I compete with DAS, Cobalt and Naked Lime( and many others) in the Reputation Management Arena with Dominion's Prime Response Reputation and Social services. We have actually been doing this type of transactional social engagement a lot longer than any of them and I can tell you why these programs are failing. The strategy they are using is called "smart redirect" (we named it 3 yrs ago and stopped using 2.9 yrs ago)...it involves putting a consumer through a small survey prior to offering them a 3rd party review site. The survey is used to take the temp of the customer before redirecting them to a review site and it is pretty much useless in helping with real reputation mgmt. It is unfortunate that this category has been labeled with the name "reputation mgmt", because what we really should be focused on is social engagement and getting an offline customer to engage online, while also helping to smoke out customer issues and develop processes to resolve them. Review sites when left alone are inherently unfair because only unhappy customers are typically motivated enough to participate. So if you are going to develop a rep mgmt strategy, it has to be centered around getting all of your customers involved and the key is conversion.
The GM program is flawed because it is not built around this core goal. It is inefficient.
One big problem is that it gives the customer choices...and most will choose to close the window. You are getting a 50:1 conversion rate (or worse, if you look at it from email to 3rd party review) because the consumer feels that they have already completed the engagement after they fill out the survey.
Here is what it looks like:
View attachment 1642
To be successful, you have to strategize like you are trying to generate a lead...The more steps, the worse the conversion.
The GM program involves the customer making a choice of review site, this makes sense to give customer choices..but it adds a costly step. We find it is best to predict the customer's best choice. As an example, if the customer is reading the email on a mobile device and they have yelp installed...open the yelp app on click and go to the dealer's page. If the customer has a gmail address, send them to the google+ page. We call this redirecting. So, what if the signals are not available to help point a customer? Our approach is to send the customer to the best site for the dealership. This is not always google or Yelp!
How do we choose a review site to send traffic? It is not really hard, go look at your web analytics and find your top 5 keywords that bring you traffic from google( this will represent about 90% of your traffic ). Go to the SERP (search engine results page) and see which review sites are dominating the results (this is where ZMOT happens . The easy choice is to redirect to these locations... but if you are more crafty, may I suggest that you decide which ones stay and which ones go. You can choke out the sites that you don't want to rank by denying them your customer traffic and promote the ones you like by redirecting more.
We have developed software that does all of this called prime response.We average 20:1 emails sent to reviews created across all of our stores. We do better if you add in our own survey system. The ultimate secret is looking at your reputation mgmt program as a loyalty and social engagement program and not an SEO strategy. If you want to kick ass, evaluate the program from all aspects: 1.monitor email collection 2.Get the entire dealership involved with asking for reviews 3. Optimize the email like it is a lead generation program 3. Choose your partners (cars, dealerrater, yelp, insiderpages, etc 4. Track the reviews and alert the right personell to solve problems (match your reviews with your crm and dms data. Ask your repmgmt company if they do this) 5. Respond to reviews 6. highlight your best testimonials on your website and social pages. hyperLink them. 7. start all over again and optimize it some more.
What I have just described is not tech wizardry beyond the capability of any dealership, you don't have to hire me (or anyone) to do this...but, If you would like help go check us out at
Automotive Marketing, CRM & Inventory Solutions - Dominion Dealer or
Online Reputation Management Tools & Services - PrimeResponse®
We currently help more than 1000 local businesses with reputation management and power Mercedes-Benz's reputation portal as well. So if you have are Mercedes dealer you probably have been using our part of toolset and don' t even know it.
Good Luck! sorry for long response, I am geeking out.
BTW, if you are attending the Automotive Bootcamp in Philly, come see me speak tomorrow at 9:30 am in ballroom independence A (no heckling to till the 2nd half of the presentation)
-Michael Sos
Product Mgr
Dominion Dealer Solutions
