Revenue Attribution in Fixed OPS

What is attribution?

Simply put, attribution is connecting your marketing and/or sales efforts to revenue. It ensures that your dealership is using your limited resources to focus on efforts that truly deliver value or ROI. This sounds simple enough, but the truth is that revenue attribution is extremely difficult to get right.  Your customer’s decision journey is a complex, intricate web of communication across multiple channels: phone, email, text messaging, and webchat, and accurately accounting for the correlation to revenue is challenging.

Understanding your customer decision journey is paramount if you’re going to properly attribute efforts to revenue. As an example, a customer might find your dealership via a web search, visit your website, chat with someone from the website, speak to someone on the phone, go in for service, receive the results of their MPI, decline services, after their visit they may go and shop your competition, receive a coupon, schedule an appointment, and get that battery or those tires replaced they originally declined.  To which stage do you attribute the revenue?  The truth is that each of these touchpoints is important, but the difficulty is understanding how to allocate your dollars to maximize your ROI.  And by saying, “all of these are important” does not help you solve the attribution problem.

Why is it important?

Now that we have a working knowledge of what attribution is, we need to understand why it’s so important to truly understand what efforts are worth investing in, which you should cut back on, and those you should simply stop.  Every business operates under constraints, whether cash, human resources, or time, it’s your responsibility as a leader to manage these resources in a way that adds the most value to your organization.  We live in a time where there are more vendors and data than ever before.  Every vendor claims how they can drive an ROI, but how many truly show you how much revenue they’ve brought in to your store with objective data?

In our many conversations with Fixed Ops leaders, retention and customer satisfaction are the top two KPIs that matter the most to management and OEMs.   And naturally, there is a high need for spending marketing dollars to ensure these KPIs are high. How are you tracking your efforts to retain customers?  What are you doing to proactively drive business to your service department?  If you’re not proactively marketing to your dealerships customer base, and measuring the attribution of those efforts, now is the time to seize this opportunity and shine.  It’s not enough to field the business that’s coming to you, you need to have an offensive approach.  Marketing to customers based on mileage, timelines, specials, declined services, recalls, and more represent a blue ocean of opportunity for your dealership.

What can you do?

Here’s the truth, I can tell you exactly how to map your customer’s decision journey, how to calculate the value of each individual stage in the customer’s decision journey, but I know you don’t have the time. Almost every service department is forced to play defense because so much is expected of them. You need a partner.  You need someone that does this every day and knows how to deliver results.  I haven’t worked with a service manager, fixed ops director, or even BDC manager that has the time to add more work to their day, no matter how important.   At Auto Labs, our specialty and focus are on creating efficiencies and driving revenue through AI and automation.  Our campaigns are all built with attribution as the foundation.  We work with our customers to deliver campaigns that are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, and Time Specific).

Do you want to learn how we’ve helped dealers drive over $50K in revenue in less than 2 weeks during Covid-19?  Give us a call today to learn more about Auto Labs and Sophi AI.