Car Dealers To Increase ’07 Ad Spend?

An article from

BizReport.com reports a new survey from Cars.com indicates that many automotive dealers will be upping their online advertising in 2007. The results are on track with a similar study by eMarketer.

According to the Cars.com survey, which polled readers of the website’s DealerADvantage newsletter in October, shows that two-thirds of dealers (about 62%) will increase their online advertising in 2007. Meanwhile 20% say they will at least maintain their current advertising budget and only 18% say they will spend less online next year.

I’d like to know where online, dealers will up their spending more money. Will it be more 3rd Party Leads, Search Engine Marketing, Banner ads in local portals or better websites? Most dealers are being forced to increase their online marketing budget if they want to continue to sites like AutoTrader, Cars.com and eBay.

The 2007 AAISP Digital Dealer Conference & Exposition is coming up. I was not able to attend last year, though I was a member. I’m not sure if I’m even a member anymore. I think my membership ran out and I don’t see my GM paying to renew it. I guess I could pay for it out of my out of my own pocket. I don’t know..I want to support anything and anyone that encourages dealer technology to the next level but I still feel like nothing is really happening over there. There have been some changes and it looks as if Digital Dealer is taking a more active role, so I guess we’ll see.

Anyways, the
event will be held March 12 – 15, 2007 at the Marriott Airport Hotel in Nashville, TN. If you plan to join AAISP and Digital Dealer at this event –
You can get more information here.

Let’s say (hypothetically) my dealer was using a dealer CRM program that was signed on with before I had started. As most CRM programs, it lacks ILM (Internet Lead Management) features and the whole email set up was a total mess and was obviously an after thought. Maybe this CRM program happens to use the dealers own email client which is an in-house MS Exchange server.

This hypothetical dealer CRM just happens to base it’s opportunities on each vehicle the customer is interested in. So, let’s say a customer was on your website and submitted a lead, then on Google found a website to get a price quote, and that lead was sold to Dealix then resold to your dealer. Take it one more step (only because it does happen), this customer was on Edmunds and submitted for another price quote and AutoUSA resold the lead to your dealer. Now you have 1 person and 3 requests and the CRM sees it as 1 person that wants 3 different vehicles of interest. You now have 3 opportunities for 1 customer! Still with me?

OK..so this CRM sends out 3 auto responders to the same customer since it has no way of differentiating the 3 leads are from the same customer for the same make and model. So you sent out 3 auto responders, no harm in that, right? Unless you have automated follow-up emails set up. And now your customers are getting 3 emails for every automated email follow-up that you have set up in the CRM.

Here is where it gets real good. Let’s just say this CRM program makes some changes to their email program portion of the CRM. They think they are bettering it but somehow some poor programming and coding takes your email with any HTML coding and strips out the HTML code and places it into a .txt file and names it “unknown1.txt”. So now every one of your emails going out to your customers has this unknown file attached to it.

You see where I’m going with this?

Now you have this CRM sending out emails that providers like AOL, Yahoo, MSN and others think you’re sending a virus (the unknown file) in each one of your emails. Take into account your automated email follow-up and all the customers that had multiple opportunities / vehicles of interest are now receiving 2-3 emails of the same with the same unknown attachment.

Can you say BLACKLISTED??? That is exactly what happened!

Let’s say hypothetical this CRM was Higher Gear.

I’m not here to slam any one product. BUT in this case, we got screwed hard and now our email account is toast.

BUT…you know, I’m sort of glad this happened. I learned a lot of things during this mess.