Opinions & Advice

Using your CRM for bulk emails, be careful.

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.

Founder of DealerRefresh - 20+ Years of dealership Sales, Management, Training, Marketing and Leadership.
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We just signed up with Higher Gear. This is not something I would have ever thought to ask them about. But I thought there was an ILM tool??
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I wonder what happened to there Quality Assurance(QA) process. Next time choosing a vendor ask them about there QA process. From a programmer view mistakes like this do happen in development... but should have been caught before going into production.

You could catch on to these errors by making your email servers part of feedback loop from AOL, Hotmail and others. This way any message that is marked SPAM you get a report and can look after them pro-actively. Hotmail goes a step further and provides you with delivery stats for a given day. Another thing to ask any provider that offers email campaigns is what is there policy on the spam rate. For example we will suspend an account for 10 spam complaints for each 5000 emails sent.


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    Jeff
  • November 11, 2006
Higher Gear did eventually fix the issue but it was too little too late. As for an ILM tool, unless it's an upgrade, I was never made aware of it. And I don't think having an email screen constitutes as a ILM tool. You can set up your desklog to view only Internet Leads and this works for your incoming new leads BUT you have to view your "ToDo" lists for incoming emails from existing customers. You will find yourself jumping from screen to screen to screen to accomplish anything. -Jeff
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Things like this are bound to occur with software. It does seem short-sighted that they would attach unknown.txt files in place of HTML in the message, but at least they fixed the issue quickly. Not being a user of automotive CRM, why does the system not recognize leads by email address? Are there security reasons for this?
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    Jeff Kershner
  • November 13, 2006
They did fix the issue but I hardly doubt 2 months is considered quick for such an important issue and for something that eventually became detrimental to our email communication with our customers. The CRM would recognize a customer with the same email and it would merge the customer information BUT it would build another opportunity for that customer and double up on the follow-up and automated emails unless you manually delete each and every follow-up that was designated to happen for this customer. The way the system is set up..there is no alert to let you know that has happened. Again, I'm not here to slander Higher Gear too much. The CRM does many things right, but it was unfortunate to have the problems that we did.
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    Jake Wirth
  • November 19, 2006
Don't worry guys, there are alternatives to Higher Gear!

Be sure to shop around for an CRM or ILM tool that was actually developed by car guys for car guys!
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    Jake Wirth
  • November 19, 2006
Maybe its due to issues like this that Higher Gear has you sign a LONG term contract when using their solutions......

Come to think of it, I think there is an ILM tool out there that measures the likeliness of your email templates getting blacklisted when you create them.

Like I mentioned before, be sure to shop around. The most expensive solution surely cannot be the best, can it?
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    DeCoder74
  • November 21, 2006
Jake, sounds like you work for a certain ILM/CRM based in Novato, CA...wait, perhaps you do. Transparency is pretty high, fyi.
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    Jake Wirth
  • November 29, 2006
DeCoder74,

Just so you dont have to speculate here are the facts:

I do work in Novato, CA for a company called iMagicLab (formerly iCarMagic). I did step out of the dealership, giving up my Internet Manager title. I did move my family across the country from a small dealer group in Indiana...

All for my belief in the products at iML. If you are looking for a debate I will happily meet you in any public forum to discuss software in the Automotive Retailing space, fyi.
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    DeCoder74
  • December 6, 2006
LOL. A debate? No. Just looking for full disclosure which you provided and I appreciate.

I wish you nothing but good luck.

Take care.
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    rwcra
  • August 29, 2007
I believe THGG's Robert Gruen was a car guy, no?
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