Personalized marketing:
How to overcome challenges to win revenue & retention.
Personalized marketing is the buzzword of the day. For good reason. Ecommerce powerhouses like Amazon and Netflix exposed its virtues to a massive, pandemic-fueled online audience. It’s no longer a consumer wish – it’s now an expectation. Personalized marketing offers a huge payoff for dealerships – positive experiences, rising revenues and undeniable customer retention. Realizing these benefits, however, comes with distinct challenges. A total service marketing solution can help you deliver every benefit.
What is Personalized Marketing?
Personalization is the act of using data to deliver specific, individualized customer experiences. The data inspires the creation of marketing content – emails, text messages and special offers – that match personal preferences. For dealerships, the data is readily available in the DMS, which is aligned with each customer’s personal vehicle situation.
Demand for personalization growing fast.
Seminal research from McKinsey & Co shows that 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions. Moreover, 75% of consumers said that receiving personalized communications was a key factor in prompting their consideration, with an even higher 78% insisting it made them more likely to repurchase! Automotive consumers ranked the following personalized experiences as the most motivating reasons to conduct business with a dealership:
1. Storing purchase or maintenance history (49%)
2.Reminders of upcoming scheduled service needs (44%)

The content creation & management challenge
So it’s clear that consumers want personalized communication. The challenge comes in putting the strategy into action. Relevant, fresh creative content fuels personalized messaging. Producing and managing it requires a commitment. Most OEMs have recommended or mandated marketing programs that are meant to help. However, the onus is often on a designated person to sift through creative templates, images and other creative elements to build templates, not to mention expertly leverage DMS data to align messaging each customer’s unique vehicle situation. All very time-consuming.
“It takes experienced marketers to set up, deploy, and manage personalized campaigns”, states Tina Mitsilios, Sr. Digital Marketing Specialist with Total Service Marketing at Dealer-FX. “A great alternative is a program like ours, which includes professional digital marketers backed by a dedicated design studio and monthly ROI reporting – all at a really affordable monthly fee.”
Today’s dealership customer has grown weary of robotic, generic marketing. They want, check that – they expect – to feel valued, seen and appreciated. Personalized communication resonates as a positive experience, increasing their inclination to repeat purchase and remain loyal. However, realizing the advantages of a personalization strategy requires creative content and management expertise that many dealerships choose not – or cannot – prioritize.
That’s where a total service marketing partner comes in. These experts can personalize your message, help you bank the additional revenue and boost long-term retention. All while reserving the dealership commitment to a flexible and modest monthly fee.
3 McKinsey & Company: The value of getting personalization right—or wrong—is multiplying. Nov. 2021.
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