If you sell cars, you’re probably well aware of how important phone calls are to car dealerships. The vast majority of car dealerships still use phone calls as the main channel for chasing leads and booking appointments and test drives – for most dealerships, it’s a strict requirement for customers to book in with their car sales rep over the phone.
In order to maximise the efforts of the sales team, it’s vital to manage enquiries effectively – and now that much of the marketing spend is used to develop digital campaigns, you need a system to manage your multi-channel marketing in a way that connects your online engagement with your offline leads. When a customer clicks an online ad, finds a number and calls you, the ability to connect the ad with the call will help you understand where your customers are coming from.
Tracking Numbers
To find out where a customer has seen – or clicked on – your number, we use tracking numbers. Tracking numbers allow us to place different phone numbers in different locations (on or offline) for the same incoming phone line.
Coupled with our call tracking technology, this means we can find out how many calls are coming from each different location. If a lot of calls come from one location, we know that advert or marketing touchpoint is performing really well. Then you can optimise your marketing spend accordingly, investing more in the channels and locations that are bringing in more of your bookings.
We use two different kinds of tracking number – static tracking numbers or dynamic tracking numbers. The static tracking numbers are used offline (e.g. print ads, billboards) or on sites like Facebook or Google My Business, where a single number is needed.
Dynamic tracking numbers use Dynamic Insertion technology to ‘read’ information about the individual user, and assign a number specific to that user. Then we can use analytics to explore more information about that user, to understand their behaviour and engagement with your marketing materials. Using attribution modelling, you can follow their buying journey.
Dynamic tracking works well for visitors to your website, and can also be used to provide numbers according to geographic location.
Optimising performance across multiple locations/franchises
The need to understand where your bookings are coming from is even greater when you’re working across multiple locations. Each location will be affected by different variables – showroom size, footfall or popularity of nearby destinations, average income of nearby residents, accessibility.
Understanding how customers specific to each location engage with your marketing materials will allow you to optimise your advertising for each franchise – and ultimately, understand the needs of the different customers at each location.
You can develop different strategies for each location – knowing how and when to implement these strategies will increase the chances of success for future franchise locations, and help you make better decisions about where you choose to locate these future dealerships.
If you’d like to know more about how a bespoke Call360 call tracking and AI solution could help you map out the future of your automotive empire, get in touch today for your free 14-day trial.
