Keep Their Cars Running This Holiday Season

This Holiday Season, More People are Expected to Travel via Automobile

The 2020 holiday season is expected to have drastically different travel patterns. Just last year, an estimated 115 million Americans traveled during the holidays, according to AAA. This year, many people will opt for shorter trips that are accessible by car, as opposed to airplanes. To illustrate this shift in demand, airfare prediction app Hopper reported that domestic prices for Christmas-time flights have dropped 25% compared to 2019. An average of $275 for a round trip marks a new low. 

More auto travel during the holidays means a bigger focus on car maintenance. Americans spend about $397 per year on vehicle maintenance and repairs, according to a recent Harris Poll.  More specifically, it says Millennials and Gen-Z age groups paid an average of $466 per year on vehicle maintenance and repairs, while drivers over age 55 averaged less at $330 per year. 

Dealers can Help Keep Customers Safe on the Road

With the holiday season quickly approaching, auto dealers have an opportunity.

Dealers can build trust with their customers by helping them ensure their vehicles are in proper mechanical condition. To do this, they need access to precise data that can help identify customers who will be in need of auto maintenance. Additionally, this data can help dealers gain an understanding of a consumer’s financial capacity to pay for those repairs. As a result, lenders can then tailor the right service and offers to the right people.

Target Marketing Data to Identify Cars for Repair

Financial durability has become an important way to segment the economic health of households within the same credit bands. It considers a consumer’s assets, income from dividends and interest, retirement income, and the relationships between income, debt and spending. Today’s sophisticated target-marketing data resources tap into this information to help dealers make better and more precise decisions when putting an incentive-driven offer in front of a specific customer. We now know that median credit scores, revolving credit utilization, monthly disposable income and debt-to-income ratios are all stronger today than during the Great Recession. Also, household deposits are four times as high, according to Equifax data from June 2008 to December 2019. 

New target marketing data resources help dealers better identify consumers that are likely to be ready for service and repairs on their vehicles.

This is important because dealers and their marketing partners must re-evaluate their strategies in 2020 to better align with the changing needs of customers, as well as their customers’ financial capacity to make minor or even major repairs on their vehicles. With these strategies in place, dealers can better leverage today’s advanced target-marketing resources to make the most of building additional trust with their customers this holiday season to help them keep their cars in good condition ahead of the busy holiday travel season. Learn more about how our automotive solutions can help you grow your business.