MINNEAPOLIS, MN--(Marketwired - May 27, 2014) - Outsell (www.outsell.com), a digital marketing Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company that is transforming the way automotive brands engage with consumers, today launched BuyerScout™, the first and only buyer-detection product that alerts dealers when current customers and prospects are actively shopping for a vehicle. At this time, more than 280 auto dealerships across four automotive brands are using BuyerScout to generate increased vehicle sales.
BuyerScout evaluates customers' online and offline behaviors and scores their actions to detect when they're ready to buy, combining anonymous shopper data from more than 12,000 automotive websites with a dealer's existing customer data to provide a full picture of buying behavior, brand preferences and shopping intensity. After synthesizing vehicle, customer, web and behavioral data, BuyerScout provides the dealers a daily "most likely buyers" report, identifying who's actively shopping for a vehicle, along with details on any competitive makes/models that the shoppers may also be considering. These insights allow the dealers' salespeople to focus their efforts on prospects that are deepest into the buying process, tailor their sales approach to the competitive realities, and as a result, sell more vehicles.
"Most firms' analytics efforts tend to stagnate after realizing initial gains from techniques such as segmentation, targeting, and lifetime value analysis," wrote Srividya Sridharan, Research Director at Forrester Research, Inc., in a Nov 2013 report titled, Five Emerging Methods Advance Customer Analytics. "These foundational techniques are key to any customer analytics function. But customer insights (CI) professionals looking to mature their analytics capability must innovate beyond traditional methods in order to advance their level of customer understanding."
BuyerScout is one example of such an innovation.
Outsell partners with the leading automotive data utility, Dataium, to gather the anonymous shopper data for BuyerScout. Outsell, leveraging its AutoMotics™ scoring models and a proprietary inference algorithm, is able to "connect the dots" between anonymous shopping behavior and existing customer data for a significant percentage of the dealers' in-market shoppers, providing the dealer's sales team with an easy-to-understand shopper score and competitive make and model data they can use to formulate effective sales strategies.
On average, 16% of the BuyerScout-identified shoppers are scored as "lower funnel," meaning they are very close to purchase. Dealers report that when they act upon the information, 1 in 5 (20%) of these high-probability shoppers purchase at the dealership within 30 days.