Sales coupons for your dealerships website have been around for some time. There are several providers that offer them as an add-on feature (edealertools, Zablo, etc.) for your existing dealership website and there are a few that incorporate coupons as a major function of their dealership website.

*Please keep in mind that I am referring to a money savings sales coupon and not a service department coupon.

So what is the purpose of a money savings sales coupon? Are they really beneficial to have? Do shoppers find them as a valuable feature of your dealerships website?

If your website has the right formula for conversion and you have the right follow-up process ..is a coupon really necessary or are you just giving up front end gross?

I have shared my different views below;

1. Conversion – different people answer to different call the actions. Where one shopper might be triggered to “Get a quote” another shopper might be more interested to “Schedule a test drive”. The right call to actions, the better your website conversion. “Click here for a “Savings Coupon” is another call to action that could cause interest and convert that shopper into a lead.

2. Tracking - Since many dealers have separate Internet sales departments or an individual internet salesperson, we know too well that argument between the sales floor and the Internet sales department to claim the customer. If the customer has that coupon…well, 1 point for the Internet sales department and Internet Marketing.

How much persuasion can a sales coupon really have? If a shopper is on your website and does not find what they want, is it possible they could be persuaded by a coupon to give up their name, number and email? Would you give your personal information for a coupon for something you’re not interested in?

If a customer sees what they want and you have already converted the customer into a lead, then they stumble across the coupon, have you just handed over some gross that maybe you otherwise would not have had to do?

Please share;

How do you feel about sales coupons?

Are you presently using a coupon on your dealership website?

If so, how successful have you been with it, what’s your closing ratio?

Please comment and share your thoughts.

I’m always on the prowl for new software to add some spice to my online marketing. I came across this program, FastStone Photo Resizer.

FastStone Photo Resizer is an image converter / resizer intended to enable users to convert, rename, resize, add text and watermarks to images in a quick and easy batch mode.

The features that I find most handy is the text and watermarking. Getting your contact information (phone number and dealers URL) on your vehicle inventory photos is a great practice. I subscribe to several different ad sources for our pre-owned inventory and send many of our vehicles to several different free listing sites. Many of these sites don’t have your phone number prominently displayed nor do they allow you to have your dealers URL displayed on the vehicle details page.

With the watermark feature you can get fancy and place a CPO Logo on your photos. Why not build value in your vehicles with your photos as well?

Most of the features (convert, rename, resize) you won’t need if you have a decent vehicle inventory management system (like Homenetinc.com ..yea that was a plug but they don’t pay me for it.) but if you want to send your photos somewhere like a free listing page, they sometimes restrict the size of photo you can send. So the resizing feature can come in handy.

If you’ve been wanting to add your phone number or your dealerships URL to your inventory photos, this is an easy to use software that will get the job done for you quickly! Check it out!

Note: I don’t know these guys personally but if you use the product, donate some money their way via PayPal or pay for a licensed version. It’s cheap!

Go here to DOWNLOAD

I just got back from lunch with my AutoTrader Rep. and we were on a conversation of inventory photos. The conversation prompted me to write about the process that I take or an ideal process for taking photos for your dealers website and other 3rd party websites like AutoTrader.

What Camera should you use? I recommend and use the Canon Powershot A series. The older A60, A65, A70 and A80 and now the newer A95. I choose these models for several reasons.

With all of these mentioned models you can set the resolution to “VGA” (640 x 480 pixels). The larger mega pixels are not necessary. Your photos are going to be resized and compressed by your 3rd party advertising vendor anyways. When you compress a larger mega pixel photo the quality of the photos is going to suffer (this does depend on the software the vendor is using for photo compression). Using a high quality VGA photo is your best bet.

The quality of the lens is the important factor! I’ve had smaller pixel cameras out-perform the larger mega pixels cameras due to the quality of the lens alone. Canon has been producing cameras way before digitals were introduced, so they offer some of the best lens available in the market. Canon also offers JPEG Compression Mode so you can set your camera to take a VGA sized photo with super fine clarity.

The price is right too! You can find the older A series models on eBay from $75.00 to $150.00. You can even find the newer A95 for a little over 200.00 (retail). Plus, the older A series and the newer A95 use a CF (CompactFlash) Card. 512 MB CF Card run for less then $50.00, that’s a lot of photo storage.

Ideally you want to take your photos at the same spot with every car. Inside works best so you’re not at the weathers’ mercy. A white background (with your dealers Logo and URL) so all the attention is on the car! Of course, many times this is wishful thinking and we are forced to take our photos outside. If this is the case, try to find a well lit area where you can get the name of your dealer in the photos as well. Try and get a process set up so you can take your photos right after the car has been detailed. No one wants to see photos of a dirty car!

Do a full walk around of the vehicle, catching every exterior and interior panel. If the vehicle has a special feature like a CD changer, heated seats or navigation, take a close up shot of these accessories. I usually end up with 20 plus photos of every car. Might sound like overkill since many of the websites only allow 5-10 photos but I tend to use eBay often and it’s a great idea to display as many photos of the vehicle as possible. Either way, try to be consistent with your photos. *If you get a second, visit www.ebaymotors.com and search for some high-end luxury pre-owned vehicles like Mercedes, Lexus or BMW’s and you find some smaller independent dealers that are doing things right!

I recommend having your photos taken in house where you have control over the quality of the photos. Many dealers use Dealer Specialties, or other local window sticker companies to take their photos. I have found most of these companies take no real pride in your photos. They don’t understand the relevance of a nice clean, well-taken photo and the impact is has on your dealers over all sales.

Monitor your dealerships website with URLTrends.com.

URLTrends provides a visual “Trend Report” on the SEO rankings of your dealers website, and, if you opt for no-cost registration, it will track your rankings over time and enable you to compare them to the rankings of your competing dealers website.

In about 5 seconds URLTrends will fetch your dealership websites PageRank, Alexa Rank, Incoming Google Links, Incoming Yahoo Links, Incoming MSN Links, Incoming Alexa Links.

Along with Search Engine Ranking Trends like
Ranking Trends
Link Popularity Trends
Social Bookmark Trends

You will also find many useful tools such as a Trend Comparison Tool, Reverse Keyword Lookup Tool, PageRank buttons and a few others helpful tools!

I like to use this site to see what dealership website providers are doing a good job at optimizing their clients websites. It can help you make an informed decision when it comes time to deciding on who to go with for your next dealer website.

Check it out!

What is Google PageRank and the importance of it for your Dealership Website?

PageRank is Google’s method of ranking individual websites and individual pages. Google looks at the websites and pages which link to your Dealership website and how they rank in terms of importance.

With the Google Toolbar you can search Google at anytime and the added feature will inform you of the PageRank of every website on the web. Download this toolbar and enable the PageRank feature in the options. Then visit your dealership website to find out your current PageRank.

PR is calculated based on both the quantity and PageRank quality of your incoming links. The higher the PR of your incoming links, and the fewer outbound links there are on that page, the more PR is passed to your Dealership Website. For example, if you were a Ford dealer and were able to somehow get a link from home page (which has a PR of to your Ford dealerships website, the PR for your dealer’s website would greatly increase. (This is just a simple example)www.Frederick.com that not only help with traffic to your website but also help with your dealerships websites PageRank.

Achieving PageRank for your Dealership website takes time and patience. Find some relevant websites that you can exchange links with or advertise on with a link to your dealership website. Many cities have community websites like

Remember, PageRank is important to have but it’s only one of about one hundred determining factors in the Google algorithm and how well your dealerships website positions in the Google search engine.

If your an Internet sales manager you can find yourself doing a lot of typeing..do yourself a favor and download this neat little application. It’s FREE!!

ieSpell is a free Internet Explorer browser extension that spell checks text input boxes on a webpage. It should come in particularly handy for users who do a lot of web-based text entry (e.g. web mails, forums, blogs, diaries). Even if your web application already includes spell checking functionality, you might still want to install this utility because it is definitely much faster than a server-side solution. Plus you get to store and use your personal word list across all your applications, instead of maintaining separate ones on each application.

Check it out!!