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Used Car Leads

Walt Kustra

Over the Curb
Aug 13, 2009
74
7
First Name
Walt
Hey All,

Any good suggestions for used car leads? Obviously cars, autotrader, etc. I just cut ties with everycarlisted and was looking for a good source to possibly replace them. Any vendors you all have been having some luck with? Thanks!
 
Depending where you are located;

Craigslist.

About 3000 cars a day going into Pittsburgh area (slow market). Cleveland is the same.

Bad news: You will not get huge results.
Good news: It will be cheap to get it done right now and you can learn your area from the beginning.

You can try setting the postings to link to a landing page instead than a VDP and have Hook-logic set up in that page so only those far away customers get the offer (so you can control and measure the amount needed to offer to get them to respond separate than regular local customers).

If Dealer.com can set up separate inventory pages to the city, then linking to the VDP is even better. This is what I mean:

Infiniti of Kirkland inventory URL's with Kirkland in the link structure: http://www.infinitiofkirkland.com/search/used-kirkland_wa/tp-cy98033

Infiniti of Kirkland inventory URL's with Everett in the link structure:
http://www.infinitiofkirkland.com/search/used-everett_wa/tp-cy98201
 
Oh boy, there's no doubt that your inbox got bombed like 3 seconds after you posted that.

Anyway are you against buying leads (I know I know ...)? If so you might want to look into carsdirect. Like Yago said, with a used car inventory of your size. You could do some serious damage on the list that craig built.

If all else fails, searching twitter for "need car", "car sucks", and "i hate my car" is always a viable option :) .. j/k ... please don't do that.
 
Same question. The majority of my sales seem to be new. Obviously everyone will tell you it's important to update your inventory with photos and descriptions. From my experience, once I do that...we get a number of phone ups and walk ins because they have all the preliminary info they need.

On the flip side, if I have a used vehicle I just took in with no information updated, I get frequent emails asking for the price, mileage, photos etc. Of course quite often these don't lead to anything either because the price or mileage didn't match up with what they were looking for.

Does anyone have any advice on giving incentive/encouraging a customer to put in a used car lead rather than phoning or just walking in?

Obviously if we sell the car, either way it's great for the dealership...just not so much for me as I'm paid based on internet leads.
 
Same question. The majority of my sales seem to be new. Obviously everyone will tell you it's important to update your inventory with photos and descriptions. From my experience, once I do that...we get a number of phone ups and walk ins because they have all the preliminary info they need.

On the flip side, if I have a used vehicle I just took in with no information updated, I get frequent emails asking for the price, mileage, photos etc. Of course quite often these don't lead to anything either because the price or mileage didn't match up with what they were looking for.

Does anyone have any advice on giving incentive/encouraging a customer to put in a used car lead rather than phoning or just walking in?

Obviously if we sell the car, either way it's great for the dealership...just not so much for me as I'm paid based on internet leads.

Last time I checked, AutoTrader, Cars.com and your website was on the internet. A phone call generated from your website or third party display advertising is an internet lead. Not only do I prefer this over an email, I encouraged it with a call to action. Unfortunately, I have run into this type of thinking before ...ignorance!
 
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I use carsforsale.com and v12 software to market our vehicles and have my cell phone and email listed as contact info. They each cost me $100 a month and get me 4-5 sales a month each. I have an inventory of around 350 cars and use v12software to upload to craigslist for me automatically. Here are my microsites for each:
Used Cars Mt. Juliet TN Used Pickup Trucks Mt. Juliet - Wholesale Inc.
Home Page | Wholesale Inc | Auto dealership in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee

I am advising them because they are effective products but if you do sign up, let them know I referred you. (I get a discount for it)
 
I use carsforsale.com and v12 software to market our vehicles and have my cell phone and email listed as contact info. They each cost me $100 a month and get me 4-5 sales a month each. I have an inventory of around 350 cars and use v12software to upload to craigslist for me automatically. Here are my microsites for each:
Used Cars Mt. Juliet TN Used Pickup Trucks Mt. Juliet - Wholesale Inc.
Home Page | Wholesale Inc | Auto dealership in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee

I am advising them because they are effective products but if you do sign up, let them know I referred you. (I get a discount for it)

Matt,

That is a great point.

For $100/month (or less!) you can have microsites that generate leads.
 
Same question. The majority of my sales seem to be new. Obviously everyone will tell you it's important to update your inventory with photos and descriptions. From my experience, once I do that...we get a number of phone ups and walk ins because they have all the preliminary info they need.

On the flip side, if I have a used vehicle I just took in with no information updated, I get frequent emails asking for the price, mileage, photos etc. Of course quite often these don't lead to anything either because the price or mileage didn't match up with what they were looking for.

Does anyone have any advice on giving incentive/encouraging a customer to put in a used car lead rather than phoning or just walking in?

Obviously if we sell the car, either way it's great for the dealership...just not so much for me as I'm paid based on internet leads.

This is an obvious example of the quality of lead generated. As I spot monitor leads this was one area of focus for me. Vehicles without pics, pricing, or lacked information often received a lower a quality of lead. Meaning once they got their information that was last contact. Sure lead volume goes up, but those leads often convert to a lower sold rate than higher quality leads.

Phone and walk-ins should also be counted towards website leads if you have a trackable phone numbers used for website only or customer mentioned finding you on your website. I've found our mobile users tend to call instead of submitting form leads. With the focus group research I've done, they felt more comfortable calling and didn't like filling out forms on phones because of time it took.

We also pay our internet managers on solds not by leads generated.
 
I use carsforsale.com and v12 software to market our vehicles and have my cell phone and email listed as contact info. They each cost me $100 a month and get me 4-5 sales a month each. I have an inventory of around 350 cars and use v12software to upload to craigslist for me automatically. Here are my microsites for each:
Used Cars Mt. Juliet TN Used Pickup Trucks Mt. Juliet - Wholesale Inc.
Home Page | Wholesale Inc | Auto dealership in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee

I am advising them because they are effective products but if you do sign up, let them know I referred you. (I get a discount for it)

Quite the opposite for us with CarsForSale.com and it must largely have to do with region or your location. Around here it's cars.com and autotrader.com for 3rd party sites.

We had on average 450 vehicles listed on carsforsale.com. I recently did a ROI for digital sources and carsforsale.com had 3rd lowest cost per lead, but highest cost per sold (1 combined for entire year for 2 dealerships in Lincoln, NE)
 
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