Draw Customers to Your Dealership This Labor Day

Labor Day is here again! For many Americans, this day celebrating the workforce and all we accomplish means having the day off. For your dealership, though, it means it’s time to move out last year’s models with big sales.

This is the last big chance to bring in droves of customers before the holiday season. So you've got your red ticket prices ready, fired up your grill and sales team and propped up your big event tent.

But are you doing everything you can to bring in customers during this big shopping holiday? Follow these tips to make sure you don’t forget anything.

Make Calls

One of the most direct ways of reaching out to a lead is by calling them. You’ve got to get the word out about your great deals and your special event, but you don’t have the time to sit and call every customer on file. Even if you did, you would probably just end up leaving a lot of voicemails.

Instead of wasting all that time, be smart about making calls with broadcast message management. Using this tool, you can broadcast an automatic campaign message to hundreds of your customers within minutes. You can even customize the message with each customer’s name. The system knows when it's reached a voicemail and will adjust its message accordingly for each call. How cool is that?

Have a Contest

We’ve talked about how to execute dealership contests before, but now is the time to make a distinctive, Labor Day themed contest. Celebrate the workforce by having a raffle in which customers enter by putting their business cards in a fish bowl. Or you could remind customers of the work your team does by featuring employee profiles on your advertising campaign.

No matter what you do, you want to distinguish your dealership from others. Customers don’t have work today and know today’s the day to get a car. Make sure your dealership is their first (and last) stop.

Get Social

Some of the best leads you’ll get this Labor Day will come from social media. In fact, conversion rates on leads from social media are 13% higher than those from regular leads. Make sure you take advantage of these high quality prospects.

Post on Facebook about your event in the days leading up to this three-day weekend. When the big day comes around, tweet pictures of happy customers with their new cars and complimentary popsicles (because if popsicles are an option, the answer is always yes). Don’t forget to create an event hashtag and use it. Oh, and #popsicles.

After all of this work to bring customers into your dealership, make sure you’re ready to satisfy them by knowing how they complete the car buying process.

How Phone Calls Are the Lifeline for Your Appointments

From the initial phone call to the final sale, you need to keep the lines of communication open with the prospects at your dealership. Since phone calls are an important part of getting leads in the door, here are some things you can do to increase your appointment sets.

Call Prospective Leads

This may seem like a no-brainer, but when online visitors fill out an inquiry form, you need to act quickly. The odds of contacting (and securing) leads decreases by more than 10 times after the first hour, so the sooner you can call back your prospects, the better.

Sales reps often waste valuable time sorting through their email to find leads who have inquired about their services. An easier (and faster) solution that will help you increase lead conversions is to immediately be connected with leads the moment they submit a form. There's a call tracking provider out there who can help you set this service up at your dealership. (Spoiler alert: It's us.)

Remind Customers of Appointments

Once you've contacted your lead and scheduled an appointment with them, you may think your work is complete. However, according to HookLogic, only 50 percent of customers show up for appointments. What gives? Is it something you said? In all honesty, it's probably not personal. Prospects contact at least 3.7 dealerships during their shopping process, so mixing up (or just plain forgetting) an appointment is quite common.

The good news is a follow-up call can help remind your customers of their appointments.

During the follow-up call, it's important to accommodate any scheduling changes that need to be made. This will prevent a no-show from your customer and demonstrate your dealership's exceptional customer service. If you can't find time in your busy day to contact each customer by phone, try sending prerecorded custom messages as friendly appointment reminders.

Manage Your Meetings

Now that you've successfully reined in all of these leads, you might have a full day of appointments ahead of you. But if you've overbooked your schedule, you might be in trouble.

To make sure you have enough time to thoroughly meet your prospects' needs, look over your CRM notes. (Some leads may require more time than others.) This will allow you to better prepare for each appointment, build rapport with the customer and give leads an overall better car buying experience.

Increasing appointment sets is vital to your dealership's success, and it all starts with active communication. To create that "WOW" factor for customers during appointments, check out these customer service tips.

The Mystery of the Missing Leads

Do you have a lead management mystery that needs to be solved?

If you've tried every lead generation strategy you can think of but still can’t seem to retain high-quality leads, you’ve sought out the right detectives. After looking over your case, we've found some clues that will help you get to the bottom of this quandary.

Clue #1: Lost Email 

Are your leads getting lost in your inbox? Once a prospect fills out an online inquiry form on your site and an auto-generated email notification arrives in your inbox, the clock starts ticking. Keeping track of those leads can be difficult, but it’s important, because the longer a prospect waits to hear back from a sales rep (if they ever do), the more likely they are to take their business elsewhere.

Clue #2: Lack of Lead Delegation

It's possible that if your leads are not getting hung up in your inbox, they're getting overlooked by your sales team. Many times there is miscommunication as to whose responsibility it is to call leads, resulting in nobody taking action. In fact, a study conducted by InsideSales.com showed that 40 percent of companies never respond to their web leads. (What a waste!)

Clue #3: Slow Response Time

One of the most important factors in capturing leads is how long it takes you to contact them. In fact, if you reach out to leads within five minutes versus 30 minutes of them filling out an online form, you're 21 times more likely to capture their business!

Don't make the mistake of wasting valuable time reading and filtering through email notifications while your prospects are passing the time by filling out inquiry forms on your competitors' sites. If the competition calls them first, that lead will slip through the cracks.

The Solution

We've cracked your case!

Now that we've put all the clues together, it's our professional opinion that a lead management software such as Lead Chaser would help you retain your leads.

Here’s how it works: The moment an online prospect submits a form on your website, Lead Chaser calls your predefined number. If we can’t get a hold of someone the first time, our round-robin routing capability allows us to route the call to the next agent on your specified rotation until an available agent is reached. When the system reaches a live agent, Lead Chaser uses text-to-speech technology to convert the contents of the form to a recording. Your agent then has the option to immediately call the prospect without even checking their email first!

Want more details? We've laid out our case findings in our SlideShare. Check it out to learn more about how to upgrade your lead management strategy.

What Your Call Greeting Says About Your Company

You may not think much about what happens when a customer first calls in. You’re sure they’ll eventually end up talking to the right department, so why does it matter what they first hear?

Well, 59 percent of consumers make brand loyalty decisions on first impressions. So it matters a lot what they hear first.

Believe it or not, your call greeting says a lot about you and your company. But just what does it say?

Read below for a highly scientific* breakdown of the psychological meaning behind your call greeting.

*This post isn’t actually based on science.

Your greeting: Wazzzzup?

What it says about you: You’re super casual and chill. While these traits might be great for a beach party, this isn’t ideal for a business greeting unless you’re a surf shop (and even then we’d still say it’s questionable).

Your greeting: Hello?

What it says about you: Absolutely nothing. If your customer calls in and hears this, they know nothing about your company and may even begin to question if they called the right number.

Your greeting: Dunder-Mifflin, this is Pam.

What it says about you: You like to cover the basics: Have a secretary identify the company and herself. You figure if you keep it simple you won’t overwhelm people. But if your secretary calls in sick one day, who answers the phone? This might not be the most reliable system.

Your greeting: Thank you for calling Callbright. For sales, please press one. For billing, press two…

What it says about you: You’re organized, professional and don’t like to leave things to chance. By using a welcome message like this, your callers can select the proper department to reach. This greeting saves time for both you and your customers, while providing an efficient solution for directing calls.

To learn how you can make a good first impression with your call greeting, click here.

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