It’s really tough to tell the difference between a trend and a fad, most pundits get it wrong a majority of the time. And it might sometimes seem in the world of online marketing and social media is the ultimate environment for chasing the latest fad. No one can truly predict the future, but  Mary Meeker's annual Internet Trend report gives us some insight in the world of online marketing. 

Let’s take a look at some trends that matter to your dealership from this report:

1. The SuperWeb

Google Fiber promises to offer Internet speeds up to 100 times faster than what is currently available today, it may enable new competitors to your business that were previously impossible. With speeds this fast, any data from the cloud will be instantly accessible. That means any information about your dealership that has been published anywhere at any time will be instantly available from any device. As a result, your reputation online will mean everything.

2. Top Level Domains

Content curation is a trend that will continue to rise, and new Top Level Domains (TLDs) are one sign of this transformation. Essentially, instead of having your web address at a .com or a .org, you could have it at a more descriptive ".anything" depending on the domains that get created and funded.  

3. Paid Niche Channels

Earlier this year, YouTube announced that it would be creating a series of paid channels for content that users could subscribe to--for $1.99. Imagine the possibility for reaching your customers directly with your message for a fraction of the cost of TV advertising. And you could drive them directly to your digital showroom!

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What do you think of these trends? Is your dealership already prepared for them? Tell us your thoughts in the comment section below and as always follow @activengage for updates and auto dealer chat tips!

Employees will treat your customers EXACTLY the way you treat them. If your employees are well cared for, they will focus on being good to your customers.

This is why, according to Shep Hyken,  the secret to building a customer service culture is not to start focusing on customers, but rather employees. He says that great companies "hire the right people to fit into the culture. They train them both technically and on how to deliver their brand of helpful customer service. The management and employees treat each other with dignity and respect, and in turn, they treat their customers in a similar fashion."  

Can you think of a  store that truly exemplifies the great customer service model? Think about it, whenever I need something for my home I dread going to Home Depot or Lowes. I’d rather go to a helpful place, like Ace Hardware. In their recent campaign they even showcase themselves as your neighbor. They have truly operationalized the word “helpful” into their culture. That is their version of customer service. Helpful is what gives them a competitive edge. They want to be known as the most helpful and trustworthy hardware store--and they are. Every time I walk into Ace Hardware, I’m immediately greeted and welcomed. Yes, I know that Home Depot and Lowes does that too, but Ace Hardware takes the cake because when I’m in an aisle looking at different sizes of washers or whatever, an Ace employee comes up to ME and asks if I need help. Not the other way around.

Here, at ActivEngage, we have a similar philosophy. Our managers hire people that fit our workplace culture and in turn, as a company we make them feel valued by the benefits we provide to them. It’s part of the reason why our chat-to-lead conversion is on average, at 80%. It’s part of the reason why our virtual sales associates (VSAs) are great at having conversations with your customers. It’s part of the reason why we are the most trusted brand in automotive live chat.

So how can you create a corporate culture that is customer service oriented?

• Management must make the measurement of service quality and feedback from the customer a basic part of everyone's work experience.

• Be very clear about specifying the behavior that employees are expected to deliver, both with external customers and their coworkers.

• Create ways to communicate excellent examples of customer service both within and outside the company.

• Indoctrinate and train everyone in the culture as soon as they are hired.

• Encourage a sense of responsibility for group performance.

• Establish policies that are "customer friendly" and that show concern for your customers.

• Remove any employees who do not show the behavior necessary to please customers.

Remember, in order for a culture of customer service excellence to grow and thrive, management must have a burning desire for it to be that way. Your dealership must become a totally customer-focused organization. EVERYONE, from the top-down, must believe that they work FOR the customer.

...In social media that is. And to be really specific, on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. Some 81% of moms would buy more from a brand if rewarded, and over 50% are willing to engage with a brand on Facebook and other social media platforms if provided incentive, according toa recent report.

Financial Rewards

• 83% of moms polled said they would value free products and services from a brand.

• 82% would be interested in receiving gift cards from popular retailers.

*If you have live chat ask if your chat provider has a feature that offers incentives for those who come in for a test drive appointment.ActivEngage has this feature which is called ActivShow. ActivShow offers gift cards to stores like Target, Dunkin Donuts, etc.  This targeted incentive moves an unsure shopper into your showroom where you can close the deal. By actively promoting these rewards on your website, your chat conversion will skyrocket! 

Now let's take a look at some more statistics from this report:

Dealer Takeaway

There’s no doubt moms are the best, so treat them like the best! Reach out to this demographic and start rewarding their participation in all forms of social media. Try BOGO’s in your service or parts department and have them share this deal across the web in order to receive this special. If you send out an email newsletter to subscribers, make one specifically for moms! Add a freebie, a discount coupon, or an exclusive offer now and then to thank them for subscribing. You could even set up a discount or special deal for moms on their birthdays and mother’s day! There’s no limit to what your dealership can offer moms!  

Lady Gaga has her Little Monsters, Justin Bieber has his Beliebers, Kiss has their Kiss Army, and your dealership has ______? Where are your fans? Musicians focus their marketingon connecting with fans, that’s nothing new, but that approach is grounded in solid business sense. A 2010 Satmetrix study found that evangelists or fans, spend 13% more than the average customer, and they refer business equal to 45% of the money they spend.

How can your dealership think like a rock star?

• Work to better understand your advocates. This will also help you determine the context of your relationship.

• Give your fans the tools and the ability to "share the love."

• There's an old marketing adage: Sell the benefit, not the product. Remember that your fans typically love your brand for many reasons other than just the product itself. Think about how your fans use your product and what's important to them.

• Seek ways to embrace your fans and stay more connected to them, it makes it far easier  for fans to advocate on their behalf.

Now you have your fans, but how do you keep them? Let’s take a look at the Loyalty Playbook:

1. Focus on Your "One Percenters": Gaga spends most of her effort on just one percent of her audience, the highly engaged super-fans who drive word of mouth.

2. Lead with Values: Create an emotional connection with customers by showcasing what you believe in, whether it be a community event or a charity your dealership devotes its time to.

3. Build Community: Connect your most loyal customers with each other to strengthen their bond with you. Have a ladies night or a new owner welcome like this dealership.

4. Give Fans a Name: Gaga calls her fans her “Little Monsters.” A name gives customers a way to self-identify as part of the group.

5. Embrace Shared Symbols: Shared symbols help customers bond by creating a collective experience. Give them a t-shirt or cool keychain.

6. Make Them Feel Like Rock Stars: Become a fan of your fans and find ways to make them feel special. Interact with your customers online, do trivia and giveaways!

7. Generate Something to Talk About: Make your business “word-of-mouth-worthy” by continually giving your fans reasons to talk about you.

Musicians and artists know the value of connecting with fans. Hopefully you do too. Use social media and blog to keep your fans aware of your dealership and what your brand stands for.

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What do you think of this loyalty playbook? Would you use this playbook for your dealership?

As always follow @activengage for dealership tips and live chat updates! 

You probably have noticed J.C. Penney's heartfelt apology taking over the airwaves afterposting a 13 billion decline in revenue while trying to attract young customers to their stores.  In this newadvertising campaign, the company admits it made mistakes and alienated many of its longtime customers. The voice-over in its most recent ad, "It's No Secret" states: “Some changes you liked, and some you didn't. But what matters with mistakes is what we learn. We learned a very simple thing, to listen to you."

What if YOU make a mistake?

Admit it--  Managers often look to protect themselves instead of helping the dealership move forward. None of these actions will win back your customers; the only way to get past a mistake is to apologize sincerely and swiftly.

Be empathetic--While there are many things outside your control, you can train your staff to practice empathy when the customer is disappointed with an outcome.

Open your ears-- When a customer actually takes the time to tell you what’s wrong instead of hiding away and complaining online, is a great opportunity to learn something.Give the customer different options for communicating, including social media, email, phone, text, and regular mail. Make sure there are processes in place to  respond to these the same day.

Changes to be made--Tell your customer specific changes that will be made in order to correct a mistake. If you cannot come up with an action plan immediately, get back to the customer in a specific period of time to make sure this is done.

Do better--Customers get frustrated if they get repeat apologies for the same mistakes and nothing ever changes.

So how does J.C. Penney commercial end?

"Come back to J.C. Penney. We heard you; now we'd love to see you," the voice-over states.

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What do you think of J.C Penney’s campaign? Would you ever issue a heartfelt apology like this over the airwaves? Comment below! 

ActivEngage, the most trusted brand in automotive live chat brings the top ten blogs and news stories right to you! We monitor industry trends, current events, and the auto dealer community every week to bring you the top ten blogs and stories from around the globe. In this weekly edition-- DD14, self driving cars, and playful whales.

10. Going to DD14?

Don’t forget to register for the Blue Martini After Party.

9. Cars.com Responds to Dealer Community

Linda Barman, Cars.com CMO, responded to the dealer community with an open and direct account of what has transpired over the past month with regards to the test email campaign.

8.  Facebook Graph Search...What’s Next?

Even though Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has emphasized that Graph Search is “not Web search,” many would agree that this is Facebook’s attempt to compete with Google. Unlike Google’s current search algorithm, Graph Search relies on social interactions to build its search database.

7. Facebook Ad Boss: Clicks and Engagement Are Not Important As Exposure

Facebook's Rajaram suggests that companies should focus less on engagement and clicks, and more on how people are being exposed to ads because "there's really no correlation between clicks and whether people actually convert."

6.  Chinese Girls Poisoned Over School Rivalry

The head of a rival kindergarten is reported to have confessed to lacing the yogurt with rat poison because the two schools were both trying to attract children

5. Bangladesh Building Collapse Death Toll Tops 500

Finance Minister Abul Maal Abdul Muhith spoke as the government cracked down on those it blamed for the disaster in the Dhaka suburb of Savar

4.YouTube Case Study - BMW

See how BMW turned to digital media – notably Google and YouTube – to deliver engagement and promote their 1series launch in Germany.

3. In the Future, Dogs Will Work Car Deals

Within your dog’s nose…Imagine a maze the size of (if you will) the Universe. Within your dog’s nose, all things are possible. Everything that can happen will, and everything that has happened did. In a space so large, ALL things are possible!

2. This is What Google’s Self Driving Car Sees

Google's self-driving car soaks in a staggering amount of information about its environment as it drives, gathering 750MB of data every second, claims Idealab founder and CEO Bill Gross.

1. Watch These Whales Chase a Boat

This is TOO awesome! Happy Friday!

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Did we miss anything important? Like our top ten blogs this week? Leave us a comment below! Or if you really can’t wait for your automotive fix, follow @activengage on Twitter for daily updates on auto industry news!

Did you know that personal stories and gossip make up 65% of our conversations? Linguists and anthropologists generally agree that storytelling has been the most effective way to penetrate mental defenses and have a message stick in the human mind. Something in our hardwiring actually hypnotizes us when we hear the words: "Let me tell you a story…."

Our unconscious can't resist letting stories in, and their stamp on human nature is everywhere. We're all born to be instant, natural storytellers whenever we have a greatproduct to recommend, we are excited about an idea, a sales pitch, or when parents have to tell their kids where babies come from.

Stories serve the biological function of encouraging pro-social behavior. The theory is that this urge to tell and listen to moralistic stories is hardwired into us, and this helps bind society together. You could say that stories are as important as genes.

A story, if broken down into the simplest form, is a connection of cause and effect.

Since there is such a strong connection between the human brain and stories ask yourself, how am I using storytelling to my advantage? Whether you’re blogging or talking to a prospect about a vehicle use these tips:

1. Avoid complex language

2. Stop using cliches! Certain words and phrases have lost ALL storytelling power

3. Tell a story to plant an idea

4. Testimonials add credibility

5. Avoid complicated nouns and overuse of adjectives

6. Quote experts in their fields

Need an example?

When it comes to presenting, our very own Todd Smith is a great storyteller. Just watch this speaking segment and take notes. I use storytelling in my blog posts, like this one or thispopular Gen Y blog.

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How do you use storytelling in your marketing, sales presentations, or blogging? Share your thoughts in the comment section below!

Headquarter Toyota Closes 12% of Chat Sales Leads

Cindy Rosado, Internet Director for Headquarter Toyota has been in the industry for 18 years. To keep up with the demand of today’s online shoppers as well as the ability to communicate with the mix of nationalities in Miami, Rosado knew she needed to start looking for a chat solution. What drew Rosado to ActivEngage is their ability to chat in 16 different languages along with the fact that 34% of the ActivEngage VSA staff is bilingual, “We have a lot of Spanish speaking customers so having bilingual chatters is very important to us.”

Implementing Chat

When the idea of chat came up four years ago, Rosado didn’t think it would be a good idea stating, “We kind of shied away from chat in the beginning because of the habit of the sales people. They would walk away from the desk, couldn’t keep up with the typing speed of the customer, and misspelled words a lot. But its 2013 now and our shoppers are looking online to communicate with us so we must fulfill that need.”

Rosado did her research, narrowed down her options and after a sales demo of ActivEngage’s managed chat service Rosado was sold, “It’s incredible that ActivEngage effectively manages our chat and any lead information captured by their team is served into our CRM in real-time.”

First-Class Service

Naturally, when electing to outsource your chat you will read a couple of the chat transcripts from time to time. Rosado reads most transcripts from the ActivEngage staff and is blown away with the first-class service ActivEngage gives Headquarter Toyota’s online shoppers. “All the chat transcripts are very professional. Actually, during the first month of having chat, we ended up with a 12% closing ratio for vehicle sales. I’m sure with parts and service we did very well too. ActivEngage’s managed chat has been a great investment,” Rosado stated.

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If you are a client of ActivEngage and wish to participate in a My Chat Story, please comment below!

Earlier this year I wrote a blog on how to make your dealership’s website mobile friendly, however a recent survey (based on an analysis of 1 million websites worldwide last year) found that 93.3% of websites are not mobile-compatible andwill not render successfully on mobiledevices, including smartphones. As Internet-content consumption is quicklymoving away from desktops to portable devices, ensuring your website is optimized for the smaller screens of tablets and smartphones is critically important. Commercial emails opened on mobile devices are on pace to surpass PC opens by the end of 2013, according to recent research from digital messaging solutions provider Knotice.

I cannot stress how important it is that your dealership’s website needs to be mobile friendly. If you don’t have a mobile friendly website - immediately get with your WSP to start working on one! Below are some tips to follow when you are creating your dealership’s mobile site:

• Make text larger for readability. Bonus tip: Consider offering a text resizing control.

• Increase padding and line-height of densely packed links to increase touch accuracy. This applies especially to form elements and calendar dropdowns.

• Remove mouse hover interactions wherever possible. If you want to keep them, extend them to support tap-and-hold interactions as well as mouse hover.

• Consider making your design resize-friendly to cover the full range of tablet screen sizes — from 600px to 1000px wide — instead of fixing page widths in stone.

• Beware of the Flash. With iPads such a big portion of the tablet market, Flash elements need to be removed.

• Remove elements using the declaration (real or simulated) "position: fixed" because they slow down page scrolling on tablets to a much greater extent than on desktop.

• Consider cutting some HTTP requests, as you would on mobile. While tablets have screen area close to that of laptops, their processing power is closer to that of phones. Additional on-page elements like Facebook Connect and Google +1 might fit into a tablet-sized wireframe but real-world performance and user experience can quickly suffer.

If you want more help on making your website tablet friendly, this eBook is a great resource.There are best practices, layouts, and case studies on effective mobile designs. If you have any additional tips, feel free to comment below!

The subject line is the most important text you can write for your emails. This line of textdetermines whether or not your customer will even open your email. Many people don’t realize how creative they can get with the subject line and today I’ll discuss unicode symbols and how they can increase engagement for your emails.

What is Unicode?

Unicode is an international encoding standard for use with different languages and scripts, by which each letter, digit, or symbol is assigned a unique number. Here are some examples:

So how can you create them?

Well it’s easy, you can either copy and paste from this source or simply turn Numlock ON and type them yourself holding down the Alt key.

Alt+9731 = ☃

Alt+9827 = ♣

To get a complete list go here.

Here’s a breakdown of a how some customers react to the Miscellaneous Symbols:

When they don’t work they will appear as empty spaces, blocks ☐ , question marks, or even weird lettering.

Testing, Testing, 1, 2, 3.

Now of course you must test to see if using unicodes in your emails will increase engagement. There has been successful open rates using these symbols, some as high as 17%. However, other companies that have tested their emails with these symbols saw a drop in engagement.

Start by sending to a small test segment of your list. Half of that test segment should receive the subject line with the symbol and the other 50% should receive the same subject line without the symbol, allow that test to run, and then compare open/read/click rates. You will then be able to see if including a symbol in the subject line works for your dealership and subscribers.  The winning subject line, with or without the symbol, should then be sent to the remainder of your list.

Final Thoughts

Ultimately, consumers will decide whether or not these unicode symbols will work, Tom Sather, Return Path Sr. Director of Email Research says it best:

“Consumers will ultimately decide whether symbols in subject lines help them understand and prioritize messages. But, if they're voting with their feet by engaging with those messages, it's probably an indication that they'll continue to, at least as long as the symbols add to their experience,” going on to say, “as with most trends though, if overused, it will lose its effectiveness.”