Im with Mike...I have been doing this for a long time and Ive used a lot of theses tool too.
You have a lot of choices out there, but first you need to make sure you are moving in the right direction.
I am about to make a selection soon but here is what I have been doing with what I consider to be some great results.
You be the JudgeI am the E-commerce Director at a stand alone Jeep store in South Texas. The Dealer just built a beautiful new facility just off the IH-35 we are in a small town about half way between San Antonio and Austin of less than 20,000 people. Currently we dont have a whole lot of E-traffic I get about 35-45 Autobytel leads a month and about 9-13 leads off of a so-so website. We also have the folks from Dealer Specialties snapping photos and making window stickers for us they are good for about 3-5 used car leads a month. This store has 6 floor sales people and we are selling 130-140 N&U/month. I personally handel my guest sales process I great them do the demo and close them on figures and I do my own deliveries.
This is my third month at the store:
The first month I delivered 14 and took 1 order without taking a single UP or phone-pop.
The second month I delivered 19 and got deposits on 5 Order units.
We are half way through my third month and we have 16 burning gas Right Now and we have about 6 more orders!
You might ask yourself why our numbers are increasing so quickly if our traffic is not?Here are the few secrets that are what I feel are a major reason of our continued growing success.
Please bear in mind I have none of the toys mentioned earlier in this string. I do have an okay Dell PC with 128ram and a cable Internet and for peripherals a $109.00 Digital camera from Wall-mart and a $49.00 Scanner Okay $19.00 after the mail-in rebate.
The only tool I am using for managing my mail is MS Outlook. The key to why things are working is that of the 166 people that have emailed me a request that have still not purchased a car from me or one of my competitors gets an email from me at least twice a week. With this tool I can keep a data base and file my entire "e-guest list to the appropriate distribution file(s)
And the people that did buy a car from me hear from me 3 to 4 times a month by email also.
Here is what I do:(Here is my process if they do not respond)
*All of the tools like Autobytel and our website have an HTML auto responder.
*Then as soon as I receive the PR on my PC I mail out another template that is called DETAILS asking for a bit more information about there request and it also includes helpful links to industry sites.
*One hour after that I send out a letter from my F&I person that is a solicitation to allow us to do their financing; sort of like an F&I Turn.
*About 3 hours later I send out another template that explains all of the rebate programs and sub-vented financing programs.
*The next email they get from me is a sort of news letter that explains specials department goals, my schedule and attached is the PDF of our newspaper ad. Im sure to include instructions on how to down load an
Adobe Acrobat Reader in the event that they do not have one yet.
*The I send out a letter called
Would you consider??? and links to some of my new or used inventory.
*Lastly I email a few pics of the car that is closest to what they are looking for.
At that point if I have not heard from them they go into my regular Follow-up Data Base and they will continue to receive the ad weekly and any other tidbits of information that might prove to be pertinent to their initial request. After one week I put them in my Telephone Follow up data base too.
If new rebates are announced I pass it on to them and I will continue to email them until they ask me to stop Im always sure that I ask them to pass it on to their friends if they might know someone who is interested.
We sold 3 of those so far this month.To date I have had only 11 people asked to be removed from the list. Today I sold 2 people that have been in the data base since the first week
The bottom line is it cost vary little to do this and the results can be hugeMy first Benchmark was going to be 20 deals in a month I guess Ill hit that tomorrow.
Now that the processes are in place and I feel that I am proving to this Dealer Group that this can be a very viable source of revenue its time to start buying a few toys. I think Ill start with Web Control. Next moth I might build us a new Web Site and perhaps even bring on another aggregator. Just think about it Im tracking to do 31 cars on fewer than 60 fresh leads a month
just imagine what I could do with 100 leads???------------------
Greg MachadoE-Commerce Director &Independant ConsultantgMACgroup.com machado@gmacgroup.com 210.710.8456[This message has been edited by machado (edited 10-20-2001).]