Dealer Revenue

Delivering on the Promise of Search

Dealer ISMs work hard to discover and leverage the keywords that will drive traffic to your website. Your dealership's website is optimized to return for local, brand and model searches, to name a few.

Your descriptions for the web pages that return when someone searches on keywords and long-tail phrases match expectations. You've even made sure that every new special or incentive offering that goes up has it's content optimized with your dealership's choice keywords

But what happens after the click?

If your traffic is up, but so are your bounce rates, then you need to pay close attention to how you're delivering on the promises your keywords and web page descriptions are making. Every search engine result sets an expectation.

Given that 90% of auto buyers now get their first impression of your dealership via search engine results that lead to your website, providing a disconnected experience will cost you. A lot.

Clicking away from websites holds no fear for your prospective buyers. In fact, they are so accustomed to search results that disappoint, you have the added opportunity to make an even better impression than you think by rewarding them for their choice to click on your link.

Search optimization is not a stand-alone exercise. Keywords are dependent upon the content they are affiliated with, which is why ensuring they match to that content is critical. And, don't forget when you update your content, to update your keywords and meta descriptions.

Making sure there's a strong and valid match between your search optimization and the content your keywords and phrases deliver is the key to delivering on the promise of search.

Put punch in your emails to auto buyers

When you get a dealership inquiry from your website, what communication is your prospective buyer getting in return?

If your email responses are dry and lack the punch that generates a dialog, try adding some compelling information that entices a response by touching on their emotions. Making a large financial decision in uncertain economic times is more difficult that when blue skies are the norm, so auto salespeople need to make sure they don't leave their prospects with a "so what" interpretation of their interaction with you.

You've all heard about how customer reviews are the new measuring stick for evaluating purchases, so take advantage of that by including them in your emails to add some punch that gets attention and gets them thinking.

As an example, I went to reviewcars.com and clicked on the Nissan Maxima. From the customer reviews there, I pulled out the following phrases:

• Maxima stands on its own. No other car in its class can match Maxima's engine performance, handling, styling, build-quality and luxury.
• Maxima is a fine machine with top of the line performance without the price tag of luxury brands.
• Absolutely wonderful powertrain. Really comfortable seating.

Overall, the Nissan Maxima rates a 4.5 out of a possible 5 from customers.

A response to someone who inquired about a blue 2008 Nissan Maxima might read this way:

Hi Joe,

Thanks for inquiring about the 2008 Nissan Maxima. We've got five in stock ranging from $25,771 to $27,829, and two of them are blue. I look forward to showing you how great the Maxima is, but figured you might also like to know what other owners are saying in online reviews about their Maximas:

• Maxima stands on its own. No other car in its class can match Maxima's engine performance, handling, styling, build-quality and luxury.
• Maxima is a fine machine with top of the line performance without the price tag of luxury brands.
• Absolutely wonderful powertrain. Really comfortable seating.

To see for yourself why the Maxima rates a 4.5, out of a possible 5, by its drivers, call my direct line at 333-4456 or reply to this email and let me know when you'll be down to drive one.

Best regards,
Sam Salesperson

Incorporating reviews into your emails can help give your potential customers some insights to what other drivers/owners of the vehicle are saying and act as an emotional engagement component. There's nothing that says it has to be your customer reviewing the car, so get out there and find some reviews you can use to put some punch into your emails.

One word of advice is to make sure you also assess the improvement comments and are ready to address them when your customer gets to the showroom.  This will go a long ways toward demonstrating your expertise and transparency if your prospects have done their research. Chances are, they have.

Dealers who respond as customers request sell more cars

Most savvy auto dealers are employing a mix of marketing tactics to encourage interactions with their potential vehicle buyers. But, increasing your lead-to-sales conversions is not just about the mix, it's about the method of response dealers choose.

An R.L. Polk & Co. study found that dealerships that responded in accordance with their buyer's preference in method were able to increase make loyalty by 3.4%. But what's really impressive is their close ratio. Dealers who responded, paying appropriate attention to content and method preferences, were able to sell cars to 68% of inquiries.

Of notable interest is that over one-third of those new customers were first-time buyers. This means that the experience you provide them can be indicative of your dealership's ability to generate long-term relationships because their first experience in buying a car delivered on their expectations. And that transaction happened with you.

Beyond that, let's get back to response methods. A couple of considerations to be aware of are:

Timing: If the inquiry expects an email response, you've got from 10 - 24 hours to get them the information they want. If the buyer wants you to call them directly, you'd better do so in under an hour.

Method: Buyers have all kinds of opportunities online. If you're not allowing them to select the type of response they want from you, you're missing the fast-lane opportunity to impress them by setting and meeting their expectations. People in the later stages of their purchase decision may want phone calls. Those just beginning, or not yet "sold," may not. The more able your dealership is to honor those preferences, the better impression you make by listening to them and responding as requested.

Content: The study found that relevancy of information in relation to their inquiry was critical to forwarding the relationship. One factor addressed by study participants was price. They want, at minimum, a range that helps them with financial considerations. They also want to know the availability status for the vehicle they're interested in.  So make sure that the content component of your response is  tailored to answer what they've asked for.

In a market like this, your dealership's response can either be judged as lacking or as a value add to their experience that influences their purchase decision to buy from you.

See how these insights measure up to the CapGemini's Cars Online 07/08 report we wrote about in December 2007. Speed is the biggest change...

Convert Lead Anonymity to Inquiry

We all know the car buying process has changed. Your potential buyers now have access to all the information they need without having to ever directly speak to you. Well, at least not until they're pretty certain about which vehicle they want to buy and which dealer they think they want to buy it from.

Which means that unless you can get your dealership's website visitors to take action, it's tough  to prove your efforts are producing consistently increasing conversions that produce revenues.

Confronted with this reality, many dealerships focus on trying to get hold of more leads - whether that means third party leads or adding bigger calls to action on their website. But don't overlook the way buyers like to buy. What do buyers do?

They compare.

Buyers compare your dealership to the competitor across town. They compare one model of vehicle to another, trying to narrow their selection options to the ONE. They compare pricing, fuel efficiency, luxury options, etc.

Here's the key. New research shows that when people are exposed to information in particular ways, then become distracted, then asked to choose between options, they will select the one that made them feel the best.

A good example of this is automotive advertising. Pretty people drive the vehicles down gorgeous roads while having the time of their lives. It's kind of a subliminal distraction that feeds into the desires the manufacturers hope their buyers are harboring and self-indulgent enough to take action to get.

Now look at your website and your inventory display. Do you get that same feeling that you had when watching the commercial? Think about what you can do to improve or enhance the impact you're making with your online car shopper.

If they're comparing your dealership to another's, what feeling are they going to be left with? Stand in their shoes and evaluate whether the impression your website makes is better than that of your competitor's website.

This is one reason why website video is becoming a big deal. But, in addition to video, can you alter your choice in graphics, colors, contextual descriptions, and comparative details about your vehicles, as well as your dealership?

What could you alter about your inquiry forms that would make people want to submit them? Converting a lead from anonymity to inquiry means they need to subconsciously, if not consciously, feel good about taking you up on your call to action.

Trigger Events for Car Buyers

Have you ever noticed that, once you adopt something new, you see it with increasing frequency? This is called selective perception. Humans have a terrific ability to ignore anything not considered important to us. And, we tend to be self-focused, so the things we do notice are usually related to our lifestyle and cultural values.

So, when shifts occur, that means our focus gets redirected. In order to construct marketing campaigns for your dealership that effectively bring in new sources of business try leveraging the triggering events specific to your buyers.

When a triggering event happens, you have a limited window of opportunity where the person is dissatisfied about their current situation and taking steps to re-align their satisfaction. By buying a new car, for example. By uncovering triggering events that shift the status quo for your customers, you can see a nice lift in conversions.

Here are a couple of ideas:

First baby: once you're expecting a family, all kinds of things shift. So create a program with baby stores or the nursery departments within larger stores that helps you find these potential new owners of your crossovers and mini vans. Offer a gift card to the store as an incentive in your lead generation programs. Or advertise on parenting websites to generate leads for your campaign.

Career change: Receiving a long-awaited promotion often causes people to look at themselves differently - or at least to want others to see them in relation to their new professional achievements. Who are the largest employers in your area? Can you create an employee incentive package or do a program designed to reward status development? If the large companies in your area have an online employee portal perhaps you could create a cool graphic with an incentive and a link to your website or a participation form.

Those are just a couple of ideas to get you started. Think about what triggering events are bringing in-market buyers to your showroom and design campaigns just for them.

Google Base for car buyer searches

Google is testing out a new Beta tool that's got a nifty targeted vehicle search tool, called Base. When a user types in a phrase that includes a car make, the option to search Base is included in the results.

Interestingly, in the first search I used Chevy, instead of Chevrolet, and the Base widget did not return.

The point here is that if you want your inventory to return in Google Base, you have to submit it. You can see the info on how to do that here. Before you start grumbling, if you have more than 10 items to submit you can use a data feed. Here's what you need to know.

When I clicked through on my search for a used Chevrolet Trailblazer Los Angeles, what was interesting is that only one dealer came back on the first page. The rest were the third party provider sites like cars.com and auto trader.

Once you've clicked through, you can refine your search farther by color and price parameters.

The key point being that you should submit your inventory now. It's free. And if you want to optimize your search results, this is a tool that can help. Especially with local search results. The content is not integrated with main Google search results, so if you want to be included, you need to take action. Also of importance to note is that the content you submit here can be boosted to main search results based on relevance, as well as included in Froogle and local Google searches. Which could theoretically boost auto dealer SERPs. Although it's too early to tell the impact.

One other nice feature is that when you search for cars, you can click on Map view and see them all from a geographic perspective. Not only can they narrow their search but they can see a map that shows them which dealer nearest to them has one that fits their needs.

However, it's worth looking into, even if it is a bit rudimentary in Beta.

The Hidden Costs of Free Technology

There seems to be some kind of belief that the array of online technology tools available without a monetary cost are somehow, well, FREE. I hate to disappoint all of you, but that's not true. Not even close.

Why is it that people undervalue their time? In the automotive industry, time is huge. Dealers work on 30-day windows with major hurdles to leap to get their numbers every single month. Yet, the idea of a FREE piece of technology has them applying a skewed set of values that eliminates all the other associated costs.

Let's take the example of a landing page you might launch to feature a special or a specific make or model of vehicle. Now let's break down the components required to launch and manage the landing page and associated traffic:

The things you need:

• domain name or custom URL
• graphics
• design layout, colors, font choices
• content
• keywords, meta descriptions for organic SEO
• analytics
• PPC campaign design
• Email messaging to drive traffic
• Add links to your website to drive traffic
• press release to promote it
• the time to learn how best to use the tool
• form for lead generation
• coupon to promote inquiries

You may have the capability to actually do all that work and gather all the materials yourself, but how much time is required to execute? A week? A month? More?

During that time you're spending implementing your landing page, how much time are you able to spend focused on lead-to-sales opportunities? What else is sliding so you can do all this work yourself? Are you sure you considered how this new project will complement the online efforts you already have underway?

Now let's look at how you manage it. What happens to all the leads it generates? Who's doing the data input if your landing page isn't integrated with your CRM? Because, let's face it, free tools won't be. Or, is that now another project you're going to take on so you can take advantage of this FREE tool?

Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of wonderful technology tools coming online that promote themselves as free. It's just not true that they are. There's always a trade off, even if you're using resources you're already paying for. You're redirecting their efforts and eliminating something else they were doing. Or adding to the pile of things they can barely manage today.

So consider carefully the cost vs the value of all that free technology that sounds so enticing. There's no question that you can use all the online juice you can get, but without evaluating the cost/benefit of the entire project, including all the components, you can't determine if that new free tool is a good choice...or an expensive one.

Once you're done with the cost vs value evaluation, you may want to consider what efforts you could apply all those hidden costs toward that would actually help you extend the online marketing platform you're incrementally implementing. If everything you do doesn't add to the intention to create an interactive platform that delivers consistent intelligence that helps you improve your results, then it may not be a lot more expensive than "FREE."

SEO Tactics: Helping or Hurtful?

Search engine optimization is a key tool for driving auto dealership website performance. As in everything you undertake, there are good ways to do this and, well, not so good ways.

The industry calls this White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO, respectively.

"White hats tend to produce results that last a long time, whereas black hats anticipate that their sites may eventually be banned either temporarily or permanently once the search engines discover what they are doing."

"Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines, or involve deception." [Wikipedia]

What this means is that if you think you can drive more traffic by trying to hijack search results by stuffing your keywords with your competitors' names and products and pulling traffic intended for them to your web pages, then you're being deceptive. Not only that, you're essentially stealing the results produced by the work and reputations of others.

But that's not the worst of it. The really bad thing about this type of deception is the picture it paints about you for your customers and potential customers. And once online, it's usually there to stay. Even if you take it down, if it's been indexed, it's likely there's a "cached" link next to the search results that will still expose the content, even if the link in the search results no longer works. Web life is a very long time.

If the traffic you drive to your website or content [videos on AOL Video or You Tube, etc.] is expecting something else based on the SERPs, what impression are you making with that click through? When you consider that the first impression for your dealership is usually going to be made online, this is more important than you might think. Is "bait and switch" really a viable option for building business?

Just ask yourself these questions:

• If someone deceives you, is that who you want to buy your next car from?
• Will you believe anything else they have to say?
• If you have to weigh everything they say, is it worth it?
• Do you trust a company that practices deception?
• Or does it all just leave a bad, lingering after taste?

The reason for today's post is that this has been done to us by one of our competitors. They brashly and irresponsibly used our good name to generate traffic for a weak video about their business that otherwise couldn't apparently draw traffic on its own. Not only that, but they made it even worse by doing the same thing to at least five of their other competitors.

They know who they are. They should be ashamed of themselves, but they continue to use similar tactics, stealing traffic from those of us who work hard for what we achieve.

What I'll ask JD the next time I see him is if he has any clue how badly he's hurt his reputation and that of his company. It's important not to forget that most Internet traffic is anonymous, until the person at the other end of the mouse decides not to be. Which means he may never know how badly he's hurt himself and his company.

Not until all their worthwhile business turns to other companies that can be trusted to employ above-board and professional tactics. Because, ultimately, auto dealers are more interested in serving their customers and potential buyers through honest efforts that reflect well on those customer reviews an escalating percentage of auto buyers are referring to before they buy.

So consider your SEO tactics carefully. Trust is the trump card.

Engage Your Dealership's Customers

You know the old adage, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Well, it's not just myth. Generating new customers is more costly than keeping the ones you have. As you work to persuade those wait-and-see buyers who're watching the economy for a sign of good times ahead, you can also focus on encouraging your existing customers to return.

User generated content was consumed by over 94 million people in 2007. That number is predicted to shoot up to 101M in 2008 and hit 130M by 2012. What this means is that it's time to get interactive. And your customers can help.

With sites like YouTube and MySpace allowing users to freely load their videos, why not invite your customers to submit a video [or a link to one] to you about them evangelizing the car they bought from you. It would be nice if they mentioned your dealership, but even if they don't, if they're talking about why they love their car, post a link to it on your site and tag them as your customer.

Why not hold a contest for the best description of a specific car model. Invite everyone who purchased one in the last year to submit a 50-word description about the car for inclusion on your inventory page. Winner gets a $50 gas card or an accessory for their car or a free oil change.

The idea is to get them involved with your dealership. And keep you top of mind for whenever they're ready to buy their next vehicle. You want them to think of you first.

Don't forget the car. Why not send a birthday email or card on the anniversary of the car's sale with some kind of bonus or special offer? If you want to touch them twice during the year, send a birthday card to the owner as well. You've got that information in their file, right?

Widgets are in demand right now. If your website provider offers them, take a look and see if you can improve the interactive experience your dealer website is delivering. Are the opportunities to reach out to your dealership as easy and obvious as they could be?

There are a lot of ways to reach out and invite interactions and participation, many of which are web-based. Some that are off line. Choose a variety of touches and generate some participation. The economy will come around eventually, but in the mean time, you've got options.

Auto Dealers Resilient During Recession

That's the prediction based on the results of a survey, The State of Retailing Online, conducted by Forrester Research for Shop.org.  An upswing in online retailing is predicted, despite the economic woes, and auto dealers are the third largest online category, behind apparel and computers.

This demonstrates the resilience of the online channel and is based on value and convenience provided to online shoppers, according to Scott Silverman, executive director of Shop.org.

There are a couple of things the study pointed out that auto dealers might be well served to pay attention to:

• Choosing between customer acquisition or retention. Although this is how the report was interpreted, auto dealers can accomplish both, if they're savvy about how they market and the tactics they select for interactions. For example, developing an eNewsletter for customers can be a very effective retention tool and doesn't preclude customer acquisition efforts. In fact, some of the content may be re-used for lead nurturing relationship building efforts. When evaluating your marketing efforts, don't forget to consider the benefits of dual application. Sometimes, only a small modification is necessary for reuse.


• Shoppers are not all the same. Your website visitors will visit your site with differing intentions and goals. We've discussed marketing to different types of customers, but also consider intentions. What does each type of buyer need to get from your website to extend their engagement with you?


• Search engine marketing for dual purposes. Thirty-five percent of new retail sales originated from search results. Consider how your keywords and phrases will play for both new and existing customers.


• Widgets or Social Networking? According to the research, 65% of respondents said they'd focus more on social networking sites and 55% indicated adding widgets. But the key here is the interaction that's possible.


• Email Marketing. The study also recommended that email marketing be used to drive revenue results. Learning how to make your emails more personalized and engaging is a skill to be mastered. Just remember that it's tricky. Only 7% of our interpretation for meaning comes from words. The rest of our interpretation is split between tone and body language, which is unavailable, to a large extent, in online communications. This is where images and style of word choice can have a big impact in making a lasting impression--of the good kind.

Given the results of the report, it's good to know that auto dealers are resilient, but that won't just happen by itself. Utilize these insights to ensure your dealership marketing program is on track for driving growth.