Who Does Craigslist at your Dealership? Do you pay for someone to do it? Or do you not use it at all

[yagoparamo]

We're trying to make the best of it--we load up all 12 photos (going forward anyway; the rest will be updated on a price change), fill in all of their metadata blanks, put the phone number in bold, open up the email relay, and take what we can get. The phones definitely haven't picked up at the rate the clicks fell off according to our call tracking, but we saw enough traffic over the years to know folks are absolutely looking at these listings even if they aren't necessarily taking action directly from them. If our competitors don't want to settle for that, that's fine*--more for us!

*Obviously, there is a point where the lack of cars would harm Craigslist...y'all know what I mean here.

I agree with you on the positives and the negatives.

It is becoming so absurdly hard and CL is so negative towards dealers that many will pull out. As they do, better for the rest... or not. Lack of selection means customers will go somewhere else.

 

[flosho]

open up the email relay, and take what we can get.

Wondering how this will work for you. You should test some adds.. Send an email from a separate computer using different emails (gmail/yahoo/etc) and make sure the email forwarding works..

For quite a while we were missing emails because they weren't making it through. Out of maybe 10 posts, 3 of the emails I sent, testing through the CL anonymous reply did not make it through. We don't use anything fancy for emails on CL either.. Just yahoo or gmail emails that are then forwarded (and a copy kept in the original inbox) to our sales email. We don't use any spam filters on the CL email because we are a smaller company the sales people can distinguish what is fake/spam. The emails would just get lost somewhere between the CL email reply and our inbox.. a bunch of them do go through fine, and someone of them still go to the junk box... This was tested in several cities, several times...

I think having the CL email would entice more people to respond but if half the customers don't get a reply(because we never receive the email) that isn't good either.