While electric vehicles remain a relatively niche part of the market, with only 0.9 percent of the total vehicle registrations through June 2018, consumer demand has grown quite significantly over the past few years. As I mentioned in a previous blog post, electric vehicles held just 0.5 percent in 2016. Undoubtedly, manufacturers and retailers will look to capitalize on this growing segment of the population. But, it’s not enough to just dig into the sales number. If the automotive industry really wants to position itself for success, it’s important to understand the consumers most interested in electric vehicles. This level of data can help manufacturers and retailers make the right decisions and improve the bottom line. Based on our vehicle registration data, below is detailed look into the electric vehicle consumer. Home Value Somewhat unsurprisingly, the people most likely to purchase an electric vehicle tend to own more expensive homes. Consumers with homes valued between $450,000-$749,000 made up 25 percent of electric vehicle market share. And, as home values increase, these consumers still make up a significant portion of electric vehicle market. More than 15 percent of the electric vehicle market share was made up by those with homes valued between $750,000-$999,000, and 22.5 percent of the share was made up by those with home values of more than $1 million. In fact, consumers with home values of more than $1 million are 5.9 times more likely to purchase an electric vehicle than the general population.  Education Level Breaking down consumers by education level shows another distinct pattern. Individuals with a graduate degree are two times more likely to own an electric vehicle. Those with graduate degrees made up 28 percent of electric vehicle market share, compared to those with no college education, which made up just 11 percent. Consumer Lifestyle Segmentation Diving deeper into the lifestyles of individuals, we leveraged our Mosaic® USA consumer lifestyle segmentation system, which classifies every household and neighborhood in the U.S. into 71 unique types and 19 overachieving groups. Findings show American Royalty, who are described as wealthy, influential couples and families living in prestigious suburbs, led the way with a 17.8 percent share. Following them were Silver Sophisticates at 11.9 percent. Those in this category are described as mature couples and singles living an upscale lifestyle in suburban homes. Rounding out the top three were Cosmopolitan Achiever, described as affluent middle-aged and established couples and families who enjoy a dynamic lifestyle in metro areas. Their share was 10.1 percent. If manufacturers and retailers go beyond just the sales figures, a clearer picture of the electric vehicle market begins to form. They have an opportunity to understand that wealthier, more established individuals with higher levels of education and home values are much more likely to purchase electric vehicles. While these characteristics are consistent, the different segments represent a dynamic group of people who share similarities, but are still at different stages in life, leading different lifestyles and have different needs. As time wears on, the electric vehicle segment is poised for growth. If the industry wants to maximize its potential, they need to leverage data and insights to help make the right decisions and adapt to the evolving marketplace.

Electric vehicles are here to stay – and will likely gain market share as costs reduce, travel ranges increase and charging infrastructure grows.

Vehicle prices are going up, yet consumers seem unfazed. Despite consumers taking out larger loan amounts, they continue to make their monthly payments on time. But, affordability remains a point of industry interest.  As vehicle prices hit record highs, how long will consumers have an appetite for them? According to Experian’s latest State of Automotive Finance Market report, delinquency rates continued a downward trend, as 30- and 60-day delinquencies were 2.11 and 0.64 percent, respectively, at the end of Q2. Those numbers demonstrate that car owners are making timely payments despite rising vehicle costs, which is an encouraging sign for the market. The average loan amount for a new vehicle is now $30,958, a $724 increase from last year. Additionally, consumers are now making monthly payments of about $525 on a new car loan, an all-time high that has seen a $20 year over year increase. The auto market shows little to no sign of declining costs, but vehicles aren’t the only cost to consider – interest rates have increased by 56 basis points since last year.  When combined with the rising manufacturer costs, long-term affordability is a continued concern within the industry. The data points to consumers offsetting the expense by taking out longer loan terms. In Q2, the most common loan length was 72 months—which equates to six years—for both new and used financing. While this lowers the monthly payment, it leaves them subject to paying higher interest over time, as well as the potential for individuals to be upside down on their loan for a longer period of time. The key takeaway from this data is that costs continue to rise, but consumers appear to be doing a better job of managing their finances. This insight can help OEMs, dealers, and lenders make strategic decisions with a better understanding of consumer borrowing and credit habits, and think about how to make car ownership more inviting, through incentive or loyalty programs. For consumers, continuing to take steps to actively improve your credit score is one of the key ways to ensure that you’re able to negotiate the right deal when it comes to financing. Ultimately, for everyone involved, it comes down to leveraging the power of data to make more informed decisions, which can help make vehicle ownership more accessible and affordable. To learn more about the State of the Automotive Finance Market report, or to watch the webinar, click here.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Florence, Experian is here to help. As a first line of defense against purchasing a flood-damaged vehicle, people can download our free Vehicle Flood Risk Check app.

Trivia question: Millennials don’t purchase new vehicles. True or False?

When it comes to driving the automotive industry forward, Experian Automotive has a motto: “The right cars. The right customers. The right data to know the difference.” We deliver an integrated perspective based on the highest quality automotive information and market intelligence. Data is important to us, and we have the most robust combination of data assets under one roof. The North American Vehicle Database℠, File One℠ Credit Database, Consumer View℠ Marketing Database, Online Activity Databases, and National Fraud Database℠ all fed into Experian’s Auto HyperConnect™.   Auto HyperConnect houses two different solutions: Auto HyperTargeting™ and Auto HyperMonitoring™. There are four different components to Auto HyperTargeting, and the one we will focus on today is Expired Lease. Dealers have found success marketing to their own customers when vehicle leases come due. The challenge has been conquesting off-lease consumers who didn’t buy from them. While off-lease consumer marketing lists are available, they only provide the estimated lease end date and monthly lease payment.  When restricted to this data, it’s hard to tell if a $550 a month payment is for a Ford F150 or a BMW 3-series. And yet this is exactly the level of detail needed to successfully target off-lease marketing. Experian’s new Auto HyperTargeting- Expired Lease addresses this challenge by enabling dealers to identify and engage off-lease audiences through a highly targeted approach that has never been possible! Now, finding customers is much easier and cost-effective. You can use the best mix of selection criteria to maximize your off-lease conquesting strategy. Some of the ways you can identify your audience are: Lease Maturity Date Vehicle Make Vehicle Model Zip Code Model Performance Tier Distance from Dealer Ship Vehicle Status (New or Used) Signing up for Auto HyperTargeting- Expired Lease comes with five perks. The first is a monthly file. This includes name and address, lease maturity date, make/model, monthly payment bands, and phone and email address when available. The second is the ability to make sign up for a subscription monthly payments. Third is marketing flexibility with direct mail, email, and phone. Four there is no firm offer of credit required for this. Finally, a quarterly sales report. ARA reports provide sales metrics industry wide for your targets. Other competitive features also available in Auto HyperTargeting- Expired Lease is the customers full contact information with name, address, email address and phone number. And for online and offline channels, you can select a specific audience that is customizable. Auto HyperTargeting has some amazing features to successfully conquest customers, and Expired Lease is one of the four ways to do this. Stay tuned for Auto HyperTargeting- Vehicle Owners coming up next!

In our previous post, we talked about Experian’s 2018 Attribution Study. This study is a wide-ranging, dealer-focused sales-driven attribution study to answer the question of what drives sales. Three takeaways were formed and the first was looking at shopper behavior instead of isolated KPIs. Now, we look at the second and third takeaways. Optimize your paid advertising Paid search is an important part of dealership marketing and precise targeting will help with both traffic and purchasing rate. Branded search drives quality traffic to websites. 7% of all traffic and 12% of HVU traffic comes from branded search. Along with traffic, the purchase rate was found to be 54% higher than average. In terms of value, New Make and Model has impressive results. 2% of all traffic and 12% of HVU traffic comes from New Make and Model. The purchase rate is 137% higher than average. Of note, we found that in order to optimize paid search to drive sales, you must buy your own name. 100% of dealers studied had buyers via branded search. With that, optimized “New Make Model” campaigns are crucial. 82% of dealers had buyers come through Make Model keywords. Traditionally, New Make Model would just create a higher funnel but since we are in the digital age, this does not happen anymore. Some participating dealers spent <20% of search budget on New Make Model campaigns. A key point is that no dealer had buyers come through via competitors’ keywords. As for a dealer’s website, display leasing offers and content for buyers since many search queries contained lease keywords. Although paid search is important, there are other channels to optimize and segmentation is key. This study found that conquesting with bulk email-blasts is not effective. You can achieve better email marketing results by targeting shoppers more intelligently and using quality lists. CRM-driven loyalty campaigns performed well in this segment. Display campaigns revealed that social media is no longer just for posting content but paid social advertising campaigns were effective. In fact, this study found Facebook display to be more effective than Google and other display networks. The reason is it is easier to segment and target a specific audience through Facebook. Google is more difficult to segment and has too many set-it-and-forget-it campaigns. Evaluate your third-party investments This brings us to third-parties, such as Automotive Shopping Portals and other lead providers. Performance with third-parties can vary and dealers should evaluate third-party performance as it relates to your sales. The third-party buy rate was under-indexed for dealers versus all sales. The business model for third-parties is not focused on driving traffic to dealer sites. Since there are so many vehicles listed on third-party sites from franchises, independent dealers, and private parties, there is a lot of “noise” for customers to sift through. For dealers, finding out what drives sales has led to Experian's 2018 Attribution. Our wide-ranging, dealer focused sales-driven attribution study focused on key variables and delivers three recommendations: Focus on website shopper behavioral metrics to drive sales. optimize paid search, specifically branded search and new make model campaigns. and evaluate third-party performance as it relates to your sales. With these, a dealer can be more confidant with their marketing and their data.

There are many factors attributing to the success of dealerships. When it comes to dealers, empirical guidance is a great way to study effective advertising. Experian brought Auto, Targeting, and the Dealer Positioning System capabilities together in a nationwide study to answer the ultimate question: what drives sales? The answers can be found in Experian’s 2018 Attribution Study. This is a wide-ranging, dealer-focused sales-driven attribution study that analyzed a few key variables. We deployed 187,701 tracking pixels to devices in 41,012 distinct households, focused on 15 digital metrics to learn about shopper behavior, and tied that digital shopping data to 2,436 vehicle sales. An industry first, Experian’s ability to combine automotive registration data, sales data, and website analytics and online behavior data puts us in a position to do something that very few companies can do. We use the household identifiers to not only see who bought a car and who bought specifically from a participating dealer, but also how they shopped the dealer’s site. Our ability to accurately identify a household’s digital behavior is based on the fact that we are a source compiler of the data and have it sitting under one roof.  Others that attempt to provide this type of insight need to contract out for registrations, sales data imports from the dealership, website analytics, household identifiers, or all the above, which generally adds time to the insights. Using our sales-based approach, we can deliver unbiased attribution. Sales-based attribution is attributing credit to different advertising sources/campaigns based on actual vehicle sales – including those targeted consumers that may have purchased outside of the dealership. This is the Holy Grail of attribution for car dealers since it ties an offline activity such as buying a car back to the online advertising that’s taking up most their budgets every month. Because of that offline-online disconnect, sales-based attribution is difficult. Other automotive attribution models are typically focused on website conversions or website behavior – “what advertising can I attribute website leads to” (conversions) or “what advertising is driving users who follow the behavior that I think shows they’re likely to buy from my dealership” (website behavior.) What are the takeaways?   We found three takeaways from our study. First off, we look at shopper behavior instead of isolating KPIs. Later we will discuss how traditional website metrics do not tie-in to sales. Second, we look at optimizing your paid advertising. Finally, we look at third-party investments. Although third parties drive sales, they may not be your sales. Looking at shopper behavior, not isolated KPI’s Traditional website metrics don’t tell the sales story for dealers. Traditional conversion stats are equal for buyers vs. all traffic such as VDPs or page views What this means is on average, buyers converted at a lower rate than overall website traffic. Looking solely at form submissions, hours and directions pageviews, and mobile clicks-to-call, don’t give the best view of what advertising is driving sales. With that, 98% of buyer traffic never submitted a form or went to the hours and directions page. This is a typical website conversion that dealers, vendors, and advertising agencies focus on.  Since traditional web metrics don’t tell the story, there is another way. These are called High-Value Users, or HVU. They purchase at a 34% higher rate than overall traffic although they make up 11% of all traffic.   High-Value Users are an Experian derived KPI. What makes someone an HVU are four different measurements. They must visit a website at least three times Spend at least six minutes on the site in total View at least eight pages in total View at least one VDP High-Value Users correlates to sales better than Vehicle Detail Page or VDP metrics. In this study, the correlation for VDP was measured at .595 which is rated a medium correlation. Meanwhile, HVU scored a .698 which is rated a high correlation. Looking at many different behavioral KPIs, like we do with our High-Value User (HVU) metric, correlates better to sales than just looking at how many VDPs you had. Driving more VDPs won’t necessarily help sales. But driving more HVUs is more likely to correlate with more sales. This also gets back to the attribution discussion above: Experian sales-based attribution is the best, and Experian’s HVUs are a good method for web-based attribution. From this attribution study, High-Value Users are a vital group for dealers to utilize. In our next post, we will go over the second and third takeaways from the attribution study: optimizing paid advertising and evaluating third-party investments.

When it comes to vehicle history reporting, there are many offerings on the table. Some are better known than others, but only one comes from the global leader in data-driven solutions. AutoCheck® vehicle history reports are backed by Experian Information Solutions and have many key features that competitors don’t have. You and your customers can make more confident decisions knowing that the vehicle’s history is backed by data from Experian. Selling is made easier by providing greater transparency which strengthens consumer confidence in your inventory and brand to sell more cars. Below, we will help you better understand the value of AutoCheck throughout your dealership and take you through the five best practices for using AutoCheck. AutoCheck Best Practice #1: Integrate AutoCheck in all your dealership’s applications and websites. The good thing about AutoCheck is the ease of integration within a dealership’s applications and websites. AutoCheck works with hundreds of software providers, meaning it is highly flexible with whatever your dealership is using. It doesn’t matter if the user is a buyer, manager, technician, or any other role at a dealership. There are no additional costs for multiple users since there is an unlimited number of users for a dealership. If a dealership works with someone that AutoCheck doesn’t already work with, Experian will still set the dealership up and work with them to make sure they have a seamless integration. AutoCheck Best Practice #2: Run an AutoCheck on every vehicle acquisition. Since AutoCheck is a vehicle history reporting software, it can uncover unknown history that could pass off to a dealer or a consumer. AutoCheck checks for multiple owners, title brands, open recalls, previous auction announcements, prior vehicle uses, odometer fraud, accidents and so much more! The reason why this is so important comes down to the number of vehicles in operation. Per NADA Data, there were over 264 million cars and light-duty trucks in operation in the United States in 20161. If approximately 20% of the cars and light-duty trucks on the road have been in an accident, that is over 50 million vehicles currently on the road that have been in an accident².  The average diminished value of a vehicle in an accident is $3,0193. Finding only one accident per month you did not know about justifies and pays for the cost of an AutoCheck subscription. AutoCheck Best Practice #3: Promote your inventory with AutoCheck. AutoCheck can also be used to directly promote a dealer’s inventory. All a dealer does is integrate AutoCheck with their dealership’s website. An AutoCheck link is automatically added to every vehicle. There is no additional charge which provides savings to both the dealer and the consumer. The most current data is provided with every click to give feedback to dealers. AutoCheck is the only vehicle history provider on all the top online shopping sites. Consumers can look for AutoCheck on Autotrader℠, Cars.com™, CarGurus®, ebay™ Motors, Edmunds®, and Kelly Blue Book®. AutoCheck Best Practice #4: Build confidence in every sale with AutoCheck.   The patented AutoCheck Score is a numerical rating summarizing the events about the vehicle. This helps dealers and consumers to compare vehicles of similar class and age based on a scale of 1 to 100. It also predicts the likelihood the car will be on the road in 5 years. The Score helps to understand a vehicle’s reliability as it pertains to the vehicle’s age, number of owners and accidents. When comparing two vehicles, it is also important to look at the Similar Vehicles Score. Even though a vehicle may have a score of 89 compared to a similar vehicle which scored an 85, the first vehicle may have a score range of 91-96. This would mean the vehicle that scored an 89 is lower than the average. The AutoCheck Score is based on many variables including age, vehicle class, mileage, number of owners, and vehicle use and event. Along with the AutoCheck Score, the BuyBack Protection program from AutoCheck will help build confidence. Experian will buy back a vehicle if the AutoCheck report fails to list certain brands available to Experian at the time the report was issued. This program is up to 110% of NADA Guides retail value, plus up to $500 in aftermarket accessories. Registered and qualified vehicles have this protection available at no cost and will have a badge on their report. AutoCheck Best Practice #5: Promote your service department by providing service data. The final aspect and best practice focuses on the service department and service data. Dealers can display services they have performed within AutoCheck. With AutoCheck, dealers and consumers can see that a vehicle has been well maintained with reported service data. Reporting service data provides an easy to understand format for customers and builds confidence for shoppers. All-in-all, AutoCheck can be used in every department successfully. To recap, these are the five best practices for AutoCheck. Integrate AutoCheck in all your dealership’s applications and websites. Run an AutoCheck on every vehicle. Promote your inventory with AutoCheck. Build consumer confidence in every sale with AutoCheck. Promote your service department and display service records on AutoCheck.         ¹Source: NADA DATA, Annual General Overview 2016, page 3. https://www.nada.org/2016NADAdataHighlights/   ²Source: Experian Analysis, more than 18 % of cars and light duty trucks in operation have been in an accident. 3Source: Mitchell Industry Trends Report, Q1 2017, page 32 http://www.mitchell.com/Portals/0/Assets/industry-trends/itr-vol-17-no-1-winter-2017-apd.pdf

Data driven insights about your marketplace are critical to your success. For instance, data can be used to determine if your customers are loyal or if they are likely to defect to another dealership. According to Experian research, there were 54 million consumer vehicle sales transactions in 2017. While that may sound great, not all returning buyers are loyal. In fact, we found that three out of four people are not dealer loyal. Even though only ¼ of a dealer’s customer base regularly return, the remaining ¾ can be conquested. 41 million non-dealer loyal vehicle sales happened in 2017, meaning there were 41 million chances to conquest for dealers across the country. You may be asking yourself “that’s interesting, but how do I win?”.  Start with best in class data. At Experian, we work with our North American Vehicle Database℠, File One℠ Credit Database, and Consumer View℠ Marketing Database. These databases have information including the history of 900 million vehicles in the United States and Canada, 10 billion vehicle history records, to consumer data about credit inquiries and data attributes for consumers and households. Figuring out how to increase customer loyalty and conquesting becomes simple once you consider Experian’s solution: Auto HyperConnect™. Auto HyperConnect is the answer to the question of “how do I use my data to win my market?” Our Auto HyperConnect suite includes two different products. The first is Auto HyperMonitoring™ which improves customer loyalty. The second is Auto HyperTargeting™, which offers four different ways to conquest vehicle owners: through owners/service, expired leases, off-loan, and current vehicle equity. Since there is a lot to talk about regarding conquesting vehicle owners, this will be a basic overview and we will go into detail later. Experian goes beyond providing quality data to our clients- we are your partner in the discovery of critical information to drive your success.  The first step in our Auto HyperTargeting methodology starts with discovery - working with an Experian Automotive representative to create the most effective conquest strategy. After that, quantify and understand what data is available and how similar records have performed historically. Next, execute the strategy by launching campaigns to communicate with prospective customers via direct mail, email, and phone, etc. Finally, measure and track results with quarterly marketing attribution reporting with Experian’s Auto Response Analysis With Auto HyperTargeting, these six product benefits help it to stand apart from the competition: Highly targeted audiences and attributes lists closely fit prospecting profiles. These profiles include geography, vehicle make, vehicle class, and lease maturity data. Append 1,500+ demographic attributes, 650+ psychographics, and 70+ Mosaic segments. Complete, accurate, and actionable data is delivered timely. Data derived from the source with proprietary processes ensure that it’s the highest quality and best coverage. Flexible marketing execution has no firm offer of credit required and customizable messaging for relevancy. Full visibility performance tracking has closed loop ARAs delivered quarterly with performance details. Performance driven audience hyper targeting approach gets dealers the closest to the customer as possible while saving time and money. Focusing on marketing strategy and tactics delivers results and eliminates waste from unproductive volume/cost opportunities. Finally, the competitive advantage takes market share away from the competition by identifying, engaging, and converting the right prospects. Briefly, here are the four different types of conquesting a dealer can do with Auto HyperTargeting: Expired Lease lets a dealer conquest new prospects based on customized input criteria including zip codes, vehicle makes and classes, and lease maturity data with the marketing flexibility necessary to drive engagement and win new customers. There is no firm offer of credit required. Vehicle Owners lets a dealer engage with current owners to enable new relationships and opportunities. These opportunities reach out to service and parts, aftermarket accessories, new/used car, warranty, insurance, and financial services. Vehicle Equity identifies, engages, and acquires new customers with positive vehicle equity status and maximizes sales opportunities. Getting consumers into a new vehicle, into re-finance solutions, into new loans, and get third party offers in front of consumers are all apart of vehicle equity. End of Loan connects dealers with consumers who are reaching the end of their loan term and help them transition into their new vehicle of choice. These include customized offers, getting consumers into a new vehicle, getting consumers into new loans, and getting third party offers in front of consumers. Juggling the requirements to both maintain customer loyalty and conquest for new ones can be difficult, but our Auto HyperConnect suite helps dealers to succeed at both. In our upcoming mini-series on conquesting with Auto HyperTargeting, we will detail it’s four core capabilities in more detail to help dealers to conquest with confidence.

Who is the ideal dealership customer? Wouldn’t they be one that buys or leases a car and becomes a repeat customer? Loyal customers are ideal because they prefer to go to your dealership to purchase a vehicle, get their vehicle serviced, and even have their family and friends purchase from you. This brings up an important question: what is customer loyalty worth to you? According to the White House Office of Consumer Affairs, on average, loyal customers are worth up to 10 times as much as their first purchase. They also found that it is six to seven times more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to keep a current one. Marketing Metrics found the probability of selling to a new prospect is only between 5-20%. But if you are selling to an existing customer, the probability rises to 60-70%. So, knowing this, what holds dealers back from actively conquesting loyal customers? Time, money, resources, expertise, priority, process and systems, and data are the key factors that keep them from pursuing these ideal customers. Even though you may stare across the street at them every day, you must remember that your competition is much bigger than the dealerships next door to you. According to recent Experian® research, Whether it is a new, certified used, or non-certified used vehicle, auto manufacturers will have the highest level of loyalty by owned vehicle acquisition. Next to that, you have the Make of a vehicle followed the Model.  Dealerships rank last in loyalty against these major factors. This leads to asking a few “what-ifs”. What if you have the unique opportunity to improve customer loyalty, make more money, and prevent defection to the competition? What if you had actionable insights to know your customer’s buying and loyalty propensities with a high degree of accuracy? How about if you had knowledge of timing on when to engage with your customers to appropriately deliver the right message and offers with the highest potential conversion rate? Finally, what if you had an easy, cost-effective, yet powerful way to unify big data relating to consumer, vehicle, and market and your customer data to make better marketing decisions? Thanks to Experian® and Auto HyperConnect™, you don’t have to ask those questions anymore. Auto HyperConnect leverages the most robust combination of data assets under one roof.  Our loyalty component is called Auto HyperMonitoring™ and takes loyalty to the next level. Auto HyperMonitoring is an event-based customer loyalty measurement solution that gives you the ability to more effectively manage and strengthen your customer retention efforts.  With insights derived from the monitoring of both macro- and micro-environments relating to the vehicle, consumer events, and the overall automotive landscape, clients can quickly gain a deep understanding of consumer loyalty propensities and can create and execute initiatives that maximize their customer loyalty opportunities. Starting with a client’s customer file, Auto HyperMonitoring provides data hygiene that verifies the VIN matches the customer household and will only monitor the VINS that have a match. Next, there is monitoring for vehicle events such as accidents or airbags going off.  Consumer events equate to having a baby or moving.  Market events involve incentives, OEM loyalty, and warranty expiration. Data events are phone numbers, email address, or VIN verification through the hygiene process.. These events feed into the creation of analysis & insights to identify your customers’ behavioral patterns attributed to loyalty, purchasing, and other factors.  When key opportunities are identified, there is client notification. This is used to manage the customer relationship and loyalty through a dealer’s CRM system and comes in an email. How you would use Auto HyperMonitoring? It can be used to bring customers back into the showroom or service lanes in a few different ways. Initially, Dealers can call consumers to open the lines of communication. Next, sending consumers emails and direct mail with special offers are both effective. Finally, Auto HyperMonitoring can also be used to activate digital media targeting campaigns to better reach them where they’re spending their time. Finally, we have the product benefits of Auto HyperMonitoring. First off, it enhances customer engagement & loyalty. By proactively engaging with clients at the right moment based on important and relevant vehicle, customer, and market-related event triggers, loyalty can be systematically strengthened. Second, it improves marketing efficiency. Knowing when to engage with your customer base to minimizes the risk of over and under marketing exposure; improve conversion and reduce cost. Third, complete, accurate, & actionable data is delivered in a timely manner. Auto HyperMonitoring leverages both a client’s customer file and Experian’s rich data assets to enable a complete view of customer opportunities. Finally, Auto HyperMonitoring compliments and supports OEM/dealer loyalty programs. Maximizing revenue opportunities by achieving/surpassing OEM/Dealer loyalty program goals is possible with Auto HyperMonitoring. Customer loyalty is important and will directly impact dealership sales in both your showroom and your service lanes – including the benefit of referral customers. The challenges of competing with manufacturers and other dealerships are mitigated with Experian’s Auto HyperConnect suite and Auto HyperMonitoring. With these, you will have greater success when targeting customer loyalty and using data to keep the relationship between the dealership and the customer alive.

The auto industry is blessed with an abundance of data - market research, demand estimates, demographic trends, registration history, not to mention your dealership's own sales and inventory data. Dealers are often visual people - who love beautiful cars more than boring spreadsheets. The more visual you can make your data, the easier it will be to make decisions based on what it's telling you. Here are the five steps to being a data-driven dealer. 1. Where am I selling the most cars? You probably have a good instinct about where the "hot spots" are around your dealership. But there's a reason many dealers often display a map somewhere in the dealership, with pushpins representing recent new and used sales. It's a tried-and-true technique because there's no substitute for a visual representation of data, especially to get a good sense of where you're currently successful. More importantly, it will also help you answer a critical question - where should I be selling the most cars? By layering your web stats, such as Google Analytics, on top of your sales data, you can start to see whether your PPC spend is resulting in sales. Then layer on registration data to understand whether you're maximizing opportunity in your own backyard. You might already be selling a lot of cars into a town, but looking at your on-brand market share will help you determine if you've fully penetrated the area. Looking at overall market activity, not just your own data, is required to understand where you fit into the bigger picture and decide upon your best sales strategy. 2. Where should we be conquesting? Once you've confirmed that you're (hopefully) dominating in your town and those directly adjacent to you, it's time to turn your eye to how to take on competitive dealerships farther afield. Again, data can help you determine next steps and target your budget appropriately. Every dealership approaches and defines "conquesting" a little differently, but there are two common techniques that can be made much easier using recent registration statistics. First, look for ZIP Codes outside of your immediate PMA that are selling a high number of on-brand vehicles. These are your competitors' happiest hunting grounds; focus on enticing shoppers in those areas to drive a little further to take advantage of special pricing or promotions, rather than attacking blindly in a 20-mile radius. 3. What is my best performing campaign now? No matter what your position is at the dealership, you need to know what's working best at any given moment. The GM needs to be able to make on-the-fly budgeting decisions, while the e-commerce Director wants to know which campaigns are working and what to do more of. But too often, the only objective measures we're regularly provided are traffic stats. Traffic is important, of course, but we'd suggest there are three factors dealers should evaluate for every campaign. A campaign may be driving lots of shoppers to your site, but if they're immediately leaving the site, they aren't worth much for you. A high bounce rate is your first sign that something is amiss since shoppers aren’t finding what they were looking for on your site. A second-level analysis involves looking at what other pages visitors looked at after hitting the campaign landing page. For an offer focused on a specific vehicle, visitors should be moving on to look at inventory on VDP pages. Free oil change promotion? Visitors should be spending time on the service portion of your site. Work with your agency or internal e-commerce team to determine what content, language and images are the most effective at engaging potential buyers to take the desired action. Speaking of action, conversion rate is your single best measure of whether a campaign is performing to expectations. Just make sure you're measuring actions that matter: Form submissions, email leads, mobile clicks to call, and visits to hours and directions pages all indicate various levels of positive customer interest in beginning a dialogue. 4. How do I determine whether my traditional advertising spend is producing results? Measuring dealer marketing ROI can be challenging, especially for traditional advertising. History tells us that radio, TV, newspaper, and outdoor are successful in driving demand, but quantifying that effect can be an elusive goal. But there are methods that will get you closer to determine the effect of your traditional efforts on sales. By tagging the start dates of all your marketing activities and mapping them on a trendline of your traffic for your URLs, leads such as phone calls, chat, and coupon codes for your service department as well as sales, you'll get a good sense about whether your offline campaigns are generating online interest.   5. Who is my ideal customer? Once you understand which models are likely to move next month, your next question should be: "Who am I selling to?" You probably have a good sense of your typical customer profile for many models (there's a good chance you're showing minivans and SUVs to young families, for example). But do you know where those customers live? And how to best talk to them? There is an incredible amount of data available on consumers, from credit history to buying behavior to lifestyle preferences. So how do you make use of this rich consumer data? At a basic level, Experian data can tell you a lot about the residents of each ZIP Code surrounding your dealership - from average age, income, and number of children, all the way to the most prevalent Mosaic® profiles in each town.  In a previous article, we talk about locating your ideal customer using Mosaic profiles. You might have a high number of "American Royalty" in one area, or an abundance of "Sports Utility Families" just a couple of towns over. This information can tell you not only where you might want to market particular models, but what medium and messaging will resonate best in each area. While only 15 miles apart, the Boston suburbs of Sudbury and Norwood are home to very different types of BMW buyers, suggesting vastly different marketing campaigns to best appeal to each.   Data is a necessary tool for understanding your ideal customer, improving your marketing results, and selling more vehicles. These five steps to becoming a data-driven dealer address all your requirements to enrich your marketing and conquest more successfully.

With delinquencies on the rise, financial institutions are looking for new tools to evaluate and improve the financial lives of customers and members. As the consumer’s bureau, Experian is also committed to improving the financial well-being of consumers. As part of that commitment, Experian supports the mission of the Center for Financial Services Innovation (CFSI), an organization focused on improving the financial health of Americans, especially the underserved, through innovative financial products and services.    Experian recently spoke with CFSI’s Thea Garon, a Director on CFSI’s Program Team to learn more about a new free, open-source tool the organization will be launching in June to help financial institutions drive consumer financial health. Here are some insights she shared about the new tool. Can you provide an overview of the CFSI Financial Health Score™ and how it is calculated? The CFSI Financial Health Score™ is designed to help financial service providers, employers, and other organizations diagnose and measure the financial health of their customers, clients, and employees. The framework provides a holistic, moment-in-time snapshot of an individual’s financial health based on eight multiple-choice questions that align with CFSI’s eight indicators of financial health. It includes one Financial Health Score and four sub-scores (Spend, Save, Borrow, and Plan). A set of nationally representative benchmarks offers comparisons across peer groups. CFSI has designed the framework to be free, open-source, simple, and easy-to-use. It’s intended to be a starting point; a proof point that financial health can be quantified, measured, and ultimately improved. Why did CFSI decide to develop this framework? At CFSI, we believe, and have recently released research to support the concept that financial institutions have a business incentive to help their customers lead financially healthy lives. Financial health comes about when your daily financial systems allow you to be resilient and pursue opportunities over time. As a financial service provider, you can help your customers lead financially healthy lives by helping them spend wisely, build savings, borrow responsibly, and plan for the future. To do this, you need a measurement framework to understand and track your customers’ financial health over time. The CFSI Financial Health Score™ is one way to do this. You can use the methodology to diagnose your customers’ financial needs and use these insights to develop products, programs, and solutions to help them improve their financial health over time. You can also share financial health scores directly with your customers to help them understand the actions they can take to improve their own financial health. Ongoing tracking will allow you to assess whether your company is making a meaningful difference in your customers’ lives over time. Can you provide any early examples of how CFSI Health Network members have adopted and incorporated this framework? Approximately 100 financial service providers have downloaded the framework, representing a diverse range of companies, including banks, credit unions, fintechs, non-profits, payment networks, and B2B technology providers. At least 14 companies are actively using the Financial Health Score to measure and track their customers’ financial health and have committed to sharing data and insights with us through CFSI’s Financial Health Leaders program. Some companies, are using the framework to assess their customers’ financial health for strategic planning purposes. Other companies, such as Wright-Patt Credit Union, are using the financial health score to engage their customers in a dialogue about financial health. The credit union has incorporated the framework into their MoneyMagnifier program, a financial coaching program designed to provide free, one-on-one advice and guidance to members in a judgment-free environment. Financial coaches have been trained to use the framework to start a conversation with members to help them improve their spending, saving, borrowing, and planning behaviors. Coaches help members set goals and develop personalized action plans to achieve those goals toward a better financial future, following up with them after six months to measure improvement and advance the conversation. What have you learned from companies who have started measuring and improving their customers’ financial health with the CFSI Financial Health Score™? While interest in advice is high, uptake can be slow. Making the interaction quick and easy, whether online or in person, is critical. The health check lengthens the interaction, so conducting the health check by appointment rather than with walk-in customers, can help set customer expectations for a lengthier interaction, but may reduce the number of potential participants. Enabling customers to expedite the session by taking the survey online can be helpful, but requires development resources to implement. Many companies are exploring the pros and cons of sharing customers’ scores with them. A single score can help motivate individuals to take action that will improve their financial well-being. However, sharing a low score can also be demoralizing to some, and focusing on the number itself can divert attention from behavioral changes and action steps. Some organizations are choosing to use customers’ response patterns to drive recommendations without sharing the score. Others are opting for a middle ground, sharing an indicator (such as green, yellow, red) instead of a specific number. The most effective measurement and improvement strategies go beyond the CFSI Financial Health Score™. While the framework can help you get started identifying high-level needs, targeted recommendations often require a more nuanced understanding of behaviors and challenges. Combining survey data with account or transaction data can provide a more holistic view into a customer’s full financial life. Each organization must find a balance between the comprehensiveness required to provide meaningful advice and the simplicity required to engage both customers and staff. How can interested companies start using the CFSI Financial Health Score™? We will be publicly releasing the CFSI Financial Health Score™ at the EMERGE: Financial Health Forum (June 6 -8 in Los Angeles). The score will be easy to download and completely free to use. Those who are interested in learning more can also sign up for our newsletter to get an update when the Toolkit is released.

The second full day of Experian Vision 2018 kicked off with an inspirational message from keynote speakers Capt. Mark Kelly and Former Congresswomen Gabby Giffords, rolled into a series of diverse breakout sessions, and concluded with Super Bowl-winning quarterback Aaron Rodgers sharing tales of sports, leadership and winning. Need a recap of some of the headlines from the day? Here you go ... Retail Apocalypse? Not so fast alarmists. Yes, there are media headlines around mergers, closings and consumers adopting new ways to shop, but let me give you three reasons as to why the retail sky is not falling. There were more store openings last year than closings, and that trend is expected to continue this year with an estimated 5,500 openings by December. There continues to be a positive sales trajectory. E-commerce sales are increasing. Big department stores have seen pains, but if brands are focused on connection, relevance and convenience, there is hope. Consumers continue to spend. Subprime auto bubble? Nope. Malinda Zabritski, Sr. Director of Experian Automotive Sales, says the media likes to fixate on the subprime, but subprime financing has been on the decline, reaching record lows. Deep subprime is at .65%. Additionally, delinquency rates have also tapered. The real message? Consumers are relying on auto lenders for financing, largely due to consumer preferences to lease. The market is healthy, and while it has slowed slightly, the market is still at 7% year-over-year growth. Consumer-permissioned data is not just a value-add for thin-file consumers. Take for instance the inclusion of demand deposit accounts (DDAs). David Shellenberger, Sr. Director of Scoring and Predictive Analytics for FICO, says people who have had long relationships with their checking accounts tend to be more stable and generally sport higher credit scores. Consumers with thick, mature files can also benefit with DDA data. Consumer-permissioned data is not just about turning a “no” to a “yes.” It can also take a consumer from near-prime to prime, or from prime to super-prime. Would you want to make a credit decision with less information or more? This was the question Paul DeSaulniers, Experian Sr. Director of Product, posed to the audience as he kicked off the session on alternative data. With an estimated 100 million U.S. consumers falling below “thick-file” credit status, there is a definite need to learn more about these individuals. By leveraging alternative credit data – like short-term lending product use, rental data, public records and consumer-permissioned data – a more holistic view of these consumers is available. A few more facts: While alternative finance users tend to be more subprime, 20% are prime or better. A recent data pull revealed 20% of approved credit card users also had alternative finance data on them as well. About 2/3 of households headed by young adults are rentals. Imagine a world where the mortgage journey takes only seven to 10 days. With data and technology, we are closer than you think. Future products are underway that could master the underwriting phase in just one day, leaving the remaining days dedicated for signing disclosures, documents and wiring funds. Processes need to be firmed up, but a vision has been set. The average 30- to 45-day mortgage journey could soon be a distant memory. 97% of online banking applications that are started are abandoned. Why? Filling out lengthy forms, especially on a mobile device, is not fun. New technology, such as Experian’s Instant Form Fill, is allowing consumers to provide a name, zip and last four numbers of their social security number for an instant form fill of the rest of the application. Additionally, voice assistants are expected to increasingly facilitate research on purchases big and small. A recent study revealed nearly half of consumers perceive voice assistants to be useful. Businesses have more fraud losses than ever before. Not surprising. What is scary? An estimated 54% of businesses said they are not confident in their ability to detect fraud. Another session reported that approximately 20% of credit charge-offs are synthetic IDs, a growing pain point for all businesses. Consumers, on the other hand, say they “want visible signs of security” and “no friction.” Tough to balance, but those are today’s expectations. More Vision 2018 insights can be accessed on #ExperianVision twitter feed. Vision 2019 will be in San Antonio, Texas next May 5-8.