Industry News & Trends

The Cobalt Group buys Onstation

Jeff Kershner
Posted onOct 10, 2006 at 9:26 PM
Updated onUpdated on Oct 23, 2008 at 12:13 PM

Not huge news but non the less worthy of a posting. The Cobalt Group has bought OnStation.

I sat through 2 Onstation demo’s and was never too impressed. They had a decent service follow-up but I thought they lacked in the sales end of their product and their email program looked very generic and primitive. BUT since I never personally used them I can’t comment on how well their services are.

I guess The Cobalt Group thought they would be an asset to their portfolio. I think we might see The Cobalt Group in the news more lately. Just a hunch..

Do any readers use OnStation..share some comments?

-OnStation is a provider of automatic, email-based customer lifecycle management solutions to auto dealers.  The Company’s main product, e-Advantage, extracts customer information from the DMS (dealer management system), discovers and authenticates email addresses for these customers, and creates automatic email marketing campaigns for all stages of the customer lifecycle.

– The Cobalt Group is a provider of marketing services to automotive manufacturers and dealers throughout North America.

Jeff Kershner
Founder of DealerRefresh - 20+ Years of dealership Sales, Management, Training, Marketing and Leadership.
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Not familiar with OnStation but based on what you say about their program, I can see why Cobalt is interested. This is a great money-maker and with IntegraLink Cobalt can probably increase their profit margins to where OnStation can not. Do you know if Cobalt has been outsourcing this part of their product to OnStation?
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    Autodealer
  • July 21, 2008
I actually signed the program on at our dealership and it is rather primitive on its email content, this is for the have to sacrifice many things to assure the high deliverability rates and an automated product. The product, like all of Cobalt service could really use some serious overhauls before it becomes a mainstream dominant product. It is too labor intensive and lacks a lot of sizzle.

It is more of a service tailored product, with some spillover to sales.

The plus of this product is that GM is in bed with Cobalt and reimburses its dealers some of the cost.


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