Focused Marketing for Empowering Car Salespeople

What would happen to the car sales industry if it changed it's focus to begin marketing with the sales representatives, rather than the dealership? According to Auto Alliance, in 2015 there were 1.65 million Americans working at car dealerships. Just think of the the untapped resource of marketing individual salespeople as well as the dealerships.

The majority of time customers spend during the car buying process is with their salesperson, and 71% of customers say they bought their vehicle because they liked, trusted and respected their salesperson, according to Jeff Kershner of Dealer Refresh. Now imagine fostering those relationships before the customers even walk on the lot.  

With a personal website, regular blogging, emailing, and social media integration a salesperson can do just that. It is a win for the dealership too, as all leads and sales through their reps ultimately come to them. Failure to encourage and help their salespeople to do so means the dealer is not maximizing their advertising dollars. Remember, buying a car is one of the most expensive and personal purchases that people make, so focusing on building a rapport between a customer and their salesperson is really a no-brainer. Why do you think most dealers don't embrace this potential?

An Open Letter to Fellow Vendors in Support of Creating Industry Standards

As anyone else in the technology sector of the automotive industry can attest, every vendor has their own system and wants things their way. Just look at inventory data feeds for example. Our company, Higher Turnover, LLC, maintains approximately 100 inventory feeds between data imports and data exports. Most companies like ours have a dedicated team with the sole purpose of creating and maintaining these feeds. This is necessary in today's world because again, every company wants something different. Out of 100 inventory feeds that our company manages, probably about 99 of them are unique. The system most vendors use is archaic from a technology standpoint; ASCII text files sent from one vendor to another which are then parsed based on how the fields in the data file are mapped to that particular vendor's own structure. Some files may be comma-delimited, others may be pipe-delimited, tab-delimited, XML, and anything in between.

As vendors, we should seriously consider creating a standard format that satisfies the needs of all. This would greatly reduce the amount of time and effort we spend making sure each feed is consistent, and at the same time enable quicker deployment of new feeds which are popping up every day as new classified sites are launched that our clients want their vehicles on.

There's really no reason NOT to have an industry standard format that simply contains ALL available fields that we as vendors may need. If one vendor doesn't have a particular field available in their database (let's say "Down Payment" for example), that field could simply be omitted as an optional field or left blank. There would be a minimum amount of required data such as VIN, year, make, model, trim, etc. and a large amount of optional fields.

An industry standard was created years ago for web leads (ADF-XML) and has certainly simplified things on that front, but vehicle data files remain as an assortment of varying file specs.

I know I'm not the first person to suggest this, but little discussion has ever come out of any suggestions in the past, so I hope to change that.

On a side note, another beneficial tool would be to have a database of known customers who have either committed fraud (i.e. signing up for services when they are a non-dealer and found to be operating a scam) or who have become delinquent in their payments before moving on to the next vendor and doing the same to them. Not a "blacklist" per se, but more of a low-level background check based on info supplied by previous vendors. Something to let each other know "hey, this dealership used services for 3 months then disputed their credit card transaction for payments". The info would be available to vendors as more of an "FYI", and the vendor can choose to do with that information as they wish.

If any of our fellow vendors want to participate in creating industry standards for data feeds and/or a "red flag" list, please feel free to contact Jake at Higher Turnover, LLC through our website, www.higherturnover.com.

Choosing a Dealer Website Provider

A simple email I received prompted me to write this post today. The email was from a "website development and marketing company" based in the Western U.S. The message was short and sweet: they saw I just registered a domain name and wanted to know if I needed help with programming, design, or marketing. We get emails like this all the time. Some are well-written, some are not, but the point of this post is the bigger picture.

Someone who didn't know any better and who had a real need for website design or internet marketing at the moment they received the email might have hired this company. Every decision-maker has the right to hire whomever they wish, but chances are you don't have to think too hard to come up with a horror story about a friend, relative, or even yourself who made a bad decision at some point and had to live with it (i.e. money or time wasted). For some reason it seems that car dealers are especially susceptible to "being sold" on a vendor's products or services, without doing any due diligence at all.

To me, this email I received had several red flags:

1. It ended up in my spam folder - If they can't even get their own emails successfully delivered to my inbox, why would I hire them to do email marketing for me?
2. There were grammatical errors - Again, if they can't write a 3-sentence email without grammar and spelling errors, how would that reflect on my business if they were representing us?
3. It was addressed to a generic name - If they want to impress me with their marketing skills, they probably shouldn't be referring to me as "Mr. Admin"

These sort of emails are a regular occurrence. I just happened to look this one over as I was emptying my spam folder and decided to comment. We see it all the time...dealers who choose a website provider because the salesperson "sold" them. These are the same dealers that come to us 6 months later, complaining that they wasted thousands of dollars on empty promises. If you're a dealer reading this, don't say you haven't been warned!

Car Dealer Websites Using Flash Alienate iPhone and iPad Users

As someone in the business of developing websites for car dealers, I frequently see an advertisement for a dealership and check out the website listed in their ad. If I happen to be watching TV and see the website on a TV ad, I typically don't sit around with my laptop so I check on my iPhone. This happened the other day and when I went to the dealer's site from my iPhone, nothing but a message telling me to download Adobe Flash. Of course I know Flash isn't supported on the iPhone or iPad but I wanted to see what less knowledgeable people might have seen if they clicked on the link to install Flash. "Flash player not available on your device". So basically, if Flash is required to view your dealership website, there is no possible way for the customers to actually use your site. With the number of iPads and iPhones out there (and continuing to grow), if I were a car dealer, this would be the only reason I need to stay away from Flash websites.

I won't mention their specific name, but our competitor who handles this particular dealer's site I checked is one of the larger companies out there. They've made a decision to cater to what their clients want, rather than educate them on best practices for exposure. When we use Flash in our designs, it's only because the dealers insist on it, even after we've educated them on the drawbacks. We know that if you are going to use it, you should use it properly. This means have a non-Flash version of the site which is displayed for iPhones/iPads, or for smaller Flash elements, have images which are displayed when the Flash cannot be displayed. See the website header on www.tmotorsales.com, one of our client sites. Visiting the site from a PC you'll see the animated header. Visiting the site from an iPhone you'll see an image of the header rather than the big empty space that most providers have on their client sites.

If you're going to do something, you should do it properly, that's all I'm saying.

Online Auto Dealers Back in Business

I'm sure many of our original followers are gone by now. After all, it has been over 2 years since the last post here. We've gone through a lot of changes with our web design for car dealers business, added many new features/improvements, and introduced new offerings/businesses too. More about that in later posts.

A lot can happen in two years, both to a person and to a business. I'm glad to say that Higher Turnover has had a lot happen in a positive way, whereas I've seen a lot of negative things in the industry over the same period. Car sales have gone through a serious slump. Some website providers have failed to improve their products beyond what they had 2 years ago...an eternity as far as the internet goes. I refuse to point fingers at those who are complacent, but if you're a car dealer it should make you think. You should be in the habit of asking yourself questions: Has your website provider added any value to you over the last year or two? Have they generated more sales for your dealership to coincide with their price hikes? Have they developed new features to make your life easier, or are they just collecting their fees from you because you don't push for more value in their product?

I'll be the first to admit that things need to be prioritized and there are things that are more important than spending 10 minutes to evaluate your web design company that you've been with for years. At some point though, you have to say "OK, it's time to catch up on some things that are long overdue". If you don't, you're going to become one of those dealers that everyone else laughs at because you're so far behind the times and pay more than you should for "old" products. You're setting yourself up for disappointment at some point.

One Thing a Dealership Can Do to Increase Web Leads

I wrote a post back in the summer comparing two similar dealers in the same market to illustrate the impact of web design on lead generation. One dealer was doing a lot better than the other in generating web leads despite similar traffic numbers. After listening to a year of complaints about how bad business is, I finally convinced the dealer with the "worse" website to take my advice and redesign it according to my recommendations. The site content was not changed much at all, only the page layouts, some graphics, etc. It's amazing how small changes can impact business so much. Here are the actual numbers from the three-week period immediately before the change compared to the three-week period immediately following the change:

Before:
Site Visitors: 1452
Pageviews: 10,212
Contact Forms Submitted: 7
Credit Apps Submitted: 9
Overall: 1 lead for every 91 visitors

After:
Site Visitors: 1599
Pageviews: 10,716
Contact Forms Submitted: 24
Credit Apps Submitted: 41
Overall: 1 lead for every 25 visitors

The site statistics have not changed much at all, but by making some adjustments to the site layout, this dealer has increased his conversion rate to 4 times the amount it used to be. We run into these sort of problems on a daily basis. A dealer may want to do something on his/her site that they think is a good idea, but I wish more dealers would listen to those of us who have been in the online media industry and have seen how much business these type of "mistakes" can cost. Going off the last 3 weeks stats, let's assume this particular dealer had 27,716 visitors for the last 52 weeks. If they had the same conversion rates they see since the redesign, that would be 1108 leads. With the old conversion rates it would only be 304 leads, a difference of 804 for the year. As a dealer you know your closing ratios, so would it be worth it for you to make a small change and have a crack at an extra 804 car shoppers over the year?

Getting the Best Customer Service from Auto Dealer Website Vendors

Jeff Kershner at Dealer Refresh recently authored a post on his blog about customer service in the auto industry. For some reason many of the auto industry vendors seem to have substandard customer service once the contract has been signed and the customer has made their payment. Jeff makes some great points about what constitutes good service in our world of auto dealer products/services. I'm proud to say Higher Turnover passes the test on all 5.

1. Don't over promise and under deliver: It's important to be straight forward with customers. If you aren't able to do something, don't promise you can do it. Personally I feel it's better to be up front in the beginning. If you over promise certain things it's starting off a business relationship on the wrong foot when the customer sees it's not what they had in mind.

2. Answer your phone: We get calls at all hours of the day, and most of the time I answer the calls personally. If I'm in the middle of 3 different projects I'll still drop what I'm doing to answer the phone, because when I'm the one calling some customer service department, I don't want to leave a message. That increases frustration, and I may be busy when they call back. If we are on the other lines when a customer calls, they will receive a call back immediately when we're available. Our customers tell us on a regular basis how much it means to them that someone always answers the phone when they call. During off-hours I have support calls forwarded to my personal phone. This past weekend I took a call at 11pm Friday night, two on Saturday, and two on Sunday. Car dealers have hectic schedules and we try to accommodate that as much as possible. Other companies should do the same.

3. Have skilled tech support highly trained and familiar with your product: Nobody is more familiar with our product than myself, which is why I prefer to field support calls instead of using a customer service department. It's not easy to hire the right people for support who can learn the ins and outs of a product.

4. Call Me Back: Nothing is more frustrating than sitting around with a product that isn't working properly and not being able to talk with support right then and there. Sometimes it does happen unfortunately. We view our current customers as the most important asset of our company, therefore any support calls which we can't answer immediately are returned promptly, generally within 5 minutes or less. I don't see any legitimate reason why other companies can't do the same, but I've had support calls go for days without a return call.

5. Check in and see how I'm coming along: This is one that we are careful on. We do make it a point to check in on customers regularly, but this has to be done according to the customer needs. Some customers want check-up calls every couple of weeks, while others don't want to be bothered by phone unless you're buying a car. Our practice is to check in more frequently in the beginning as the dealers are learning our products. While we do this we try to get a feel for that particular dealer as far as how often they want us to check in. We have some customers who we speak with several times a week and we have others who we speak with once every 10-12 months. The important thing is that we're available as much as needed.

All of these items above may not be possible for the typical bigger company. No matter how big of a company we are or how much bigger we get, we have made it our mission to maintain our small-company style of customer service. Maybe it stems from my own need to have everything done "right now", but from what our dealers tell us, other companies aren't able to provide the same level of service. For now I guess that's just one more thing to elevate us above the other website providers in the auto industry.

Cost vs. Value in Auto Dealer Websites

I've tried to post a couple of comments on a blog recently that were not approved/posted by the moderator. Perhaps they don't approve of my comments, or perhaps their blog is only being used to help with driving traffic to their business website and they aren't concerned with generating a dialogue. Since there are no comments from anyone on the entire blog I'd have to assume the latter, so I thought I'd speak my opinions here.

The blog I'm referring to may be authored by a competitor of ours on some level, but I'll be the first to admit, they do offer decent web solutions. The latest blog post that caught my eye was about car dealers in the Midwest not wanting to spend money on internet marketing. It's a good topic because it's typical of the dealerships we work with on the independent level. I happen to disagree with certain portions of the post however.

The author equates a website cost with the number of leads received. According to him, the more money a car dealer spends on a website the more leads they will receive.

I have to say I disagree most with their comment that "If you are not spending a minimum of $700 per month on your website, your website is probably not attracting the leads necessary to really be effective". They're assuming cost is correlated directly with value, which if you've taken a look at some of the other providers out there, is clearly not the case. Sure there are some companies that develop great sites for $700/month, and the author's company may be one of them, but there are others that are capable of generating the same amount of leads for the end user at a fraction of that cost. A website should match the dealers needs, and if they don't need a $700/month site, there are other options that may be equally as effective.

Unfortunately a lot of consumers (including car dealers) fall for the trick that more expensive means better product. A friend of mine just bought a brand new car. The identical car was at two dealerships, and they really were the same, even down to the colors/options. One dealer had the car listed higher than the other dealer. If you were buying a car that two dealers each had on the lot, and each one was identical, would you buy the higher priced car? Is it a better car somehow?

The point I want to make is that cost is not the same as value. Our company offers some of the cheapest rates available for car dealer websites. I feel our products are far better than any other company that charges similar rates, meaning we have a similar cost but a better value. As a dealer your focus should be on value. Without it, cost is nothing more than an arbitrary number.

What Can Be Done to Improve Website Leads?

We’ve done websites for car dealers across the country, and of course we have several clients in our local area as well. The different approaches by two local dealerships has given us a unique look into how much a website design really impacts the amount of leads generated from the dealership website.

These two dealers, we’ll call them Dealer 1 and Dealer 2, are comparable on most levels. They both spend a lot of money on marketing. Both use the same 3^rd party classified sites (Autotrader.com, Cars.com, AutoMart.com, AutoExtra.com, and a couple of smaller sites). They also use the same magazines to advertise locally with similar multi-page spreads. Even the inventory and customers are similar – they both sell in the $7k-$15k range, have the same number of cars on the lot, and both do mostly sub-prime finance. When Dealer 1 seemed to be doing so much better than Dealer 2 as far as website leads, it warranted a closer look.

When Dealer 1 signed up with us over a year ago they didn’t have a lot of input into their site design. They wanted to trust our expertise and see the results. We did a very simple design, easy to navigate, always 1-click away from inventory, and a very short credit application.

Dealer 2 was the exact opposite. This dealer was adamant in the design and features he wanted on his site, even though most were against convention, and certainly against our recommendations. Their site has been more of an ongoing project – constant changes requested, seemingly new features added every couple of weeks. It’s truly become an endless pit of feature-creep. A prime example of what can be done as opposed to what should be done.

Upon a recent evaluation of leads and overall statistics, here’s what was uncovered. We literally went through every lead ever generated on each site to clean out things such as multiple inquiries and bogus leads. We wanted to do an apples to apples comparison, so accurate data was necessary. Here’s what we found:

Visitors on Dealer #1 site only spend half the time of visitors on Dealer #2 site.

Bounce rates for Dealer #2 are twice that of Dealer #1.

Dealer #1 receives 1 good lead for every 22 website visitors (4.5%). Dealer #2 receives 1 for every 91 visitors (1.1%).

So what does all this mean? One way to look at it is that Dealer #1 has a site which doesn’t confuse visitors (lower bounce rate), they’re able to find what they’re looking for easier (lower time spent on site), and the calls to action make customers more apt to submit leads.

Dealer #2 has a site which isn’t nearly as user-friendly, has a lot of content that customers don’t care about, and lacks the necessary calls to action which help generate leads.

This all goes back to what I’ve said before on other posts. Just because something can be done, that doesn’t mean it should be done. Car dealers by nature want to do things their own way, but not listening to the people you pay to help you can cost you a lot in the long run.

Your Future is in the Hands of Your Website Provider

How many car dealers really think ahead when it comes to internet marketing? My experience tells me that most dealers are right here, right now personalities. While that may be OK for right here, right now, it's inevitably going to hurt them down the road.

I spent the past weekend attending two birthday parties for family members. Saturday was a surprise 60th birthday celebration for my aunt, and Sunday was a party for her granddaughter's 1st birthday. Looking at a lot of old photos put together in a slideshow presentation which eventually moved toward recent photos, it reminded me how much things have changed in the last 60 years....the last 30 years....even the last 3 years. I found myself imagining what sort of party the one year old will have in 59 years. Some sort of virtual reality display based on home videos where guests are able to "be there" for the 1st birthday? Brain implants so they can experience being there? The way technology changes, it's probably well beyond what anyone can even imagine at this point, but you get the idea that it's going to be different than this past weekend.

As a website company that specializes in independent car dealerships, our typical clients don't need a lot of the bells and whistles that some of our competitors offer....yet. Our business model dictates that we provide only those tools that are needed by our core client base. Someone who is relatively new to internet marketing and/or technology in general does not want to be overwhelmed with products they don't use or understand. As a dealership grows and puts more emphasis into an internet department I believe the average dealer will want these extras. The way I see it, there are thousands of dealers across the country. Some are ahead of the curve and some are behind the curve. Our company's role is to get the "behind the curve" dealers up to speed. At the same time we do this, the curve continues to move, and we as a company need to evolve and adapt.

A few years ago videos on dealership websites were rare. This is a perfect example of a technology trend that's growing and becoming closer to par for the course. While our early dealers did not even consider such things for their sites, we're starting to get more dealers who are. As a reputable web design company it's our obligation to advance the technology with the times. Complacency may not kill a company, but it shortchanges that company's clients.

Whether you have an existing website provider or you are searching for one for the first time, it's important to consider how progressive the leaders of that company think. One company may fit your needs today, but if they maintain the status quo, chances are they won't meet your needs for very long. Choose a web design company wisely, and although I know most car dealers don't like to think about the future, doing so when it comes to the technology side of your business is one of the best moves you can make.

Pricing for a Dealership Website

Take a look around the web and you'll see an unbelievable range of pricing for auto dealer websites. It's no surprise - you get hundreds or thousands of companies and you're bound to be all over the map. Of course a small company who builds websites in their spare time is going to charge less than another company who focuses strictly on car dealers. Why? I believe the answer is a simple concept. For some reason a lot of auto dealers we talk to don't seem to get it right off.

The reason is a matter of simple economics. I see a lot of web design "companies" that are nothing more than one person building and promoting all sorts of site design in their spare time. The usual situation is one in which a person has a full time job and relies almost exclusively on referrals from existing customers and also the "friend of a friend" scenario. In this situation there is no real need to grow the business; it's merely a hobby. This means no money needed for marketing, development, a sales force, an office, etc. When these typical business needs aren't present, of course the profit margins increase and voila, you have an inexpensive website product to offer. This isn't always a bad thing, but we see a lot of these providers who just don't care about having a good product. Of course there are larger companies that produce good looking sites but lack the essential features to make your internet marketing a success. I'd say the majority of car dealers still haven't been educated on what makes a good site vs. a bad site.

It all boils down to value. Suppose I go to a car dealer and ask how much his BMW costs. Let's say they quote me $25,000. If I tell the dealer that another dealer down the street has "a car" for $5000, we all know what the first question would be from them: "Well is it the same BMW?" This example sounds absurd, but we run into the same thing with a lot of dealers who call in. "Company X only charges this amount and you want to charge your amount." Car dealer websites probably have as much variety as the vehicles on the road, so we constantly have the apples to oranges discussion with dealers. We choose to work in this industry where price is everything in the mind of most customers, so taking on the value-building educational role doesn't bother us. When it comes time to make a decision on what provider you want to develop your dealership website, I recommend shopping around, determining what features you need and what features you could care less about, and then make a true apples to apples comparison between the providers who offer the features you need. Your choice is eventually going to impact your return on investment, so it's well worth your while to do the homework.