The AI-Powered Shift in Automotive Conquest Marketing

Competition in automotive sales is fierce. This intensity is amplified by a May 2024 forecast from Cox Automotive, revealing a 46% surge in new-vehicle inventory compared to the previous year. Amidst this relentless pursuit of market share, dealerships must also contend with evolving consumer preferences. Foremost among these is the widespread desire for an omnichannel buying experience, where the journey begins online and seamlessly transitions to in-person. This preference is shared by a striking 70% of consumers across all age demographics, as reported by Cox Automotive.

Conquest marketing is the strategic effort to attract customers away from competing brands or dealerships. But traditional conquest is increasingly ineffective in the digital-first world. A better alternative is AI-powered automotive conquest marketing. 

Challenges of traditional conquest marketing

Traditional conquest marketing often significantly strains limited dealership resources. Sales staff dedicate excessive time sifting through irrelevant data and unqualified leads, resulting in inefficient outbound calls and generic email blasts. This time-intensive process inflates labor costs and yields diminishing returns.

Beyond resource drain, traditional conquesting frequently suffers from low conversion rates and poor ROI. The common "spray and pray" approach leads to low relevance and engagement, making it difficult for sales teams to distinguish genuine shoppers from casual browsers. This reactive model waits for customer initiation rather than proactively engaging with potential buyers.

The typical conquest marketing approach also lacks personalization, which research shows is imperative for today’s customers. Generic messaging fails to resonate with individual buyer intent, leading to missed opportunities. Consequently, dealerships struggle to effectively identify and capitalize on anonymous online shopper behavior.

AutoPilot: The AI-powered conquest engine

Artificial intelligence is fundamentally redefining the rules of automotive conquest. With AutoPilot, a partnership between Client Command and STELLA Automotive AI, dealerships can now leverage a specialized AI solutive for automotive conquest marketing. It offers intelligent, proactive engagement. How it works:

Identifying anonymous shoppers with accuracy

Autopilot begins by solving the industry's most elusive challenge: accurately identifying in-market shoppers, even those completely unknown to your dealership. It leverages the Active Shopper Network, a database indexing over 60 billion web pages daily, to gain a holistic, real-time view of nearly every auto shopper in the United States. Through advanced AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP), Autopilot tracks and understands passive web visitors,  even those who never fill out a form or visit your website. This technology goes beyond simple demographics, resolving individual identities and analyzing their actual browsing behavior to build rich profiles. These profiles reveal specific vehicle interest, dominant buying motives, purchase intensity, and consideration sets, transforming previously anonymous traffic into highly actionable, qualified leads.

Proactive, personalized outreach, on their terms

Once high-intent shoppers are identified, Autopilot shifts to proactive, personalized outreach. Leveraging STELLA's real-time AI conversational platform, engagement is initiated precisely when a shopper's interest is at its peak. Autopilot delivers customized messages tailored to individual buying motives and vehicle interests, moving far beyond generic offers to highly relevant value propositions. Critically, this outreach happens on the customer's terms, across their preferred channels — whether that's text, email, web chat, or a live phone call — ensuring optimal relevance and engagement while building a consistent, branded experience.

Rich Sands, STELLA’s CEO, said it best: “We are after a frictionless customer experience so that when a consumer calls, emails, or texts a dealership that we're meeting them on the right channel.”

Intelligent conversation and qualification

Autopilot's core strength lies in its intelligent conversation and qualification capabilities. STELLA’s advanced AI engages prospects in natural, human-like dialogue 24/7/365, providing an always-on, responsive experience. Given that 83% of all people who contact a dealership do so through a live phone call, a natural-sounding conversation is imperative. 

The AI actively listens to customer intent, tone, and inflection, leveraging a comprehensive understanding of their background and browsing behavior to provide a truly custom conversation. It adeptly answers questions, addresses concerns, and, crucially, qualifies prospects in real-time based on their responses. This allows Autopilot to mimic the best human sales interactions, guiding the customer efficiently toward their desired outcome, ensuring no lead is left unqualified.

Direct appointment booking and seamless handoff

The final, critical step in Autopilot's process is the direct booking of appointments and a seamless handoff to your sales team. The AI streamlines the path to purchase by directly scheduling showroom or virtual appointments, eliminating common customer frustrations like holds or voicemails. Once prospects are fully qualified and deeply engaged by the AI's intelligent conversation, they receive a "warm handoff" to your human sales team, arriving ready to buy. Autopilot's state-of-the-art "whisper technology" debriefs the live agent with the full conversation history, allowing them to pick up precisely where the AI left off, ensuring the customer never has to repeat themselves. This not only eliminates friction for the customer but also dramatically improves sales team efficiency, allowing them to focus on closing deals rather than initial qualification, driving more sales and service appointments. This was evident in significant pilot results: 12 new vehicle sales and 127 service appointments in just 27 days, which later doubled.

Beyond generic AI: Why AutoPilot stands alone

Generic AI solutions that claim to boost dealership sales and service revenue fall short because they lack an understanding of the nuances of the automotive market and the technology to effectively pinpoint truly in-market shoppers, engage them proactively with personalized communication, and seamlessly convert that interest into qualified appointments. 

Additionally, these AI solutions are generally passive, leaving your growth entirely up to chance and forcing your staff into inefficient manual efforts like cold calls. For more pitfalls of generalistic AI tools, read our post on four key things a generic AI can't do.

AutoPilot, meanwhile, was designed with specialized automotive expertise, deep industry knowledge, and dedicated algorithms to provide capabilities that generic AIs simply lack. The companies behind AutoPilot, STELLA AI and Client Command, have a deep understanding ofcar buyer journeys, vehicle specs, financing, and dealership operations. The two companies sought to solve the challenges of keeping customers in your store coming back for a repeat service throughout the vehicle life-cycle journey and conquesting new, local customers to come into your store who are actively shopping for vehicles or service. 

Amp up your automotive conquest marketing efforts

Traditional conquest methods are obsolete in the face of AI's capabilities. AutoPilot is an essential tool for dealerships to thrive in the new era of customer acquisition. Chat with our team to hear more about how AutoPilot can transform your conquest marketing strategy.

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