Mobile App Users Become More Frequent Service Visitors

Service intervals continue to increase; millennials continue to reshape our industry; and still some dealerships think a mobile app is little more than a side dish to the meat and potatoes of their business. It’s often considered a luxury at best or frivolous at worst, but is rarely seen as a vital contributor to sales or service revenue. That way of thinking is about to change.

A new DMEautomotive study reveals that once a customer downloads and creates an account on a dealership’s mobile app, their service visits increase by a massive 25%. In fact, the mobile app customer service visit frequency grows 3.7 times faster than customers without an app.

Let’s put those numbers into perspective. Essentially, an individual customer with your dealership’s mobile app will add 50% more visit per year than a non-app customer, so 1,000 app customers will add 500 more visits per year. So for every 1,000 of your customers who download your mobile app, your dealership stands to earn up to an annual lift of $144,000 in incremental service revenue.

This study spanned a mix of 307 dealerships, representing multiple brands, store sizes, and regions, all of which offer Driver Connect, DMEautomotive’s dealership-branded mobile app, to their customers. Studying 2.2 million consumer records between the months of April 2013 and June 2014, it compared app users’ service behavior for 6 months prior to download and 6 months post-download with the data from non-app users during that same time period.

This new development works in tandem with the mobile app and sales data that DMEa uncovered in May.

As a refresher, this earlier DMEa study found that automotive customers who use a dealership’s mobile app are 73% more likely to buy a car, and that they will spend 7% more on that purchase than non-app-users. That study included over 366,000 consumer records between April 1, 2013 and March 31, 2014. It spanned 111 dealerships, similarly representing multiple brands, store sizes, and regions, all of whom offer Driver Connect, DMEautomotive’s dealership-branded mobile app, to their customers.

The numbers keep piling in and the conclusion is clear: a mobile app is the way to improve service visit frequency, and therefore service revenues, at your dealership. So, what are you waiting for? Get your mobile app on the market and in your customers’ hands today!

Mike Martinez is chief marketing officer of DMEautomotive, the industry leader in science-based, results-driven automotive marketing that provides a range of marketing services to the biggest and most innovative automotive organizations in the industry. For more information, email [email protected].