Do you buy third party leads without First/Last Names on them?

[Alex Snyder]

When you buy third party leads, will you accept them if all you get is an email address?

First Name: Not Required
Last Name: Not Required
Email Address: REQUIRED
Phone Number: Not Required

Vehicle of Interest: Not Required

 

[Eley Duke]

I voted NO Alex, yet the 3rd party leads we get through GM that we pay for only have about a 20% rate of good information. I am sure any other GM dealer reading this will have the same to add. GM and every manufacture should have a validation process somehow!

 

[Alex Snyder]

Is that a 20% rate of good information just being "80% of the leads GM sends just suck in quality" or is that "80% of the leads from GM do not have a FIRST NAME & LAST NAME to go along with the email address they send over?"

Thanks for answering the poll on the third party leads. OEM leads are definitely an issue too, but I'm more curious if people are apt to accept leads without decent contact information when they can control what they're receiving.

 

[Jeff Kershner]

I voted NO - but not sure why.

Depends on how the form was set up AND it depends on the call to action. If it was set up just as you described above, with the right call to action, then I take my vote for NO back and vote yes.

Too many times a "Required" field does noting more than capture bogus information. If someone doesn't want to provide their personal information other than their email (and chances are you're getting their "other email" anyways) then you're simply not going to get it.

Let's have a slightly different process around these leads.

I would also venture to say that if the email is the only required field and that's all you received from the customer - you've might have increased your chances of getting that "other email" address anyways.

Make sense?

 

[Alex Snyder]

I would also venture to say that if the email is the only required field and that's all you received from the customer - you've might have increased your chances of getting that "other email" address anyways.

Make sense?

In all your experience with lead scoring did you find there was a difference in the score based on people who supplied more information vs. people who only supplied an email address?

 

[Eley Duke]

Is that a 20% rate of good information just being "80% of the leads GM sends just suck in quality" or is that "80% of the leads from GM do not have a FIRST NAME & LAST NAME to go along with the email address they send over?"

Thanks for answering the poll on the third party leads. OEM leads are definitely an issue too, but I'm more curious if people are apt to accept leads without decent contact information when they can control what they're receiving.

To answer your question Alex; its about 20% of GM leads, inluding their 3rd party "paid" leads", that have good info. ALL have name, email and phone, YET, phones are 80% BS, and 50% emails bounce. Our new ISM is amazed at how much bad info the GM leads contain regarding contact info vs. his experience at at Honda store where he said the info they recieved significantly better.

Understood on what you are looking for. We could turn off the 3rd party from GM, we get about 200+ leads a month, and we pay for it. But we choose to continue because we are selling about 5 on avg a month.

 

[kcar]

Voted NO. Why would you buy e-mail leads? Someone could buy a 100K+ targeted lead list with the automotive data and vehicle info and send you them one by one. It's a good concept to make money off dealers, but I don't know why anyone would be that uneducated on the possibility of what they are really getting.

 

[john.quinn]

In all your experience with lead scoring did you find there was a difference in the score based on people who supplied more information vs. people who only supplied an email address?

I can kinda answer that... the way scoring works, for the most part, are not going to get a score without a name.

I would not pay for 3rd-party leads without good contact info, based on the premise that reasonably low-funnel "surfers" are more than willing to provide good contact info.

While it would be "nice" to take a shot at everybody with a hankerin for some new wheels, logistics come into play here. Take Omni, for instance. MB pushes these "preferred" (aka "garbage") 3rd party leads on us.

I tried to explain the aggregating system to a few people here when explaining why Omni was probably not a good investment. I told them to do a search for something stupid, like "Cheapest Mercedes in the World." Of course, in the paid section, we found and clicked a site that said "Find the Cheapest Mercedes in the World." Filled-out the form, and 2 seconds later, a Benz lead showed-up from Omni. This is the crap we pay for, and these have name and contact info. Can you imagine the crap they'd send you if even a name was not required? Ooof....

3rd-party leads, at best, need a lot of attention. Now, gathering email addresses to automatically filter into a prospecting program -- that's a different story. But probably still wouldn't pay for them.

 

[ddavis]

I have never had a good experience with third party leads. All that I have purchased, in the past, were very low percentage leads.

Eley, "We could turn off the 3rd party from GM, we get about 200+ leads a month, and we pay for it. But we choose to continue because we are selling about 5 on avg a month." With a closing percentage of 2.5%, I'm out. I have strict standards when it comes to ROI and I would chose to spend on something else.

The average Internet Manager can handle 85 leads per month and you need more than two to handle those. The Managers that get those leads see them as low percentage and give them the attention that they feel that they are due.