3rd party leads resold to OEMS for conquesting

[Brad Burlingham]

We've always known that lower level 3rd party lead companies resold their leads several times, but recently we were surprised to find these are being resold to other manufacturers.

Our VW GM submitted a lead on one of the Cars.com Plus pages. We weren't signed up for those leads and were curious where it would show up. Sure enough it came back to us as an Autobytel lead sold back to us via VW's 3rd party lead program (more on that later). Then, about 3 weeks later our GM got a conquest email from Hyundai corporate and the only way they would have had her email was via this lead. Today, she received an email from Mazda corporate.

Its no wonder consumers don't submit as many email leads these days if their emails are so easily bought and sold by 3rd party companies. Anyone else have experiences with this?

In the last couple of years, i have finally convinced my dealerships to cut back on average to poor 3rd party leads and invest it in promoting our own dealership via digital marketing or elsewhere. But now, many oems are buying those same leads and trying to sell it back to us at a cheaper rate. They claim these are deduped and filtered by lead score, but these leads tend to close at an even worse rate then when we bought them directly. are we alone here?

We are like recovering drug attics and now the oems are selling us the same bad drugs, but cheaper. And if we don't buy them, they are sent to our competitors.

Curious to hear what other people think about reselling of leads and manufacturer 3rd party lead programs.

Brad

VP of Marketing
LAcarGUY

 

[ddavis]

In the last couple of years, i have finally convinced my dealerships to cut back on average to poor 3rd party leads and invest it in promoting our own dealership via digital marketing or elsewhere.

I was going through a CRM looking at leads from a third party source. I had put several asterisks next to the last name so I could easily identify which of those leads had either no phone number or a bogus phone number (something that I still recommend). The greater majority of those leads fell into that category. I then started looking at email tracking to find that very few customers had opened any emails. In most cases these emails were not templates. How much time did it take to write those emails? Considering that most of the ISMs had written between 7 to 10 emails that were never opened. What a tremendous waste of time for talented people not to mention the frustration that this must create. At some point, these people start looking at the lead sources and understand that their efforts are not likely to benefit them.

I quit buying leads years ago.

 

[Jeff Kershner]

These are always fun. It's been happening for years! Check this out (2007) -

Hate to say, but it could have been resold by Cars.com OR AutoBytel. That's the lead business for ya.


With that being said, I do believe there is a place for 3rd party leads in many dealers marketing mix but damn this makes it hard to swallow. Another example on why I only work with one lead provider when I can but when the OEM's are in the game - not much you can do with some of the "mandated" programs that exist.

Brad - What kind of emails did she receive from Hyundai and Mazda corporate?

"They claim these are deduped and filtered by lead score" - obviously they're not being deduped. They could be getting scored BUT how tight are the parameters on the scoring?

I've been quite successful with 3rd Party leads (13-18% Closing ratio) over the last few years as I've incorporated the use of lead intelligence, GEO targeting, Dataium and changing up the process a bit.

 

[ddavis]

I've incorporated the use of lead intelligence, GEO targeting, Dataium and changing up the process a bit.

I'm looking forward to your article on this.