Codirect

We are excited to announce the launch of Codirect, an innovative, marketing intelligence system for your DMS. Codirect starts by bringing in-active customers back into the fold and then keeps them there through targeted and continuous communication. This auto marketing tactic enhances your customer engagement strategy and uses messaging channels like direct mail, email, video email, and text to engage and retain car buyers.

Codirect is built and designed for all dealerships – from automotive dealer marketing teams to marine, motorsport, and RV marketing teams. In this article, we’ll expand upon Codirect as an automotive marketing solution for your dealership. More specifically, here’s what to expect:

• Purpose of auto marketing & auto advertising
• Automotive industry trends
• Automotive marketing strategies with Codirect
  • Automotive direct mail advertising
  • Email marketing for car dealerships
• Automotive customer retention strategies with Codirect

Automotive Marketing

Auto dealer marketing, marine marketing, motorsport marketing, and marketing for RV dealers looks a little different today compared to the previous decade. Consumer habits have shifted to a digital environment, with 92 % of car buyers researching online before stepping foot into a dealership. Therefore, dealerships have adjusted their car selling strategies and car sales marketing tactics in order to reach buyers online and bring them into the dealership. Ultimately, while the car buying journey initially begins online, 95% of sales still occur in person at the dealership. Therefore, car dealership marketing goals revolve around setting appointments and bringing internet leads onto the lot.

In this article, we’ll cover a range of auto dealership marketing ideas that engage buyers and drive quality traffic to your store. From our experience, a few examples of effective auto sales marketing ideas include: video email, direct mail, SMS marketing, paid automotive ads, and social media. We’ll explore how these different marketing elements work together in order to improve the overall automotive experience and make your dealership stand out, and outperform your competition. Likewise, we’ll explore how automotive marketing services or automated marketing systems like Codirect can help streamline your marketing efforts by driving organic growth, retention revenue and increasing market share.

Automotive trends

The recent shift in online car buying behaviors are a result of the overall automotive shopping experience. With the accessibility of the internet and with safety precautions of the pandemic, new car dealership trends have emerged, forcing the industry to adapt. Check out a few up and coming trends:

• Advertising: Traditional forms of automotive advertising like commercials and print ads are no longer effective. Millennials instead are strongly influenced by reviews. Car dealership advertising dollars should be spent digitally – with a specific focus on social media, email marketing, SEO, influencer marketing, and video content.

• Customer Experience: Nowadays, consumers don’t resonate with transactional brands. Instead, customers consider a purchase as part of an emotional experience. As a result, customer experience trends in automotive industry show that buyers prefer more personalized communication, better customer service, access to digital content, and a relationship to be built between buyer and seller.

• Visiting fewer dealerships: The average buyer only visits 1.6 dealerships while car shopping. Ten years ago, this average was 5 dealerships. This is important because if you’re able to get the buyer into your dealership, there’s a strong chance they’ll make a purchase. As a result, dealerships are spending more time, money and energy on the top of the funnel, internet leads and doing what they can to bring them on the lot.

What is Codirect?

Codirect is a marketing intelligence system that integrates with your dealer management system (DMS), bringing in-active customers back into the fold and keeping them there through timely, targeted and continuous communication. By identifying opportunities in sales, service, and conquest, Codirect drives organic growth and retention revenue, while increasing market share.

Codirect is one of the most powerful marketing automation platforms for dealerships. In a matter of minutes, we help you turn stagnant data into a gold mine of information that you can put to work for you. But let’s back up to elaborate on what marketing automation is and why it’s used. Marketing automation uses technology to automate some of your marketing tasks, processes, and campaigns. helps maximize efficiency and increase revenue. Marketing automation tools can be used across various channels such as email marketing, push notifications, SMS messages, social media posts, and digital ads. Codirect’s marketing automation software uses data from your DMS to deliver personalized messages that engage buyers through communication channels like a direct mail campaign, video email, email marketing, and text.

How does Codirect work?

Codirect’s powerful marketing intelligence system uses data from your DMS to re-target and engage customers through automated techniques and messaging like automotive direct mail, email, video, and text. Now let’s dive in and take a deeper look into Codirect’s operations and the automotive customer engagement & automotive customer retention software.

1. Refresh

The average dealer has well over 10,000 sales and service customer records. After linking up with your DMS, we hit the “refresh button,” cleaning your database so you never waste another marketing dollar on out-dated information. Then, we run an in-depth market evaluation that combs through your DMS, extracting and organizing key data. Next, Codirect identifies active and inactive customer records, and combines them with brand conquest and crossover data to create a comprehensive framework of opportunities.

2. Recover

After mining lost and in-active customers from your DMS, we combine these groups to create your initial Recovery opportunities. We re-engage these customers and bring them back into the fold using proven customer engagement marketing techniques, messages, and four different communication channels: direct mail, email, text, and video email.

3. Retain

Using information from your DMS and in-market data, our automated system delivers timely and targeted messaging to your customers. This communication is based on 35 different triggering touchpoints, all designed to drive traffic back to your store. We work with you directly at the store level or with your agency to create, manage, and track these campaigns to your customers throughout their lifecycle.

You determine:

• Your triggering touchpoints: like purchase, service, unsold follow up, and declined repairs.
• Your preferred communication: direct mail marketing, email, text, video email and video text.
• Your budget: for optimal control of your campaigns and recurring communications.

Once you’ve recovered lost and in-active customers, we help you keep them in the fold by conditioning your customers to visit regularly, resulting in incredible growth for your sales and service business.

In the automotive industry, customer retention strategies are crucial for engaging buyers and keeping them connected, with the ultimate goal of building loyal and lifelong customers. For example, automotive dealership customer retention statistics note that improving customer retention by only 5% increased profits by 25% to 85%.

4. Report

Once activated, the system works continuously and automatically behind the scenes, so you can “set it and forget it.” Through your dashboard on Codirect’s portal, you’re able to monitor campaigns, capitalize on opportunities, and track results through pin-point ROI reports – down to the individual customer.

Communication channels: Automotive direct mail, email, text and video

Codirect uses information from your DMS and in-market data, to deliver the right message, to the right person, at the right time – in the most effective communication channel. Our automated, marketing intelligence system delivers targeted and tailored messaging to your customers via direct mail, email, text and video. Let’s explore each of these channels to see how they work together to engage, retain, and re-target car buyers.

• Automotive direct mail campaigns:RV, marine, motorsport and car dealer mailers are print ads sent directly to your target audience’s mailbox. These auto dealership mailers typically consist of promotions, service reminders, inventory brochures or newsletters. Codirect’s platform will automatically send automotive mailers that work to engage buyers, drive traffic, and increase revenue.

• Email marketing: The best strategies combine digital marketing efforts with car dealership mailers in order to expand reach across multiple platforms. While the digital marketing space is crowded, email remains as consumers preferred form of communication. Email marketing is a great way to follow up on internet leads in a timely and effective manner, and also makes it easy for buyers to take action. See best results by sending personalized and targeted emails based on your customers behavior and interactions with Codirect.

• SMS marketing: Americans check their phones on average 96 times a day, which comes out to be every 10 minutes. Better yet, 98% of text messages are opened – email open rates tend to be 10% for the automotive industry. With SMS messaging, you can almost guarantee your customer will see your message. As a result, SMS has become a powerful channel to send appointment reminders, promotional details, and even videos.

• Video messaging: Sending car buyers a video message offers a wide range of benefits such as: building trust, increasing engagement, providing convenience, establishing relationships, personalizing the experience, and ultimately, selling more vehicles. Record and send short video messages introducing yourself, following up on inquiries, sharing a car walkaround, or sending service/appointment reminders.

Get started with easy & effective dealership marketing today

Are you ready to jumpstart your marketing efforts, and drive organic growth? All accomplished with little to no extra work from your team? Codirect’s marketing intelligence system is ready to help your team bring inactive customers back into the fold and drive more revenue.

With Codirect, there’s no need to contract out your marketing efforts to automotive email marketing companies or automotive direct mail companies. Now, your team can send personalized and targeted messages in-house with Codirect’s powerful marketing automation system.

So, if your dealership is ready to improve the customer experience, build customer retention, engage inactive consumers, and drive more traffic to your store. – reach out to a Cosocial expert today. They’ll walk you through a short demo, answer any questions, and show you firsthand how Codirect executes powerful marine, RV, motorsport, and car dealer strategies. Start re-engaging buyers, building lifelong customers, and selling more cars with Codirect today.