CRM success in your dealership depends on having the right people and processes.

Having the right people can sometimes be the most difficult part. CRM utilization has to come from the top down. The management team has to use the system and mandate that all the salespeople use it. If the management team doesn't use it, or have a bad attitude about it, how can you expect the salespeople to use it?

If your dealership doesn't have any processes in place, how can you expect anyone to follow them? I would define a process as a set of coordinated tasks and activities, conducted by both people and technology, that will lead to accomplishing a specific organizational goal.

Your dealership must define processes on how to handle internet leads, showroom leads, phone leads, unsold showroom visit follow up, lease renewals, appointment confirmations, and much more. Once you figure out these processes, you have to figure out how to use your CRM to accomplish your goals. Your CRM can keep track of these processes and help you monitor if they are being followed.

It boggles my mind how many dealerships don't ever call a customer back if they test drive a car and don't buy that day. Or dealers that don't follow up on internet leads past an auto responder. Even worse are the dealers who "think" their salespeople do the follow up but have no way to track it.

If you have the right people, the processes, and the right automotive CRM, your dealership can run much more efficiently and increase sales.

Matt Watson
VinSolutions
Chief Technical Officer

CRM technology isn't new. They all do the same thing, right? Manage tasks, schedule follow up calls, mail letters, and other basic things. Sure, they all do that by the year 2000 standards, but this is 2009! The CRM of 2009 can do so much more and do it much more intelligently.

CRM Technology for car dealers continues to rapidly change. The problem is, most car dealers don't even know about it. They are locked in to long term contracts. Contracts with products that in technology years would easily be considered dinosaurs.

The best way to purchase any type of software product is from a vendor that sells it as a monthly service with no contract or strings attached. You also want to ensure that the vendor is still heavily investing in the technology to continue improving it. Because the second they stop improving, is the second it becomes a dinosaur. You aren't looking for a vendor, you are looking for a partner.

I know several of the major CRM vendors who don't even have an R&D budget. They haven't improved the software recently and nor do they have any plans to. Where does that leave your dealership in terms of keeping up with the technology?

Has your out dated CRM solution got you stuck in a low gear?

OK, time for me to get back to working on the automotive CRM solution of 2010.

Matt Watson
Chief Technical Officer
VinSolutions
http://www.vinsolutions.com

"Similar vehicles" is one of the best functions of a good CRM system. Here are a couple example of how you can use this excellent functionality.

Trying to do this manually would take forever and be nearly impossible. So it takes smart software to compare the year, make, model, bodystyle, price, mileage, engine, and all sorts of other factors to evaluate which vehicles are the closest matches.

Initial auto responders. Rarely do customers buy the car the inquired upon. So why not give them some more options right up front? More options to contact you and come to do your dealership?

In this example, the first vehicle is what they inquired upon, and the next 4 are similar vehicles. This same technology can be used to supply similar vehicles to a new car lead, or similar new cars on a pre-owned lead.

Unsold follow up - Weeks later the car they were interested is now gone. Why not send them some similar vehicles that you now have available?

Matt Watson
VinSolutions
Automotive CRM Software provider

One of my favorite sayings is "Persistence Wears Down Resistance"

I feel like this saying pretty much sums up SEO. SEO takes a lot of persistence and effort to see big results over a long period of time.

7 months ago our corporate website was ranked #33 on Google for one of the most important key phrases for our company. Today, we are now #1 or #2 depending on the day you search. We are ranked above all of our competitors, and even Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle.

It just goes to show that anything is possible with a little persistence!


Matt Watson
CTO

After 2 days of release, about 2% of web traffic is via Internet Explorer 8. Compare that to the release of Firefox 3.0 and it makes you wonder if anyone even cares about IE8. After 3 days of the release of Firefox 3.0, it accounted for an amazing 19% of all web traffic.

View the stats here

So what does this mean?

Does it mean that no one is excited about IE8? (I installed it the first day, and had been testing the beta version)

Or does it mean that Firefox users are just much more progressive than the typical IE user?

I'm going to guess that Firefox users are much more sophisticated/power Internet users. IE8 is more of a defensive/catch up release by Microsoft, and not really a revolutionary step forward. IE's marketshare has fallen to about 67% and IE8 is not going to bring the other 33% back. At best Microsoft can hope it will just prevent further loss in market share.

Or... Does it really matter what browser we use anymore?

I would say no it doesn't. IE8, Firefox 3.0 and Google Chrome are all so close in functionality that it really doesn't matter. They all follow the latest web standards and provide very similar functionality.

So if you haven't downloaded IE8 yet, I would strongly recommend it. It is better in every way than its predecessor, especially from a speed and stability stand point. Visit Microsoft's website for a detailed list of new changes.

Be sure to test your website with Internet Explorer 8.0!

Your website provider may need to fix some things, and in the meantime they can add a special tag (X-UA-Compatible) to your website so it forces IE8 to load in IE7 compatibility mode until they fix the problems.

By the way... FireFox 3.5 is scheduled to come out this summer, which will raise the bar again for Internet Explorer to catch up to.

Even more importantly, Silverlight 3.0 was announced this week. This is actually big news. :-)

Matt Watson
CTO
VinSolutions

Someone recently was concerned about the CRM/ILM tool they use and about how their emails were not getting delivered. So it got me thinking about this some more and I started doing some research. I won't name names but I have looked at several common CRM/ILM tools that dealers use and found that most of them had bad reputation scores as email senders.

About 80-90% of all emails sent are SPAM. Since real emails are the exception to the norm, email providers employ a lot of measures to prevent SPAM. Nobody likes Viagra ads, scams, and porn piling up in their email.

How does the content of the email effect its SPAM ratings?
Most large ISPs don't even care about the subject or content of an email. They rely solely on the reputation of the IP address of the sender. A long time ago the content of the email was very important in SPAM calculations. Some ISPs do still look at it, most importantly Hotmail based on some information I am seeing.

So what effects the reputation of an email sender?

1. Emails sent to email addresses that don't exist. If a sender sends a lot of emails to bad email addresses then it looks like they are spamming and trying to harvest email accounts.

2. User complaints. If users are clicking the "this is junk" or "this is spam" buttons on your emails then they are complaining about the emails.

The combination of these two items in relation to the quantity of email being sent create a sort of reputation for the IP address of who is sending the email. There are also a lot of other technical things about how emails are sent that must be done correctly. I won't go in to these technical details here.

So how does this apply to CRM/ILM software?

Most vendors use one or a small number of IP addresses for all of their customers. So everyone is sharing the same IP address and the same reputation. The problem with this is one dealer can ruin it for everyone by continually spamming the world. But, it also isn't feasiable to have hundreds of IP address either if you have a lot of dealers to provide email for.

Another thing to think about is no reputation is potentially worse than a good reputation. I mention this because if you did have your own IP address you would probably not send enough email to register a good reputation. So your reputation would just forever be unknown. So there are potential benefits of having a shared IP if every does a good job.

I've seen dealers send "quote of the day" emails to their entire customer database on a daily basis. You can imagine how many SPAM complaints that generates very quickly.

So how do you know if your emails are being delivered?

Only way to know is to send test emails to a yahoo, gmail, hotmail, aol and other email accounts to check. Your results could vary from day to day though. The reputation of a sender continually changes.

What can you do to ensure your email are delivered?

1. Take time to send quality and professionally written and looking emails to your customers. Don't send size 72 point font in bold red font.

2. Make sure every email has a clear way to unsubscribe so you don't send them any more emails. You are better off having them unsubscribe than flag your email as SPAM and a user complaint. That user complaint will keep you from emailing someone else who really wants to receive your emails.

3. Keep a clean email list. If you export email lists from one tool and import them in another, be sure to exclude emails of people who previously opted out or their emails were found to be invalid before.

4. Always include in the email your address and contact information. Be sure to list the name of dealership, other ways to contact you and the location of the store. The CAN-SPAM law requires you to list the location of the company sending the email. It is also much more professional looking and it builds trust with the recipient that you aren't spamming them if you are genuinely listing information on how to contact you. Do spammers usually send you their contact information and address? No. This seems like a simple thing but dealers don't do it and most vendors don't enforce this.

5. Include in the email why you are contacting the customer. Basically you want to remind them that they are receiving the email because you did business with them in the past or they just submitted a lead or etc. You want to remind them that the message isn't SPAM.

<plug>
Some of these items can be enforced by your ILM/CRM provider. However most vendors leave it up to you. However, since most likely you are sharing an email reputation with several other dealers because you are sharing IP addresses, the other dealer's may not care as much as you. So it is better if the ILM/CRM vendor forces certain standards and compliance.

VinSolutions enforces certain standards for this reason. Occasionally our customers even complain about some of the content we automatically put in the emails. But they don't understand we are trying to protect and help them....
</plug>

What if my emails are going in to the junk folder?

Unfortunately there probably isn't much you can do. But you can start by trying my tips above. You may have to switch to a different ILM vendor if your having a lot of serious problems getting your emails delivered. A CRM/ILM tool isn't worth anything if it can't delivery your email messages.

As a side note, Yahoo is by far the most difficult to send email to.

What about whitelisting?

First off, to become whitelisted you would have to have a very good reputation as a sender to qualify. You have to have very low complaint rates and conform to a lot of other requirements. However, if you have a very good reputation as a sender... you probably wouldn't need to be on a whitelist.

In all actuality, there is only one magical white list and they told me that less than 15% of companies are eligible to get on that list. One of the top requirements is the IP address of the sender can only send email for a single company. So virtually all commercial senders can't be whitelisted. They told me to follow all the best practices and have a low complaint rate and I didn't really even need to worry about being on their list.

For example, based on my research, IMakeNews (IMN Loyalty Driver) is not on the the white list I'm referring to. However, they have a very good reputation as a sender and probably don't have a lot of email delivery problems.

There are some special techniques to increase email deliverability that you can not control. They must be employed by the vendor providing your email service. Of course I'm not going to share my secrets ;-)

Hopefully this was helpful!

If anyone has any questions let me know!

Thanks,
Matt Watson
Chief Technical Officer
http://www.VinSolutions.com

My last post was about a common myth about search engines: "Search Engines Love Video"

Search engines don't love video, they love popular websites. YouTube is one of the most popular websites there is and it has a very high Google Page Rank. So any content created on the site stands a good chance to rank well in the search engines. Simply putting a video on a webpage alone doesn't make google love it.

"Video SEO" is really using video to create content on YouTube. There are two main reasons every dealership in the country should use YouTube:

1. YouTube is the 2nd most popular search engine there is. It gets more searches daily than Yahoo, MSN, Ask and all others except for Google. So there are a lot of users searching for virtually anything. You need to get your products and your dealership in front of those millions of users. Luckily YouTube will let you do it FOR FREE.

2. Posting videos on YouTube has some intrinsic indirect SEO benefits. Listing videos on YouTube is not going to create more direct traffic to your website. What it will do is give you a chance to get good penetration in the search engines for long tail key phrases and other phrases that you post videos for. Search engines will drive traffic to your videos on YouTube which will then in turn drive more traffic to your dealership.

What kind of videos should you post on YouTube?

1. Videos about your dealership. Give your current and potential customers a glimpse of your showroom, service department, parts department, and more. Highlight your history, what separates you from your competition, and anything else that would be relevant about your dealership.

2. Your TV commercials. This is probably the easiest thing to do. Get a digital copy of your commercials from your ad agency and upload them to YouTube. You never know, they could be the next viral video sensation on the Internet!

3. Videos of your inventory. As you take photos of your vehicles and prepare them to sell online, add to that process by taking a quick video of your vehicles. If this process seems technically challenging, a product like VinCamera from VinSolutions can make it simple.

4. Anything else you can dream up! Interviews of your staff, video of the hot dogs you give away on busy saturday afternoons, video of your special Mustang club that gets together every month. Anything is possible!

Now of course you should also post all these videos on your website where they appropriately fit in.

You can also include all your videos on YouTube right on your website like so:

http://johnsonautoplaza.com/youtube.aspx

http://www.roosterbush.com/youtube.aspx

http://pontiacindy.com/youtube.aspx

Posting links on your website back to your YouTube videos will help cement to the search engines that the videos are important and will improve their performance in the search engines.

You can also use all this video content as part of your internet and BDC department. You can use your ILM/CRM system to email videos to your customers. For example, send an email to your sold customers with a video about your service department and their scheduled maintenance that needs to be performed. Anything is possible!

For more information visit

http://www.vinsolutions.com/motosnap-videos.aspx

Matt Watson
CTO
VinSolutions

If you do some searching around Google for phrases like “city name year make model” you will find search engine listings of videos. I hear all the time about how search engines love video and rank pages with video higher over other content.

This is simply a myth and not true.

Web pages don't rank higher because they contain video. They rank higher because of other SEO reasons.

Google spiders web pages and ranks them on primarily 4 factors in no particular order:

1. Page titles
2. Page content
3. Back links (how many people link to your page?)
4. Google Page Rank

So why do web pages on YouTube.com rank so highly in search rankings?

Two simple reasons:
1.YouTube.com has a Google Page Rank of 9
2.YouTube.com has millions of back links to it

YouTube videos ranks well because of these SEO factors of course, not because the pages have video on them. Videos are embedded on websites using OBJECT tags. Tags that I highly doubt the search engines even pay attention to, yet alone figure out they are streaming videos and what they are streaming videos of.

So what is “Video SEO” then?

Video SEO is really being able to leverage video to create content on a website that has one of the highest Google Page Ranks there is. Regardless of how good or bad the video is, it enables you to create content on a website that has millions of visitors and a great Google page rank. This is the secret to the success.

More info about Google Page Rank:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

For comparison sakes here is how some popular sites compare when it comes to Google Page Rank:

YouTube.com: 9
autos.aol.com: 8
Cars.com: 8
autos.yahoo.com: 8
Edmunds.com: 7
eBay Motors: 7
AutoTrader.com: 6
CarsDirect.com: 6
Average dealer website: 3-5

So based on this you can see how probable it is for your video on YouTube to rank well on long tail searches, if listed on YouTube optimally.

Listing on YouTube is free and fairly easy to do, but has to be done the right way to maximize the SEO benefits.

Matt Watson
Chief Technical Officer
http://www.VinSolutions.com

http://www.vinsolutions.com/motosnap-videos.aspx

If your dealership is buying leads from your OEM or 3rd party vendor, then one of the best ways to save money is through what I would call “Bad Lead Reporting & Rejection”. This functionality is available as part of some ILM/CRM solutions. If you purchase a lot of leads, it can potentially save you enough money to purchase your ILM/CRM solution.

OK, so what is Bad Lead Reporting & Rejection?

Bad lead rejection can save you money on duplicate leads, leads with no or bad contact information, under age leads, bogus leads, etc, etc. If you are buying leads at $15-$30 a shot, the savings adds up very quickly.

Lead aggregators try to weed out duplicate leads, but aren't aware of what other lead providers are sending you. They don't try to send you duplicate leads, but they also want to sell you as many leads as they can. So it puts the responsibility on you to report duplicate leads and ask for refunds when appropriate.

Most lead suppliers will gladly refund your money if you tell them quickly and can prove why it was a bad or duplicate lead. The problem is it can be very tedious to manually figure out and report which leads were duplicate or bad when you are managing hundreds of leads a month. This is where an intelligent ILM/CRM can save you a lot of time and money.

I did a query across all of our VinSolutions ILM/CRM customers for the last 500,000 leads received. I found that about 20% of all leads received in our system were caught by the system as a duplicate or marked bad by a salesperson.

Wow. 20% of leads are bad? Sounds like there is a lot of money to be saved.

For example, if you purchase 200 leads a month at $20 each, that is $4,000 a month. You should be able to save about $800 a month at 20%. That is enough to pay for your ILM or part of your CRM every month.

As a suggestion, don't purchase a stand alone product that only does duplicate lead reporting. Those programs only catch duplicate leads and can't track leads that the salepeople evaluated as bad. With your CRM you could also potentially catch showroom ups that later submit Internet leads. You could argue against paying for those as well!

Matt Watson
VinSolutions CTO