Sales & Marketing
Your BDC and Using The Internet to Save Money
By Forrest Scott
While BDCs are being installed in massive numbers, many dealerships are not collecting e-mail addresses. A concentrated effort should be made to collect every person's e-mail address. E-mail addresses should be viewed like phone numbers or mailing addresses. However, please note that a person's e-mail address may prove to be significantly better than the phone number in the not too distant future.
While a customer's phone number could be a great method for reaching him or her, it is also easy for people today to have their calls screened. They could subscribe to a service which blocks you from getting through or they may have an answering machine, which allows them to screen calls themselves. In any case the result is the same: you are not getting through. Sure, you could keep trying and hope for the customer to feel bad for you and finally pick up. The fact is that people want their private time and they are shutting you out in greater numbers than ever before. This is where e-mail could be a tremendous help. E-mailing a person gives them the opportunity to view the message at their leisure. If you phone them, you may be interrupting something and the customer may resent the intrusion. E-mail is usually read when a person has dedicated an amount of time to read it. Some only read their e-mail at work. In either case this is actually better for you. Whether it's during the day or late at night, you now have a captive audience.
In addition to the benefits of communicating with a customer via e-mail during the sales process, you also could use e-mail to improve and reduce the costs of marketing. Most dealers use direct mail to notify customers of a sale. If a dealership were to use e-mail to market the event they would save the cost of labor, postage and printing. Essentially the marketing would be free.
While everyone does not have an e-mail address, they eventually will. In the meantime, you could e-mail to those who do and direct mail to the customers who are not yet on the Internet. The result could save you thousands on every sale you make. Technology is now available enabling you to send a copy of every printed marketing piece to every customer in your database, every week and at a cost of zero. However, first you must collect e-mail addresses.
Since the BDC is a controlled environment, I suggest e-mail be sent from this department. Additionally, copies of all e-mail should be kept for future reference.
Collecting and maintaining a database of e-mail addresses has the potential of saving your dealership between $50,000 and $500,000 a year depending on the size of your dealership. Considering the fact that collecting e-mail addresses costs you nothing, I would say this is a pretty good deal.
Getting e-mail addresses is not as difficult as some would like you to think. All you have to do is ask. Ask every showroom prospect. If your showroom worksheets and buyers orders do not have a designated spot for this, I suggest you have new ones printed that do. Additionally, ask every service and parts customer. Most dealerships send out questionnaires. It amazes me how few ask for e-mail addresses. If your questionnaires do not have a spot for e-mail addresses, have new ones printed.
A major effort should be put in place to collect e-mail addresses. After all, the money you save is money that goes directly to the bottom line. If you have any questions please feel free to e-mail me.
Forrest Scott is president of Dynamic Marketing Strategies Inc. fscott@dealeronline.com
