Master the Twitterverse with DealerMine Social
DealerMine wants to help dealers get in on the conversation on Twitter.
Those conversations, or tweets, often contain important and profitable tidbits of information such as the fact the sender is looking for a car or that their car needs servicing. Those 140-character conversations also reveal the sender’s demographics and interests, their social fingerprint.
DealerMine says its product, called Social, offers dealers a way to listen to and make dollars and sense out of the thousands of conversations going on in Twitter every day in real time and engage with customers based on their interests and intentions.
Karen Parmenter, DealerMIne’s V-P sales and marketing for North American, explains that Social scans the dealer’s entire customer database and updates every customer file that has a valid Twitter account based on email matches found.
“Each customer file will be flagged with a Twitter handle, allowing the dealer to view their profile in DealerMIne,” she says. “Our Social tool automatically links up any tweet pulled in that matches a customer in the dealer’s database, allowing the dealer to track the number of Social leads coming in from new prospects versus existing customers.”
She says Social reads those tweets and supplies dealership staff with another way to build customer relationships now that staff knows what each customer’s interests are based on the “customer enrichment data” DealerMine supplies.
Customer enrichment data is anything about the person, whether they are single, a homeowner, income level, whether they loves dogs, watch the Food Network, etc.
If the customer tweets they will be shopping for a car over the weekend, Social sees to it the tweet passes into the dealership’s Social feed along with an intent-to-buy-score based on the “geo-target market setting,” she says.
Social supplies another source of real-time leads and gives the dealership staff an opportunity to engage with the customer in a timely manner – all tracked in DealerMine.
A tweet can contain more than just 140 characters. It can also contain photos, videos and links, which give the dealership staff plenty of ways to introduce the dealership and what it has to offer.
She explains the dealer chooses the “listening region,” or “geo-target market setting,” which Social monitors. The region could have a range as narrow as 15 kilometres or as wide as 100.
“We sift the region the dealer wants and return the leads to the dealer,” she says. “It’s that simple.”
And she adds that since Twitter is in the public domain there are no anti-spam laws to interfere with contacting prospects meaning dealership staff can add them to the database.
(Since Facebook and Linkedin are both permission-based, Social cannot contact potential customers in either social networks. But Social can say whether the person it researched on Twitter has a Facebook or LinkedIn profile.)
Armed with information about the likes and wants of customers and potential customers in the region the dealer is aiming at, DealerMIne can use FETCH, its campaign management system, to create targeted marketing campaigns that appeal to the interests of certain customers and prospects from the enrichment data supplied.
“As an example, FETCH could find all the women in the dealership data base with a certain profile from Twitter analysis and aim a campaign at them,” Parmenter says.
As for ROI, she says dealers now have another way to generate leads beyond the traditional sources; measure where they came from; when they responded and how successful they were in converting them from shoppers into buyers – “all for a minimal investment in the Social tool.”
In business for over 15 years, DealerMine is a Canadian company specializing in sales and service department CRM for car dealerships.
