As an award-winning national dealer group – that offers new and used vehicles from brands including Vauxhall, Peugeot, Citroen and Ford – Perrys Motor Sales engages with hundreds of customers on a daily basis to find a car that’s tailored to their needs. With more than 5,000 employees, Perrys operates from over 50 showrooms nationwide.
The problem:
Perrys’ internal processes were struggling to keep up with its ongoing growth. Its marketing department was still utilising manual, time-heavy processes when speaking to customers and were only exposed to ‘vanity metrics’, such as open and click rates from email comms, as a result.
Keen to move away from a ‘batch and blast’ style approach to marketing, there became an immediate need to craft digital communications that were timely and relevant to continue to drive conversions.
This was especially important when the Covid-19 pandemic hit. Closing locations during the first UK lockdown, Perrys had to act fast to keep customers happy. So, with its popular new car registration ‘Loyalty’ event looming only a few months later, the automotive brand wasted little time in exploring the benefits of marketing automation.
The solution:
Having never used such a savvy solution before, Perrys required a platform that was simple to use as well as quick-to-deploy. It was also important that it could produce the granular detail needed to help better understand consumers’ of-the-moment interests – this was especially pertinent during a global crisis.
Searching for a way to deliver hyper-personalised content to segmented audiences, a demonstration of marketing automation platform Force24 underlined the need for a savvy lead scoring mechanism, and a journey builder to ease the manual creation of engaging content.
Challenges involved with implementation and how these were overcome:
There were concerns about how swiftly the Force24 platform could be plugged into Perrys’ existing CRM system and ensure all data was captured, and utilised effective.
Time was of the essence too as it was specifically brought in to manage the comms for Perrys’ September 2020 ‘Loyalty’ event. The automotive business holds these viewings each year to showcase new car registration plates for brands including Ford and Vauxhall, and it is always an incredibly popular event.
However, with physical showroom viewings limited, Perrys required both a safer shopping experience for customers throughout the pandemic and needed to speak to buyers to deliver the a high-quality level of content – and Force24’s marketing automation capabilities helped the team to do just that.
The result:
It typically costs up to £100,000 to host a physical event inclusive of customer touchpoints such as marketing collateral, emails, POS, showroom flags and more.
But with Force24 integrated into Perrys’ system, the organisation spent just £5,000 – and generated even better results. A total of 559 sales were achieved in only a couple of weeks via:
- Tailored email and SMS campaigns for each car brand – for example ‘The Ford Loyalty Event’
- Streamlined internal processes and data segmentation to deliver more content to the right person, at the right time
- Web tracking – to understand and respond to a customer’s interests there and then
- Lead scoring. Measuring recipients’ exact engagement levels enabled us to feed this information into call centre staff so they could follow-up and book appointments
Louise Bradbury, head of digital and CRM at Perrys Motor Sales, said: “Life before Force24 was manually-intensive and it wasn’t delivering the bottom-line results we needed when it came to truly engaging our customers. We’re now much more streamlined in how we communicate and are able to send out content that’s personalised to each individual. Lead scoring is something we would’ve never considered before, but now we don’t know what we’d do without it!”
Interested in hearing leading global brands discuss subjects like this in person? Find out more about Digital Marketing World Forum (#DMWF) Europe, London, North America, and Singapore.
