How To Increase Business At Your Dealership... Fast

Most Dealership owners and GMs I speak with on a  regular bases are most interested in advice to spark up sales, and all of these same people see the “solution” to that question as *new customers*.  They all want to know how to acquire more new customers.

Acquiring new customers is very expense and requires large investment and risk of ROI.  After all, traditional advertising is pricy and always contains a risk.

Dealerships could instead, easily increased their monthly sales without adding a single new customer.  The increases are readily available within their own customer data base.

The smart and savvy Dealership, who will survive whatever impact the current recessions has on his business, places great importance on “the customer” and seeks out to maximize their “Total Customer Value”.

3 Basic Categories of Customer Standards

1)     Minimum Customer Standards:  This Dealership will do just enough to comply with any laws, staying out of trouble, and deter lawsuits or returns for any vehicle return.

2)     Average Customer Standards:  This Dealership will give the customer “fair exchange” – reasonable value for their hard-earned dollars, no less and no more.  Most Dealerships are right here, and as a result they will get average results during good times and will turn a profit and continue forward in business.

3)     Maximum Customer Standards:  This Dealership (and there are only a handful in Canada) asks the question “not how we can get more sales, but how we can give more and better service”.  This is the right question to ask.  The Dealership owner who is constantly striving to better reward his customer for their patronage is taking the maximum customer value and will be rewarded.

Take Home Information

1)     You and your staff need to get together and compile the longest most detailed list on how you would like to be treated if you were the customer.  Think how you would be most appreciate being treated and continue to add to this list.

2)     Any bad relationships between your Dealership leaders and your sales team / finance or service staff will find its way to your customer. 

Make no mistake about this information.

To learn more about selling more vehicles and increasing profits each month; simply contact us at: sales@automarketingprofits.com for a full Free Consultation.

Car Dealer Marketing - Birthday Marketing At Your Dealership

Using your customers’ birthdays is an excellent way to boost sales and service at your local Dealership.

Here are some ideas to make your customers’ birthdays a branding, loyalty and revenue-generating event.

What’s in a Birthday?
Quick answer: a lot. Knowing a customer’s birthday is especially important if can created gift material. Many companies go all out when marketing for gift-giving holidays. A birthday is a personal gift-giving, gift-receiving holiday, and e-mail is the perfect channel for targeted messages to take advantage of the opportunity.

Don’t Have it? Ask.
Make providing a birth date voluntary. Tell customers what is in it for them (such as a free oil change or a tire rotation / check when they come to your Dealership during their birth month). Your best customers should have no problem giving you that information.

Before the Big Day
Send the e-mail a few weeks before the customer’s birthday. Remind them to view your gift idea and forward gift ideas to people who are shopping for them. Think about it: If you get 100 customers to view birthday gift and they send gift ideas to ten of their friends, you will receive exposure to 1,000 new potential customers. Now that’s powerful.

Happy Birthday to You
This is part two of your one-two birthday punch. On or around the big day, send a second e-mail acknowledging the occasion.

 E-mail messages that perform the obligatory, “Happy Birthday from everyone here at ABC Dealership" are nice sentiments, but you can go beyond them to address your bottom-line goals. Offer gift-appropriate items (an oil change / tire rotation) or other. You will generate customer loyalty and appreciation. Additionally, many people may bring someone in with them to receive this gift.

Don’t Skimp on Copy or Design
Use a professional e-mail marketing tool, and do not send from your personal e-mail account. Your e-mails need not be elaborate, but they do need to be engaging, like any other marketing message.

Birthdays can easily leverage the power of marketing and increase your return on investment from one of your most valuable assets—your existing customers. Give it a try and let me know how you do.

Is your Dealership interested in becoming King-Of-The-Hill for your area? If so, contact us now as our 6-month special is available to new clients to showcase our results.

Contact us at: 866-927-0947 ext. 4

Automotive Take-Away Selling Techniques - Strategy # 10

When your Dealership limits the supply of your inventory or services in some way (i.e. takeaway selling), basic economics dictates that the demand will rise.

In other words, people will generally respond better to an offer if they believe the offer is about to become unavailable or restricted in some way.

And of course, the opposite is also true. If a prospect knows your vehicles will be around whenever they need it, there’s no need for them to act now. And when your ad is put aside by the prospect, the chance of closing the sale diminishes greatly.

It’s your job, therefore, to get your prospect to buy, and buy now. Using scarcity to sell is a great way to accomplish that. 

There are basically three types of takeaways:

1)     Limiting the quantity

2)     Limiting the time

3)     Limiting the offer

In the first method, limiting the quantity, you are presenting a fixed number of widgets available for sale. After they’re gone, that’s it.

Some good ways to limit the quantity include:

• only so many vehicles available
• selling off old inventory to make room for new
• limited number of non-certified vehicles, or a fire sale
• only a limited number being sold so as not to saturate the market
• etc.

In the second method, limiting the time, a deadline is added to your offer. It should be a realistic deadline, not one that changes all the time (especially on a website, where the deadline date always seems to be that very day at midnight…when you return the next day, the deadline date has mysteriously changed again to the new day).

Deadlines that change decrease your credibility.

This approach works well when your offer or the price will change, or the vehicles or sale will become unavailable, after the deadline.

The third method, limiting the offer, is accomplished by limiting other parts of the offer, such as the guarantee, bonuses or premiums, the price, and so on.

When using takeaway selling, you must be sure to follow-through with your restrictions. If you say you only have 20 "Kia Rio's" to sell, then don’t sell 21. If you say your offer will expire at the end of the month, make sure it does. Otherwise your credibility will take a hit. Prospects will remember the next time another offer from you makes its way into their hands.

Another important thing you should do is explain the reason why the offer is being restricted. Don’t just say the price will be going up in three weeks, but decline to tell them why.

Here are some examples of good takeaway selling:

“Unfortunately, we can only handle so many clients. Once our plate is full, we will be unable to accept any new business. So if you’re serious about grabbing the deal of a life-time and building your credit faster than ever before, you should contact us ASAP.”

“Remember…you must act by [date] at 5:00pm in order to get our 2 service bonuses. These bonuses have been provided by [third-party company], and we have no control over their availability after that time.”

“We’ve obtained only 90 of these premiums from our vendor. Once they are gone, we won’t be able to get any more until next year. And even then we can’t guarantee the price will remain the same. In fact, because of the increasing demand, it’s very likely the price could double or triple by then!”

Remember when I said earlier that people buy based on emotions, then back up their decision to buy with logic? Well, by using takeaway selling, that restriction becomes part of that logic to buy and buy now.

Is your Dealership interested in becoming King-Of-The-Hill for your area?  If so, contact us now as our 6-month special is available to new clients to showcase our results.

Contact us at:  866-927-0947 ext. 4

Sales Letters For Car DealersThat Get Results - Strategy # 9

Is your Dealership looking for a solution to your sales letters?  Well look no further for there is a well-known structure in successful sales letters, described by the acronym AIDA.

AIDA stands for:

• Attention
  
  
• Interest
  
  
• Desire
  
  
• Action
  
  

First, you must Capture your prospect’s attention. This is done with your headline and lead. If your ad fails to capture your prospect’s attention, it fails completely. Your prospect doesn’t read your stellar copy, and doesn’t order your product or service.

The next step is Interest - you want to build a strong interest in your prospect. You must keep them reading, for if they read, they ight just purchase from you.

Next, you channel a Desire. Having a targeted market for this is key, because you’re not trying to create a desire where one did not already exist. You want to capitalize on an existing desire, which your prospect may or may not know they already have. And you want your prospect to experience that desire for your inventory or a financial or vehicle services you offer.

Finally, you present a Call To Action. You want them to pick up the telephone, walk into your showrrom, whatever. You need to ask for the sale (or response, if that’s the goal). You don’t want to beat around the bush at this point. If your letter and AIDA structure is sound and persuasive, here’s where you present the terms of your offer and urge the prospect to act now.

A lot has been written about the AIDA copywriting formula. for many busienss and this will work for your store.

But I would like to add one more letter to the acronym:

S for Satisfy.

In the end, after the sale is made, you want to satisfy your prospect, who is now a customer. You want to deliver exactly what you promised (or even more), by the date you promised, in the manner you promised. In short, you want to give them every reason in the world to trust you the next time they need a vehicle.

Either way, you want your customers to be satisfied. It will make your Dealership  a lot more profits in the long run.

Looking for more ideas to increase your Dealership's success?

Go to http://www.automarketingprofits.com/automotive-marketing-books.html
to see some of the books we offer or simply give us a phone call to chat as we would be happy to help you and your Dealership jump to the next level!

Car Dealer Sales Letter Design Strategies - Tip # 8

Is your Dealership looking for help to design a sales letter?

Your layout is very important in a sales letter, because you want your letter to look inviting, refreshing to the eyes. In short, you want your prospect to stop what he’s doing and read your letter.

If your prospect sees a letter with tiny margins, no indentations, no breaks in the text, no white space, and no subheads…if he sees a page of nothing but densely-packed words, do you think they'll be tempted to read it?

Not likely.

If you do have ample white space and generous margins, short sentences, short paragraphs, subheads, and an italicized or underlined word here and there for emphasis, it will certainly look more inviting to read.

When reading your letter, some prospects will start at the beginning and read word for word. Some will read the headline and maybe the lead, then read the “P.S.” at the end of the letter and see who the letter is from, then start from the beginning.

And some prospects will scan through your letter, noticing the various subheads strategically positioned by you throughout your letter, then decide if it’s worth their time to read the entire thing. Some may never read the entire letter, but order anyways.

You must write for all of them. Interesting and compelling long copy for the studious reader, and short paragraphs and sentences, white space, and subheads for the skimmer.

Subheads are the smaller headlines sprinkled throughout your copy.

Like this.

When coming up with your headline, some of the headlines that didn’t make the cut can make great subheads. A good subhead forces your prospect to keep reading, threading him along from start to finish throughout your copy, while also providing the glue necessary to keep skimmers skimming.

Looking for even more help for your Dealership?  Well take some time and browse through our previous posts or wait until your next issue!

Car Dealer Marketing Tip 7 - 7. The More You Tell, The More You Sell

Does the debate on using long copy versus short copy ever seems to end in your Car Dealership? Usually it is a newcomer to copywriting who seems to think that long copy is boring and, well…long. “I would never read that much copy,” they say.

The fact of the matter is that all things being equal, long copy will outperform short copy every time. And when I say long copy, I don’t mean long and boring, or long and untargeted.

The person who says he would never read all that copy is making a big mistaking in copywriting: he is going with his gut reaction instead of relying on test results. He is thinking that he himself is the prospect. He’s not. We’re never our own prospects.

There have been many studies and split tests conducted on the long copy versus short copy debate. And the clear winner is always long copy. But that’s targeted relevant long copy as opposed to untargeted boring long copy.

Some significant research has found that readership tends to fall off dramatically at around 300 words, but does not drop off again until around 3,000 words

If I’m selling an expensive set of golf clubs and send my long copy to a person who’s plays golf occasionally, or always wanted to try golf, I am sending my sales pitch to the wrong prospect. It is not targeted effectively. And so if a person who receives my long copy doesn’t read past the 300^th word, they weren’t qualified for my offer in the first place.

It wouldn’t have mattered whether they read up to the 100^th word or 10,000^th word. They still wouldn’t have made a purchase.

However, if I sent my long copy to an avid die-hard golfer, who just recently purchased other expensive golf products through the mail, painting an irresistible offer, telling him how my clubs will knock 10 strokes off his game, he’ll likely read every word. And if I’ve targeted my message correctly, he will buy.

Remember, if your prospect is 3000 miles away, it’s not easy for him to ask you a question. You must anticipate and answer all of his questions and overcome all objections in your copy if you are to be successful.

And make sure you don’t throw everything you can think of under the sun in there. You only need to include as much information as you need to make the sale…and not one word more.

If it takes a 10-page sales letter, so be it. If it takes a 16-page magalog, fine. But if the 10-page sales letter tests better than the 16-page magalog, then by all means go with the winner.

Does that mean every prospect must read every word of your copy before he will order your product? Of course not.

Some will read every word and then go back and reread it again. Some will read the headline and lead, then skim much of the body and land on the close. Some will scan the entire body, then go back and read it. All of those prospects may end up purchasing the offer, but they also all may have different styles of reading and skimming.

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Tip #6 - The Importance Of Car Dealers Using Headlines

If your Dealership is going to make a single change to boost the response rate of your advertising - the most important focus should on your headline (you do use one with your advertising don’t you?).

Why? Because five times as many people read your headline than your copy. Quite simply, a headline is…an ad for your ad. People won’t stop their busy lives to read your advertsement unless you give them a good reason to do so. So a good headline promises some news and a benefit.

Perhaps you’re thinking, “What’s this about news, you say?”

Think about the last time you browsed through your local newspaper. You checked out the articles, one by one, and occasionally an ad may have caught your eye. Which ads were the ones most likely to catch your eye?

The ones that looked like an article, of course.

The ones with the headline that promised news.

The ones with fonts and type that closely resembled the fonts and type used in articles.

The ones that were placed where articles were placed (as opposed to being placed on a full page of ads, for example).

And the ones with the most compelling headlines that convinced you it’s worth a few minutes to read the copy.

The headline is that powerful and that important.

I’ve seen so many Automotive ads over the years that either had a brutal headline or not even a headline. And that’s just the equivalent to flushing good advertsing money right down the toilet.

Why? Because your response can increase dramatically by not only adding a headline, but by making that headline almost impossible to resist for your target market.

And those last three words are important. Your target market.
 
For example, take a look at the following headline:

Announcing…New High-Tech Gloves Protect Wearer Against Hazardous Waste

News, and a benefit.

Will that headline appeal to everyone?

No, and you don’t care about everyone.

But for someone who handles hazardous waste, they would sure appreciate knowing about this little gem.

That’s your target market, and it’s your job to get them to read your ad. Your headline is the way you do that.

Ok, now where do you find great headlines?

You look at other successful ads (especially direct response) that have stood the test of time. You look for ads that run regularly in magazines and other publications. How do you know they’re good? Because if they didn’t do their job, the advertiser wouldn’t keep running them again and again.

You get on the mailing lists of the big direct response companies like Agora and Boardroom and save their direct mail packages.

You read the National Enquirer.

Huh? You heard that correctly.

The National Enquirer has some of the best headlines in the business.

Pick up a recent issue and you’ll see what I mean. Ok, now how could you adapt some of those headlines to your own product or service?

Your headline should create a sense of urgency. It should be as specific as possible (i.e. say $1,007,274.23 instead of “a million dollars”).
   

The headline appearance is also very important. Make sure the type used is bold and large, and different from the type used in the copy. Generally, longer headlines tend to out pull shorter ones, even when targeting more “conservative” prospects.

It should go without saying that when you use other successful headlines, you adapt them to your own vehicles and dealership. Never copy a headline (or any other written copyrighted piece of work for that matter) word for word. Copywriters and ad agencies are notoriously famous for suing for plagiarism. And rightfully so.

Interested in finding the top Headlines for your Media, Print, Radio and Flyer Advertising?For only $19.99 we are offering our clients the top Headlines and Phrases To Use For Your Markeitng and Advertising. Simply send us an email to sales@automarketingprofits.com for more information.