Top Equipment Dealership Marketing Tips
Top Equipment Dealership Marketing Tips
Guest writer Debbie Frakes provides readers with four concrete strategies to employ in her blog, “Top Equipment Dealership Marketing.”
The key to success for heavy equipment dealers is to prioritize customer retention and purchase frequency. With the economy potentially tightening, it’s crucial to maintain your current customer base and motivate them to increase the number of purchases they make. To achieve that goal, we recommend implementing the following four key equipment dealership marketing strategies immediately:
- Customer satisfaction surveys.
- Email marketing.
- Website SEO.
- Email list expansion.
Equipment dealership marketing strategy #1.
Customer satisfaction surveys
Understanding your customers’ needs and how well you meet them should be an essential part of any distributor’s marketing plan. Conducting customer satisfaction surveys is the best way to gather this crucial information and increase retention. For example, the surveys that our partner, Winsby, conducts for their clients help boost their customer retention by 20% to 30%.
These surveys are effective because they provide insights into what matters most to your customers and where your processes might be lacking. For instance, one client was losing customers without knowing the reason. Winsby suggested conducting customer satisfaction surveys, including questions about invoices. The survey revealed several unfriendly accounting processes that the company was unaware of. After addressing these issues, their customer loss rate significantly decreased.
Customer satisfaction surveys are vital for equipment dealership marketing, because they help you solve issues before they turn into bigger problems and customers leave you for the competition. Retention is especially important for construction equipment dealers, as customer revenue significantly increases from the second to the third year. Typically, we see dealer customers purchasing 2.9X more equipment, 9.1X more rentals, 4.1X more services, and 5.6X more parts in the third year compared to the second.
Equipment dealership marketing strategy #2.
Email marketing.
In addition to customer satisfaction surveys, sending effective emails is another crucial strategy for equipment dealers. Emails remind customers of the products and services you offer and how you can address their challenges, leading to increased and more frequent purchases.
Winsby has found that customers on their clients’ email lists buy two to three times more often than those who aren’t. Their clients typically see a return on investment of around 4,300% from their email campaigns.
Emails not only boost purchase frequency but also help keep your customers from turning to competitors. Frequent messages remind them of your offerings, encouraging them to buy from you and reducing the temptation to seek alternatives.
Equipment dealership marketing strategy #3.
Website SEO
In a tough economy, it’s essential to capture every potential customer. For that reason, website search engine optimization (SEO) should be a core component of your distributor marketing strategy. How does your website rank for relevant keywords? Is it generating and converting leads, or merely existing online?
Your dealership’s website should clearly highlight what you offer, showcase your capabilities, and make it easy for visitors to find and purchase what they need. If your website isn’t guiding prospects and customers through the sales funnel, it needs improvement.
In addition to customer satisfaction surveys and emails, Winsby also develops websites that deliver results. They continuously add content based on relevant keywords to improve your search rankings. This way, you won’t miss potential business.
Equipment dealership marketing strategy #4.
Email list expansion.
It might be hard to believe, but as much as 20% to 30% of your list goes bad every year. What that means is that up to nearly a third of your contacts are no longer looking at your marketing emails. To help fix this problem, you should review your customer list, call any company that doesn’t have an email address on file or that has stopped engaging with your emails, determine the email addresses you should be using going forward, and add them to your email distribution list.
In addition to verifying contacts already on your list, you should also be continuously adding new prospects. One of the best ways to grow your email distribution list is to analyze it in terms of SIC or NAICS codes. First, you must determine which industries are most prevalent in your current customer base. Then, you’ll want to find companies that look like the ones on your list—in the same industries and with the same geographic limitations, if there are any. Add them to your prospect list, then call through the list to determine who the decision makers are at those companies, ask them for their email addresses, and send them information about your company.
Winsby will continually call through your email list to verify the right people are on it, and help you find new leads to add to the list, so it is as effective as possible for your marketing emails.
If you want to enhance customer retention, increase purchase frequency, and capture more leads, then contact Winsby today to implement an effective distributor marketing strategy.