Happy Holidays from Jeff Kershner / DealerRefresh – see you in 2006!
Happy Holidays – 2005
Archives for 2005
David Kain writes about Long Term Follow-up
In this article David writes about "Relevance and Timing" and offers several pointers on how to get that potential customer to open your email. He touches on the importance of your Subject Lines, including your Logo in every email and of course the actual body of your message.
Black Book had 100 dealers surveyed.
The end result noted 92% of auto dealers are going to expand their Internet departments this up and coming year. Are dealers finally catching on?
A result from the survey; "Twenty-seven percent said they (dealers) followed-up leads for at least two weeks and 21 percent said they followed-up on sales leads indefinitely." Dealers still have a long way to go is this is true.
New website launches offering Free business listings to Dealers
Today while searching a few popular keyword phrases for my dealers website, I found a new dealer listings directory.
While investigating the site, I found it gave me the ability to enter a detailed listings which include the dealerships name, a link to my dealers website, an address, a local phone number, a toll-free number, business hours and a list of services offered. It also gave me the flexibility to include descriptions of vehicles offered, inventory, specials and promotions, rebates and incentives, and financing services. All this at no charge!
Cardealersnearyou.com offers dealers free detailed business listings for local car dealerships in the United States. There are not too many services that is offers a detailed listing to car dealers for free.
Take a moment and submit your dealers information!
What independent sites are your shoppers visiting?
Here’s a statistical chart borrowed from the latest J.D. Power New Autoshopper.com Survey. I thought it was interesting to see KBB to have such a lead on the other sites. I thought for sure Edmunds would be closer behind.
I’d be interested in seeing this broken down by demographic locations and what content is being viewed the most on KBB. Are shoppers visiting KBB more frequently for new vehicle information or for trade-in evaluations?
It’s interesting and educational to what sites our shoppers are visiting and where they are gathering their information. I recommend taking an hour or so and visit these sites to get a feel and understanding of what your customers are viewing. This can help overcome objections that your customer might gather from these websites. We all know these sites are sometimes full of opinions and not so accurate information.
An ADP and ReyRey Blitz?
I’m always searching dealer websites hoping to find something new with all the right elements. What I have found is an increasing number of dealers switching to ADP and ReyRey websites.
I’m really baffled by this. On average I find their homepages to be sloppy, navigation hard to follow, vehicle details and homepages lack call to actions and multi photos (sorry for the slap guys). From what I have heard around the block, they usually produce a below average conversion rate. (Some of their newer sites are an improvement but they are far and few between). 
What’s happening here? One site that I visit often, Paul Miller, was a user of BZResults. BZ has used them in their “many” advertisements. I just checked their site only to find ADP has taken over (What happened Sean?). MileOne, another huge dealer group dropped their many providers for ReyRey.
ADP and ReyRey have to be getting aggressive with their sales pitches or throwing their websites in with their CRM software (that sounds more like it). Sorry for the slander guys, but with the power and money at your disposal, you could be at the forefront of dealer website design and technology.
Anyone have an idea or know first person what’s happening here? I’m curious.
Product Information is more Influential than Price
According to the latest study from J.D. Power and Associates, online product information is more influential than Price to New-Vehicle shoppers. That’s a shocker to me!!
They also show that New-Vehicle buyers using the Internet has again reached record levels.
Manufacturer Website visitation continues to increase among all new-vehicle buyers, while visits to independent sites such as edmunds.com, kbb.com and others have remained the same. On average, buyers say they rely most on manufacturer websites for product information and independent sites for price related information.
A Quote from the article "There is tremendous market share at stake in the battle to turn site visitors into buyers," said Galbraith. "Manufacturers will continue to move hundreds of millions of marketing dollars toward their online efforts and will become more efficient marketers in the process."
I think it’s funny, better yet, totally ignorant. You have Manufactures dumping millions into online advertising but yet your lucky if 90% of dealerships are spending over a thousand for online marketing. Something doesn’t jive!
WAKE UP People!! (GM’s, Sales and Marketing managers.)
I noticed something else as well..many dealers hire marketing firms for their TV and Print ads. BUT yet so many of these firms have no clue about online marketing. How many commercials do you see or hear that never mention the dealers website?
What’s your Opinion?
Click here to read the full Article.
PageRank for your Dealership Website
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 8) 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.
Cool Tools – ieSpell Checker
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.
My Lending Tree experience –Consistent Follow-up!
Several weeks ago I decided to refinance my house due the attractive rates and sudden increase in the local housing market. Pay off some debt and get a few things done around the house that have been well over due.
I decided to click over to Lending Tree after seeing a banner ad and one of their TV commercials. I figured why not, let’s see what this Lending Tree is all about. Within minutes my inbox was filled up with auto responses (none too impressive either). Within hours I was getting phone calls from several different banks quoting me rates, terms and fees. After a phone call from the seventh bank, I was lost in a pool of information. It quickly became very overwhelming.
If anyone has been in the automotive dealership business long enough, you then know that the last thing you have is time. I didn’t have the time to sit down and go over all the terms, rates and fees that had been quoted from all the different banks. And though it was something that I wanted to do, it just seemed as if time was not allowing me to pick up the phone and make the call back to the banks.
Throughout the weeks I continued to receive phone calls and emails
from two of the banks. Both banks had aggressive rates but the bank
that received my business was the bank that kept touching base with me via phone and email. They kept the process simple and kept in touch, and were not pushy.
After the process was over, I was realized that many of our customers are taking the same steps as I did for their car shopping.
They want a product, competitive price, simple process and great
service. Today’s generation consists of busy people and families, both
parents working to hold down the fort. During all of their daily
routines, they are also shopping for their next vehicle. They don’t
have the time to drive around dealer to dealer. They use the Internet
and make their first contact via email or phone, just as I did with
Lending Tree. The difference between the bank that earned my business
and the others was the consistent FOLLOW-UP. They never gave up!
So when you wonder why that customer has not called you back or responded to your email; call them, and then call them again and again (rotate your call times from morning to afternoon and evening). Follow-up each time with a "just tried to call you" email until you get some type of communication from the customer. Create some urgency, schedule the appointment, confirm the appointment and make the sale.