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Apr 28, 2009
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First Name
Jerry
What if all these years we've been trying to engage customers the wrong way? I am talking about getting customers to share their contact information with you from website visits. Currently most of you give the customer no reason to want to fill out a form on your website. You provide all the information right there on your VDP.

I know from being a phone trainer that if you want to get a customer to give you their name and number when handling a phone shopper, you need to give them a reason such as; "So I don't waste your time, I am going to go check on that vehicle and make sure it's still available and it should only take me ten minutes. Are you calling from home or work, and that number is? How do I spell your last name correctly?" I gave the customer a valid reason to provide me with their info. I can tell you that works 95% of the time.

With the above paragraph in mind, how can we get a customer to give us their name and cell number when on our website? Let's think about what is important to them when shopping on your website.

1. Is it the vehicle that meets my needs?
2. How much is it going to cost me?
3. Is it a good/nice vehicle?

Knowing those three things allows us place a call to action (CTA) on our Vehicle Description Pages (VDP). If you dangle the "Unlock Your Low Price" or the "Vehicle History Report" on your VDP's, you're giving the customer a reason to give you their information. Especially if the customer is made aware that you will immediately text them the information upon hitting the "Submit" button. You now have a lead with a cell number. Your salesperson can be notified at that moment and engage the customer while they are still on your website by calling or texting the customer.

F&%# email! You all are pissing people off with the countless email auto campaigns you have designed that eventually get you black-listed. The amount of junk mail taking place today is off the charts and it's like a mosquito buzzing me every time I get one. Email is an evil we all hate, but we love our cell phones!

I can tell you that we've been testing this with a dealer and the results have been outstanding. More form fills, higher contact rates and more appointments. But I have identified a new problem with our test dealer, the BDC staff at this dealership is not great at asking for the appointment, so training is required. If you're going to generate leads, make sure your staff is properly trained to handle those leads.

Would you like to see the process I just explained in action? Open this link, click on both CTA's, Fill out the forms and see what happens: http://www.talkoptions.com/widget/inventoryUPSample.cfm
 
I know this is an old thread, but I love the concept! We spend all this time trying to follow up via phone, and email and it obviously isn't most people's preferred method of communication, at least not with someone trying to sell them something.

If they spent 10 mins on our site, our phone number was probably in the top corner the entire time. Safe to assume, if they wanted to talk to us on the phone they would have just called.

Email seems less and less effective because of spam filters, the volume of emails most people receive, etc.

I have started doing my sold follow up through text and my response rate has probably increased 400%-500%. So if our existing customers prefer to text, you can bet the new customers likely do too.

Not only is this approach a good way to get customers opting into text "organically", I think a lot of people see texting as more of a "real-time" communication as opposed to email correspondence which typically moves at a slower pace.

It's almost been six months since this post, how has it been working?

The Carfax via text is interesting, how are you accomplishing that when most Carfax's are multiple pages? Are you simply sending a link?
 
It's almost been six months since this post, how has it been working?

The Carfax via text is interesting, how are you accomplishing that when most Carfax's are multiple pages? Are you simply sending a link?

It's been working well, more leads. The problem is the sales people need to be quick and well versed on what to say. The link is sent in the text message.
 
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It's been working well, more leads. The problem is the sales people need to be quick and well versed on what to say. The link is sent in the text message.

Thank you for the quick reply! I assumed you were sending a link, but if you had found a way to text the actual Carfax I was really interested to hear how.

As far as "well versed on what to say", this to me seems like a mix of phone training and email training, are there specific practices with texting that you are using?
 
Trent,

Yes, you can send a snapshot of the Carfax with a link for all the details. We do this for inventory now and I believe it makes a difference sending a VDP with the main photo in the text versus some long URL string that links back to the dealerships webpage. People don't like clicking weird links. I am more than happy to dive into the technical implementation of doing this but it might be too much in the weeds.