CIMA Systems Blog

DMS data, to drive marketing campaigns and sell service, is especially effective right now. And those campaigns are even more powerful when you can use the exact communication channel that your customers prefer.

By Gary Nixon

Proactive marketing of factory-recommended services as well as dealership recommendations prior to the customer arriving in the drive not only pre-sells your service business, but displays your expertise at keeping their vehicle in top performance.

To accomplish this, you will need a plan of action and some automation to make such pre-selling practical, largely hands-off, and effective. Your audience must include new and used vehicle customers, current service customers, those you haven’t serviced in a while, and those which declined some of your recommended services.

Today, most dealers attempt to do this with a “blast” direct mail or email offering one-time service specials like a lube, oil filter or brake special hoping customers will see a coupon that is applicable to the service they feel their vehicles need. Although this plan does result in a spike in service, it is only temporary.’

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According to Reuters, auto sales dropped 12 percent in March alone and predictions are that they will continue to decline through the second quarter of this year. Experts counsel that a strong focus on promoting your parts and service business is the way to keep your profits up during this down time. I’d like to offer a different perspective to ensure you focus on your entire dealership.

Although individual promotions for parts and services, vehicles sales, or any other aspect of your dealership are an integral part of your marketing plan, sending communications that promote specific departments to the exclusion of others sets you up for a roller coaster ride. For example, a marketing promotion that only touts a $9.99 oil change may make your service business rise briefly, but it may soon go right back down again, leaving you in a constant state of peaks and valleys, scrambling to come up with even better promotions.

Instead, focus on promoting your entire dealership. This approach gives you room to highlight a particular department, for instance your service department, while still tying in all the services and products you offer that meet the full gamut of customer needs. Marketing your dealership as a whole sets you up for a steady stream of revenue, so your business remains strong even during the most difficult economic conditions.
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Dealer Magazine

By Gary Nixon

I grew up practicing the maxim that every cloud has a silver lining, and you’ll find one even in this dark-cloud market if you’ll simply look at the situation as opportunity.

I realize many readers are doing the best they can just to hang on today. Each dealer I speak to is looking closely at every single expense with the goal of dramatically reducing each while increasing business. One expense that can be reduced significantly is marketing and promotion.

Yet many of the dealers I speak with continue to use expensive non-technology-based means for advertising their products and services, such as hardcopy mailers. I encourage these dealers to reconsider those expenditures and look closely at email marketing as a better alternative.

Email marketing continues to be the most cost effective way of communicating those important dealership promotions/announcements and service due notifications with customers and prospects.  A recent Aberdeen Group study confirmed this fact: “While 60% of marketers plan to cut their traditional marketing budgets this year, 47% of marketers plan to boost their email marketing budgets,” the study reported.

Now more than ever before, dealerships must look at the most cost effective way of marketing/communicating to their customers/prospects resulting in achieving the most effective return on investment (ROI).

Email marketing continues to reign as the lowest-cost, most-effective marketing medium to promote business to your dealership. However, as effective as email marketing is, let me state as an important aside that email marketing is not always the kind of communications every customer wants to receive from you. As you go about building your customer and prospect base, be sure you give customers the opportunity to tell you how they prefer to be contacted. For instance, while most customers will desire email communications, some still prefer phone contact, traditional mail or, in growing popularity, text messaging and related communications (e.g. live chat). A majority of our dealership customers offer each of these variations to their customers to ensure their message has the highest probability of being acted upon.

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By Gary Nixon for Dealer Marketing Magazine

Embrace a dealership-wide marketing approach that meets your customers’ needs and allows you to reap the maximum profit from every part of your business.  

We all know the current market situation. A decline in consumer confidence, along with high fuel prices, and the worry that the weakened market could turn into a full blown recession has hit the automotive industry hard.

According to Reuters, auto sales dropped 12 percent in March alone and predictions are that they will continue to decline through the second quarter of this year. Experts counsel that a strong focus on promoting your parts and service business is the way to keep your profits up during this down time. I’d like to offer a different perspective to ensure you focus on your entire dealership.

Although individual promotions for parts and services, vehicles sales, or any other aspect of your dealership are an integral part of your marketing plan, sending communications that promote specific departments to the exclusion of others sets you up for a roller coaster ride. For example, a marketing promotion that only touts a $9.99 oil change may make your service business rise briefly, but it may soon go right back down again, leaving you in a constant state of peaks and valleys, scrambling to come up with even better promotions.

Instead, focus on promoting your entire dealership. This approach gives you room to highlight a particular department, for instance your service department, while still tying in all the services and products you offer that meet the full gamut of customer needs. Marketing your dealership as a whole sets you up for a steady stream of revenue, so your business remains strong even during the most difficult economic conditions.

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Determine the pros and cons of each of your marketing methods for maximum success.
by Gary Nixon for Digital Dealer

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Determine the pros and cons of each of your marketing methods for maximum success.
by Gary Nixon for Digital Dealer

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Determine the pros and cons of each of your marketing methods for maximum success.
by Gary Nixon for Digital Dealer

Dealers often ask us, with the many ways to reach out to customers which channels work the best for communicating important dealership promotions/recommendations to drive customers for life? Mailers, business development centers, emails, automated calls, enewsletters and blogs are just samples of various communication possibilities. In this series I’d like to help demystify some of the more common forms of marketing communication and share with you the pros and cons of each. There’s a variety of ways to bring in customers, all of them with good and bad points. Regardless of which way you choose to pull in customers, sending the right message at the right time and in the right way is your best bet for pulling in additional leads and sales.

This month’s article will focus on the advantages and disadvantages of direct mail and email. In future articles we’ll focus on: automated phone calls, live phone calls (or Business Development Centers-BDC’s) and newer technologies such as text messages and Blogs (or timely two-way enewsletters).

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With ever-changing technology in the world, more and more consumers are looking at better and faster ways of exchanging important information. In the past, dealers have exchanged information with their customers via mailed newsletters that have now progressed into e-newsletters. Although these have worked well, many dealers today are turning to blogging.

Simply put, a blog (or web log) provides interactive commentary or news on a particular subject (i.e. latest announcements from your manufacturer, dealership news/promos) to your customers. A typical dealer blog combines text, images, links and video content applicable to the auto industry. Further, the reader has the ability to leave comments in an interactive format on each of your blog subjects.

A 2006 study by PQ Media, “Blog, Podcast and RSS Advertising Outlook” showed the combined spending on blogs, podcasts and RSS feeds by companies rose from $6.8 million in 2004 to close to $50 million in 2006. In addition, a recent CapGemini study shows of the tools auto shoppers use when researching a vehicle for purchase, a healthy 16 percent used interactive marketing in the form of blogs or discussion groups when compiling information. These two studies point out a trend happening throughout the business world: as more companies adopt blogs, more consumers are visiting them and driving explosive growth in the new medium.

A blog has certain characteristics that qualify it to be a unique marketing tool above and beyond your typical marketing channels such as e-newsletters. It is timely, delivers fresh content, is quick and establishes a direct line from management to customers. Let’s identify the strengths of each of these qualifiers directly as they pertain to the automotive industry.

Timely response
Unlike any other online tool available, blogs give dealerships the opportunity to respond to their environment in an immediate way. For instance, a quick look at General Motor’s forward-thinking blog, Fastlane (www.fastlane.com), shows me I can find out the truth about the latest rumors regarding Buick breaking its contract with Tiger Woods. (Buick, in fact, did not and General Manager Jim Bunnell sets the record straight in his post, “Tiger Woods and Buick.”) In the post Bunnell candidly discusses the rumors and writes to “set the record straight”; letting Buick loyalists know that the contract is intact and the hoopla was started due to sensationalized headlines in the media.

This is a perfect example of the power of a blog when it comes to disseminating information quickly and controlling the message. GM could have chosen to continue letting the rumors fly and eventually send out a statement in their e-newsletter, but by taking the bull by the horn and posting the truth on their blog, they’ve taken the mountain and made it back into the molehill, stopping rumors in their tracks.

Fresh content
A frequent complaint heard by e-newsletter readers is they’re faced with the same content they can find on the company’s website or marketing materials. Nothing is fresh. This happens often with dealership e-newsletters as dealers recycle content used on their web site or in their online promotions. Not only does this discount the time your customers have spent reading the enewsletter, it also is a surefire way to dissuade customers and prospects from giving you their e-mail address for future communications. A blog, on the other hand, enables dealerships to add small bits of content the reader can’t find anywhere else. Due to the nature of a blog, posts are often personal comments and thoughts from leadership and can feature anything from news about the industry to their opinion on current events. It’s a view into the dealership a reader might not see through any other source.

Quick
Today’s consumers want to scan information in bite-size chunks and pull out the content that catches their interest or pertains directly to them. Some of the best media sites on the web have already invested time and energy into designing their sites to attract readers in this way. Take the Wall Street Journal, www.wsj.com, for instance. One glance at the front page of the Wall Street Journal and the reader will see several headlines that make up the news of the day summarized in four lines or less.

A dealership blog taps into this trend by giving users bits of information that can be easily scanned. The best blog posts are no more than a few paragraphs long; with one paragraph being the general rule of thumb for length. Compare that with an e-newsletter that often contains three to eight feature-length articles and long lead-ins and it’s not hard to figure out why e-newsletter conversion rates are dropping.

Direct
Perhaps the most important benefit of a blog is the direct link it creates between customer and executive leadership, or in the dealership world, buyers and sellers. While an e-newsletter article may inspire a reader to shoot off a quick e-mail to whoever maintains the mailing list, a blog creates the opportunity for one on one interaction between the reader and the poster. Teddy Stephens, General Manager of Fiesta Ford Lincoln Mercury, in Indio, CA has seen the power of his blog, Fiesta Ford eNewsFlash (www.fiestaford.wordpress.com) firsthand.

Since beginning his blog in February of this year, Stephens has received positive feedback from posters all over the nation. In this way, eNewsFlash, is pulling interest into the Fiesta dealership from sources across the U.S. rather than pushing information out to those readers in his geographic area. Again looking at the Fastlane example from above, Buick was able to begin a one-on-one communication with its brand loyalists the moment the contract rumors began. No other form of marketing gives you instant, direct communication in this way.

While blogs will by no means make e-newsletters or other forms of interactive marketing extinct any time soon, they should be considered as an addition to your marketing mix due to some of the attributes noted above. Blogs, unlike any other form of online marketing, can bring fresh, timely, interesting information to the reader and establish a one-on-one communication channel that can’t be matched today. And if you need a further push, look to your competitor down the street. I’ll bet within the next year you’ll see a blog pop up on their web site. Take my advice and establish a blog to get those buyers first. Best of luck.

This article is published in Digital Dealer Magazine, here.

Gary Nixon’s article lays out the benefits of blogs over enewsletters and predicts blogs increasing strength in the industry.

Read the original article at http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/15140.asp