There is one customer who seems to have purchased from almost every dealership in the country. He is a master of disguises – sometimes he’s the nicest, little old lady and the next day he could be a first time car buyer. It is amazing how much this guy gets around but even more amazing is the ongoing damage he causes:

• Preventing your other customers from receiving your email messages because he’s convinced email providers like AOL and Hotmail that you’re not a reputable company.
  
• Over-inflating the amount of customers you have with email addresses by 10% or more.

Who is this guy and why does he have such an impact?

He has a few aliases, two popular ones are: “Does Not Have” and “Would Not Give.” You can probably look him up in your database right now by doing an email search for “DNH” or “WNG” and you’ll find tons of returns for:

• [email protected]
  
• [email protected]

But sometimes he’s a little sneakier and you’ll find him under:

• [email protected]
  
• [email protected]
  
• [email protected]

The possibilities are really endless.

What is really happening is your employee is asking a customer what their email address is and when the customer declines, your employee inputs in the bad email address to get credit for asking - not realizing that a bad email is much worse than no email.

While some 3rd party vendors sending your emails will do a data hygiene audit to remove these bad addresses, I’m guessing the email broadcasts coming from your dealership do not.

When you send a dealership email broadcast with a high bounce rate due to bad email addresses, the email providers (Yahoo, Gmail, AOL) take note of that and use it as one of their determining factors in whether your email message gets delivered to your customer’s inbox, spam folder, or blocked entirely.

Send enough dealership email broadcasts with high bounce rates and soon you’ll find yourself with a bad sender reputation and your deliverability rate to all of your customers can suffer.

Additionally, most 3rd party vendors sending email on your behalf, base some of their pricing on the number of emails in your list. If you’re paying to send to [email protected] then you’re raising your price unnecessarily.

What can you do?

1. Educate your employees on the problems with entering false email addresses. If they need to enter something to show they asked, then enter “declined” without the .com extension. By not including “.com” in the field most email programs won’t import that address so you’ll avoid the bad send. (If the email field requires a “.com” then enter nothing.)
   
2. Clean-up your database to remove bad emails. You won't have emails for your entire database so it may not be as large of a project as you think.
   
3. Develop a confirmation email process to validate new emails that are entered.
   
4. If your customers are receiving a benefit for signing up for your email notifications, email that benefit. So rather than hand them a $5 service coupon for joining your list, email them that coupon.

Online marketing options seem to change daily but basic marketing principles still hold true – collect accurate data on your customers so you can market to your base... which is almost always more profitable than the cost to find and convert a new prospect.

Has the master of disguises visited your dealership?

WALTHAM, MA – November 14, 2011 – DealerRater, the premier car dealer review web site, today announced continued expansion with the launch of a Canada-specific web site dedicated to auto consumers and car dealers throughout Canada.  The new site will serve as a central collection point for consumer reviews of Canadian car dealerships.  Using DealerRater’s new site, Canadian auto consumers will be able to search for car dealerships, read existing reviews of car dealers, or post their own descriptive review of a car dealership experience.

“Our new Canada site addresses the immediate need for auto consumers across Canada to be able to easily research and find Canadian car dealers that are committed to quality customer service,” said Chip Grueter, president of DealerRater.  “With the launch of this Canada-specific dealer review site, we are excited to expand the DealerRater community and build lasting partnerships with additional Canadian dealerships.”

DealerRater was founded in 2002 as North America’s first review web site dedicated solely to automotive dealerships.  In the last two years, the site has demonstrated record growth in the number of dealer reviews as well as web site visitors.  In addition, the volume of Canadian dealers and reviews represented in DealerRater’s database has grown at a rate of 3,711% and 1,342%, respectively, over the past year.

Dealers throughout the U.S. and Canada have embraced DealerRater as a third-party review site and trusted partner that is critical to their online reputation management efforts.  The DealerRater Certified Dealer Program, created in 2008, is a certification program and reputation management tool offered to qualified car dealers.  The program is designed to help car dealerships connect with automotive consumers at the most critical phase of the buying process, while demonstrating an utmost commitment to quality service.

“DealerRater gives a simple and effective conduit to represent the dealerships brand and experience through a rating online,” said Mitch Gallant, internet department manager of Capital Ford Lincoln, which was the first dealership in Saskatchewan to qualify for and embrace the DealerRater Certified Dealer Program.  “As a Certified Dealer, we now have a tool to focus on not only building reviews but sharing them through our website, RSS feeds and staff pages.”

DealerRater maintains more than 4,100 dealer partners through its Certification Program, and has experienced a 327% increase in Canadian dealers joining the program over the past year.  As auto consumers increase their reliance on online reviews when selecting a car dealer, building third-party reviews and defining a proven strategy to manage and leverage those reviews is becoming a critical component of a successful sales process for car dealerships.

About DealerRater
DealerRater was founded in 2002 as the first car dealer review website worldwide.  DealerRater is the world’s #1 online resource for anyone seeking third-party information on automobile dealerships.   DealerRater features more than 41,000 U.S. and Canadian car dealers, 460,000 user reviews and over 1,000,000 cars for sale.  DealerRater attracts more than 5 million consumers every year who visit the site to search for car dealerships, read current reviews, write their own descriptive reviews, and find car deals – all for free.  Car dealers are rated on the criteria of customer service, quality of work, friendliness, price and overall experience.  In addition, DealerRater offers qualified car dealers a Certified Dealer Program as a reputation management tool to help them grow their online presence and achieve higher SEO rankings across the Web.  Today, more than 4,100 dealers are members of DealerRater’s Certification Program.  For more information, visit www.DealerRater.ca or call 800-266-9455.