The Importance of Positive Online Reviews for Car Dealers

How many positive reviews from customers does your dealership have on Google, DealerRater, Cars.com and other consumer review websites? If the answer is "not many," "not enough,"or "none," then you're significantly increasing your chances of being ruled out by many potential customers and losing them to your competition.

Want to increase your dealership's sales by 80%?

The challenge for car dealerships today:

• Are we asking our customers to complete a positive review?
• How do we get our happy customers to review us positively online?
• How do we prevent the unhappy customers from posting negative reviews?
• What percentage of sales customers are ever asked to review their experience on one (or more) websites?
• Have good follow up with your car dealer sales leads

Get more positive reviews and push those negative reviews down! 

Statistics show that 4 in 5 consumers choose NOT to do business with car dealerships because of their negative consumer reviews online, or because the dealer they wound up doing business with had substantially more positive reviews.

Car Dealership Reviews are more Important Now Than Ever!

If you’re in charge of a car dealership reviews, it’s natural to worry about reviews and potential negative reviews. Knowing the process of the potential car buyers mental thinking and how they choose car dealerships is key. Sure, it’s always a challenge to gain insights on how exactly consumers behave, but here’s at least one recommendation I’m not reluctant to make: be proactive in monitoring your online reviews and in improving your visibility on the Internet.

You won’t be surprised… According to a study, a growing number of car buyers are turning to online review aggregators and rating sites – such as CarGurus, Yelp, GOOGLE, DealerRater, and Edmunds – before making a purchase. In fact, you can argue that these sites now play the most important role in the dealership selection process, with 90 percent of car buyers saying that online dealership reviews influence where they choose to go. Moreover, 24 percent considered review sites to be the “most helpful” factor when it comes to making purchase decisions.

One recent study takes into account the responses of over 2,000 people in the US who have purchased a vehicle in the last 6 months. It also surveyed more than 600 dealerships in the U.S. on how they use social media.

Here are more highlights from the study on Car Dealership Reviews:

1. The number of car buyers using review sites has increased by 23 percent from just 6 months ago.

2. 81 percent of these people who consult review sites said that they check the review scores / aggregated ratings of dealerships that appear in search results.

Younger people (in the age range of 18 to 34) prefer to use Yelp, while Cars.com is used consistently by car buyers in all age ranges.

Here’s the detailed age breakdown of buyer car dealership review site usage.

See my Original post here How Important are Car Dealership Reviews? and Learn How to Delete Bad Reviews in 2 Simple Steps

How come everybody isn't using Google Voice for their car dealership?

Here are 15 reasons why you should be using it for marketing

1. It's FREE with a GMail account.
2. You can get a new phone number or port over an existing number.
3. You can even choose your new number from an available list in most area codes.
4. You can also have your number include a word or phrase like SALE (7253), if it's available.
5. Free voicemail and call recording (optional).
6. Route incoming calls to as many as 6 different phone numbers simultaneously - one phone number can ring to your office, cell AND home phone!
7. Make calls from your cell phone's data plan with the free Google Voice app (iPhone, Android) - save your minutes!
8. Perfect for accepting TEXT Messages in your marketing campaigns.
9. Free incoming and outgoing calls and text messages to the United States and Canada from your computer with the Google Talk app or Talk PC software from anywhere in the world with an Internet connection.
10. Perfect for tracking different marketing campaigns for differnet car dealer sales leads.
11. Ties into your Google contacts, so all your phone numbers are probably already there Maintains a log of your calls, texts and voice mails.
12. Make calls from your Chrome browser with the free Google Voice extension.
13. You can change the phone number or port it to any other carrier at any time Give it out whenever you don't want to share your home, cell and/or work number
14. Car dealerships can use it for call tracking and text tracking EXAMPLE: search all text for someone searching for "Ford Mustang".

Sign up for free at http://google.com/voice.