All Posts By

Ali Amirrezvani

Tips for Auto Dealership Email Marketing Campaigns

While some dealerships are successful with their email marketing campaigns, it is a task that can easily fall to the back burner or be neglected.  When done correctly, email marketing is an effective way to stay in touch with existing customers, and build a relationship with potential car buyers.

 

If your dealership has let your email marketing efforts go in recent years, here are some tips to refresh your campaigns and help keep them successful:

Add a Human Element: Make sure you email sounds as though an actual person wrote it.  Email users get so many automated messages as it is; put a personal touch and tone in yours to connect with your past, current, and future customers.

Send Often, but Make It Relevant: If your dealership has relevant, quality information you want to get out to your customers, send it!  Worry less about frequency, and more about quality.

Design Matters: When was the last time you took a look at the design of your outgoing email marketing?  Is it branded well?  Pleasing to look at?  Devote some resources to making sure your email template matches your other branding for a consistent message, and that it looks good.

Essentially, put some effort in, and it will show.  Make your emails worthwhile to read, sound as though they were actually written by a person, and are pleasing to the eye.   If you’re going to use email marketing, integrate it into your car dealer online marketing plan. Remember, the goal of email marketing is to establish, develop, or maintain relationships, so send emails (and give it the time and effort) that reflect that goal.

More Reasons Your Car Dealership NEEDS an Optimized Mobile Website

While at NADA, I heard quite a bit of buzz about mobile websites. Does my dealership need one?  If I already have one, do I need to actually optimize it?  Is mobile traffic really growing as rapidly as everyone says it is?  Should I be making my car dealership’s mobile website a priority to sell more cars?

The answer to all four of those questions is absolutely, unequivocally–YES.

Some stats:

  • The number of mobile searches has grown 400% in the last year
  • 1 in 3 mobile searches is related to local search
  • 79% of smartphone owners use their phones to help with shopping (compare prices, find product info, locate a retailer, etc)
  • 28% of those that see a mobile ad take action
  • 59% of users visit an online store after looking it up online

In short, mobile traffic is growing extremely quickly, and is expected to be the predominant mode of searching online for local content by 2013.  If your dealership is neglecting your mobile websites, you’ll be behind the curve as time goes on.

Your car dealership mobile website optimization efforts should focus on two things: earning top rankings in the mobile SERPs and making the site’s layout mobile friendly.

You can use this tool to test how your mobile site looks on an iPhone, or use Google’s GoMo to preview your mobile site and find resources to help if your site isn’t as quality as you’d like it to be.  Make sure you talk to your mobile website provider to ensure they are optimizing your mobile site and helping your dealership achieve your mobile optimization goals.

How Your Dealership Can Use Google+ To Increase Local SEO

A few weeks ago I wrote about how Google was going to include items from Google+ in their regular search results when users were signed in, calling it “Search Plus Your World”. Now that users have had some time to get accustomed to it, I wanted to touch on how this new way of searching could benefit your car dealership’s local search optimization efforts.

>This combination of social media and search allows your dealership to do the same–combine your social media efforts with your search engine optimization efforts on Google.  Some searches actually result in recommended “People and Pages on Google+”, and I would imagine this is only going to grow.  Imagine if someone searched for a car dealership in your area, and your dealership was recommended!

Step 1 – Create a Google+ business page if you haven’t already.  While Google is working on having the ability to create admins and having multiple emails tied to each account, this functionality doesn’t exist yet.  Make sure you use a Gmail account that multiple people can have access to, not someone’s personal email account.  The next few steps are similar to those for creating a Facebook page.

Step 2 – Choose a category, fill in your dealership name, and dealership URL.

Step 3 – Add a tagline (a short description of your dealership) and your logo.

Step 4 – Add some content.  You may want to wait to start promoting it until you have some content to share.  Update your Google+ page with relevant information, deals, and inventory.  Make sure you use keywords that people may be searching for; otherwise your Google+ page may not show up in search results.

Step 5 – Promote it!  Put it on your dealership site, blog, and in your emails.  Encourage customers to follow your Google+ account just as you would your Twitter and Facebook.

Is your car dealership using Google+?  Have you seen any results?

What Can You Do With Great Rankings, But Low Website Traffic?

Many dealerships focus their search engine optimization reporting on how well they are ranking for certain terms.  As long as they show up on Page 1 of Google’s search results, they are happy.  While search engine page ranking is an important part of every dealership’s online marketing efforts, what happens if your auto dealer website is showing up on page 1 for every keyword, but you aren’t seeing any traffic?

If you are seeing this happening at your dealership, here are some potential causes:

Optimizing for the Wrong Keywords: Your dealership can rank first for “blue widgets”, but that probably won’t help you with leads and sales for the cars on your lot.  Make sure you, your website provider, and your SEO provider are all on the same page when it comes to ranking for effective, relevant keywords.

Double Check Your SERP Listing: Your organic listing should have an informative title tag and meta-tag to help entice searchers to click onto your website.

The only way your dealership will know how much traffic, leads, and sales you are getting from your high ranking keywords is by tracking all of these metrics.  Make sure your website provider and/or SEO providers are measuring all of these stats and that you are double checking them with Google Analytics.

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