Prescreening Prospects: Are You Really Identifying the Right Customers?

As competition has heated up in the auto lending arena, many auto lenders are relooking at their customer acquisition and cross sell strategies and how they can partner with their dealers to improve their capture rate of vehicle shoppers. Often, the marketing choice has been between settling for an underpowered, inflexible “one size fits all” offer to many prospects, or struggling with a lack of insight to create high quality segmented lists for unique offers.

Losing money on the wrong customers

Without clear insight, making the right offer is virtually impossible. What are they in-market for, and what can they afford? What are the terms they are most likely to accept? When you throw marketing resources at the wrong prospects, it ends up as a case of “good money after bad.” Your cross-sell programs are off target, and your return on investment (ROI) is far below optimal.

Knowing when key prospects are ready to buy

The good news is that there are solutions available that successfully address these nagging issues. To help identify in-the-market customers, for example, there’s Equifax’s Prospect ID, which includes reliable data on most of today’s US credit-active consumer population. Leveraging and mining this data grants you insight around in-the-market prospects. Prospect ID lets you access 105 automotive loan-related financial attributes. This solution can help in targeting prospects who are ready to buy now.

Reaching your best prospects before your competition

Other tools, like Equifax’s TargetPoint Acquisition, let you know which of your credit-worthy consumers show recent credit activity — and whose buying profiles and behaviors suggest they may be ideal prospects for your loan portfolio. You can reach the best prospects before your competition even knows they’re in-the-market. With almost real-time speed and precision, this one tool uses nearly a dozen events to help you zero in on credit-active consumers who might meet your criteria.

Making the right offer at the right time can help you raise response rates, increase activations, boost revenues and significantly lower acquisition costs.

For more information on Equifax solutions for Automotive, please visit www.equifax.com/automotive

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