Digital Dealer
What To Do With The 90% Of Internet Leads You Don't Close
By Todd Smith
This month I wanted to take the time to provide you with a practical solution to effectively help you close more Internet leads.
Internet leads are hard to get a handle on since you really don't know much about the person; it's not as if they walked into your dealership and explained their situation allowing you to build some rapport with them. Dealerships all over the US share this same problem; what do you do with the leads that don't respond back after they have requested information from you in the first place? After much trial and error, we finally came up with a solution to the problem. For example, let's take ABCDealership.com, which receives 100 leads per month. Out of those leads the Internet manager closes 10, which is the statistical average nationwide.
The next question is what to do with the 90 leads that don't close or somehow disappear into cyber space. You don't want to stop marketing to these people, but it is difficult with the influx of new leads you receive every day to keep up. You end up dropping the people who don't respond.
What you need to do is create an automatic process that will send these non-responsive people seven letters over 8 weeks. Why seven letters and why eight weeks? In direct marketing this is how many contacts you need to have with a prospect to get them to respond. Notice I didn't say "buy," just respond, and eight weeks makes sure you have kept your dealership in front of the prospect during their entire vehicle buying cycle.
The first thing you need to do is to set yourself up with an automatic system that will send out the e-mail letters for you. Call www.aweber.com. It is easy to use and is less than $20 per month. There are other companies out there so you might want to look around, but I have had great success with aweber.com's messaging system. What you do is drop the e-mail addresses of the people who don't respond into the system and let the e-mail marketing begin.
Here are the features of the seven letters, including how you should develop them and when to send them. All letters need to have the following features:
A bold subject line and letter headline.
They should be time sensitive (meaning they should expire if not responded to within a specific timeframe), All letters need to have a call to action e.g. "click here to buy" etc.
What should you offer in your marketing letters? Some offers that we found to be great to drive response are limited time low interest rates, special new car pricing promotions, service special (e.g. "buy your next car at ABCDealerhip.com and receive your first year of oil changes free"). You can use the same type promotions that you use offline online to get the hook set in your prospects. Just remember to make them time sensitive and have whatever you write call the prospect to take immediate action. Try to bundle different things together and always keep experimenting with different promotions.
Your direct e-mail marketing campaign should begin 24 hours after your prospect doesn't respond to you and continue for eight weeks or until the prospect removes himself from your list. This campaign will have a dramatic effect on the number of people you re-up due to your persistent follow up, even though the computer is doing all the work for you.
If you use a system like aweber.com it will allow people to unsubscribe automatically and will also allow you to track what people received what letters as well as allowing you to track when they dropped out. For example, if 35% of all people unsubscribe on letter 3, you might need to change the letter to make it more effective. The object is to drive more people into your dealership - period.
As an Internet consultant in a busy dealership it is impossible to follow up on every lead effectively. But by building and utilizing a system that automatically follows up on cold and non responsive leads it allows you to focus your energy on the people who want to buy now without sacrificing good quality leads that just needed a little more information.
To really get the most out of this system you need to track everything as you want to be able to uncover any chinks in the armor of your letters and address them immediately. This has been the most effective system we have ever tried and used to manage unresponsive leads. It will work for your dealership too. Take one day and set it up and start e-mail marketing for your dealership today.
Todd L. Smith is the president and CEO of Target Marketing Group, the leading developer of e-automotive solutions & strategies. He is also the publisher of the manual ÒAutomotive Retailing on the Internet.Ó TMG works with OEMs, dealership groups, and individual dealerships to create and implement successful Internet strategies. Visit TMGÕs web site at http://www.tmg-online.com.tsmith@dealeronline.com
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