I just came across DealerRefresh few days ago and wanted to let you know how much I appreciate the time and effort it must take to keep it up and running.  I’ve been involved in the car business now for almost 4 years and have been on the Internet side of it for all but about 5 months.

For the most part, everything has been a self-taught or at best a trial and error experience.  It’s nice to have a resource such as this one to turn to for thoughts and opinions from others in the industry that are in a non-competitive situation.  I’m working now for a family owned business that has been in business for a little over 58 years.  It was started as a Buick dealership back in the day.  We are now a 4 franchise group, Buick, Isuzu, Mazda and BMW.  We are in the process of becoming only a BMW dealership, that along with the used car department which will expand by adding a high-line section to our current, mostly GM and other domestic inventory.

We now use Reynolds both for our web site design and our CRM tool.  I used AVV at my prior dealership (Honda) for about 3 years.  I can’t say that Reynolds Contact Management is any easier to use, but it does seem to have much more capability and the support folks at Reynolds are outstanding.  With the upcoming new changes in mind, would you have any advice to offer as to a web provider? Reynolds is a bit limited in the template offerings they have available and they only have one template that is BMW compliant in their super premium package.  It’s in use by a BMW Center about 225 miles away from us and I am afraid the same template might be a bit confusing to our clients.  If you had the opportunity to start over with your website, what would you do?

If you have taken the time and effort to read this far, I truly appreciate it.  As well as any opinions/suggestions you might have to pass along to someone who wants to get better and dominate this market area.  I am a full time Internet Manager here and have a pretty free hand as to how I run the department.  It is me and I generally receive and work the leads myself, except the BMW leads which I divide out among 4 Client Advisors.

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Sincerely, Ray

-Per Ray’s request, I was asked to remove his full name and dealer info.

Share the wealth!

Buying leads at their origin versus buying them from one of the big third-parties.

Now that I’m about to bring on my third lead generating vendor, I thought I’d probe the DealerRefresh community for their thoughts on the choice between buying leads at their origin versus buying them from one of the big third-parties. I’m very much on the fence myself, and usually it just comes down to whether or not I think the vendor’s program works for me.

For those of you, who have never bothered to consider the pros and cons of each camp, let me present some ingredients for the debate:

• Lead generators have a web site- or network of sites- that reel in consumers via SEO, PPC, and other advertising, and subsequently sell that lead to a dealer.

• Lead aggregators buy leads from the premier sources in the industry, like Edmunds and KBB. While most aggregators also generate some “original” leads of their own, purchased leads constitute the majority of their business.
• Most generators will sell you their lead exclusively, as opposed to aggregators who are usually going to sell their acquired lead to several dealers. This sounds like a great benefit, until you consider that consumers often submit leads to several sites. So that exclusive customer information you think you have could easily have already gone to your competition a few days ago via a different web site. Think about the  brand awareness of consumer sites and you’ll quickly understand how a consumer could go to Edmunds or KBB first to submit their lead, and then decide later on to google “Honda dealers in NY” and end up at one of the other lead generators’ sites. So in theory, if your generated lead isn’t the only lead that customer sent, it’s probably old information to your competition.

• Lead costs should hypothetically be lower coming from a generator, because there’s one less middleman to get paid. However, depending on the vendor’s program, you could easily pay more for generated leads than aggregated ones… I pay anywhere from $16 to $21 for my generated leads. There’s really no consistency here, as the primary factor in lead cost is the intensity of the program (i.e. closing ratio guarantees, buyer status updates, 800# tracking, etc). Nevertheless, if you have a fetish for paying the lowest possible price for a customer’s information, a lead generator is the way to go.

Anyone have some experiences to share? While I believe it all depends on the vendor, part of me wants to be able to say that one of these sides of the fence is greener than the other.

Mitch Turck
Internet Director – JelMAC Auto Group

Share the wealth!

Is a direct link from the Manufacturers Website a must-have?

As a large dealer family with multiple franchises (including GM brands), we have a non-Cobalt website, which means that when prospects hit our GM brand websites, our dealership location is listed, but without a live link to our website.

I certainly understand the value of having a live link to our website at the OEM level, however, we have to balance this value against having another website vendor that can better meet our needs.

My question is this; Is having a direct link at the OEM level for GM brands a must-have?

Is it worth the price of paying for a basic template website with Cobalt just to get that live link and have that additional site complement our primary site?  For those of you that have a Cobalt website and get this live link with GM, have you measured the traffic clicking through from GM to your website?  I would appreciate any input, many thanks!

Kevin Frye
eCommerce Director – Jeff Wyler Automotive Family

Share the wealth!

Are any of you using embedded video clips within your emails for your internet sales process?  If so, where are you hosting the videos?

Are you running into problems with spam filters?

What do you put in your videos?

Many thanks for any insight!

Kevin Frye
eCommerce Director – Jeff Wyler Automotive Family

Share the wealth!

I’m curious as to how various dealerships are counting Internet deals for pay?

We use a simple system:  If a customer submits an Internet Inquiry, we require either a direct phone conversation with the customer be logged into our CRM or have two email responses from the customer.  We also count phone calls that originate from various web sites/lead generators as deals worthy for compensation in the Internet department.  Basically, it is an Internet deal when either two emails or a phone call are logged in the CRM.  My staff is only paid on sold units that they had a provable hand in selling, and we audit the inputs into the CRM.

From speaking to many other dealers over the past few years it sounds like we are a bit more stringent in this area than others.

Alex Snyder
Director of eCommerce – Checkered Flag Motor Car Corp.

Share the wealth!