Text Messaging and AI = Auto Sales
We’ve all been advertising for years. You used to put an ad in the paper or the phone book and people would come to buy cars from you.
Then the internet arrived. The local paper disappeared. The phone book disappeared. We were left with Google and social media.
The amazing part of the new technologies and advertising outlets is they can pinpoint buyers with incredible accuracy.
Using the systems in Facebook, Instagram, Google, and many more, you can target exactly the right people at the right time.
Following Up on Leads
At SimpSocial, we deliver leads. Often, we deliver more leads than a sales team easily handle.
That’s where text messaging and AI come in. Using these two tools combined, we’re able to engage with your clients for months, keeping their interest without overwhelming them.
Using AI, we’re able to target your customers, answer their questions, and even walk them through inventory. What makes it most effective is that there is rarely any human interaction.
Why AI and text messaging
Writing a text message to every lead is time consuming. It takes hours to send out messages to each person. It’s even more time-consuming when you’re sending them messages that correspond to where they’re at in the sales cycle and based on their last messages to you.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is designed to do that thinking for you. Working together, we set up a system of predefined steps that your customers can go through. The AI will recognize questions about financing, inventory, availability, appointments, and more without any input from your team.
So why text messages?
The answer is in the numbers. Over 95% of text messages are read by the recipient. In most cases, our phones will hold a text message on the screen until we read it or dismiss it.
Compare that to emails which are read less that 50% of the time and phone calls that are answered less than 10% of the time. With text messaging, you’re getting the lead to read what you wrote (or what the AI wrote). Even if they don’t respond, you’ve made another impression and you’ve reminded them they need a car.
The CRM Connection
When this is integrated with your CRM, it can provide you with a lot of information and some very warm leads.
The AI will even inviten the lead to the showroom, find out what vehicles they’re interested in and tee it all up for you. All you have to do is make the sale.
Sure, there will still be some phone calls and emails coming in, but anyone that opts in for text messages will have your message right in front of them anywhere.
All of this can be connected to your CRM and deliver detailed information. Every question in the lead asks, every time they clicked a link, even the inventory they looked at will all be listed in your CRM. You’ll know what the customer wants, even if they’re not sure yet.
Can we live without text messaging?
No. If you want to reach younger car buyers, you need to start using text messages. The average Millennial doesn’t use their phone to make phone calls.
“A poll by Gallup also confirmed that text messaging outranks phone calls as the dominant form of communication among millennials, with 68 percent of 18 to 29-year-olds saying they texted “a lot” the previous day. In the last couple of years, monthly texting among this age group has more than doubled.” – https://www.eztexting.com/blog/why-millennials-are-so-keen-text
The same report from EZTexting also notes that 76% of Millennials would rather lose the ability to make calls than the ability to text.
The future is in text messages and the ease and convenience of sending written messages. Texting will only get easier as voice recognition improves and we can speak our messages.
Text Messages and AI: The Fastest Way to Fill the Pipeline
Using social media advertising to capture leads, a CRM to track them, and text messages and AI to follow up on them, the average dealership can fill their sales pipeline in about a week.
It requires some expertise and planning, but it’s easy to do with the right help.
Transactional v Emotional customers – Speaking to the right people
There are two types of buyers in the world of automobiles: transactional buyers and emotional buyers.
A transactional buyer is a haggler, a competitive shopper, who isn’t swayed by the beauty of a machine. They want to know that they got the very best deal on a vehicle. They see paying more than the next guy is an insult.
An emotional buyer is exactly the opposite. They don’t care as much about the price they pay as they do about getting the car that makes them feel a certain way. You can sell to an emotional buyer with the feeling of the drive, the way that everyone will see them behind the wheel, and how much pleasure they’ll get from the car.
Auto dealership marketing – now and then
Throughout most of the auto industry’s history, the only people that most dealerships saw were the in-market customers, people who are ready to buy as they stepped onto the sales lot. Most of these people were emotional buyers, people who were inspired by an ad to purchase a car.
Traditional advertising operates almost entirely on the emotional level. TV commercials that show people driving cars on mountain roads, along beaches, and with lots of beautiful people in the car are emotional images. Most will end with a shout-out to the transactional buyers with a list of costs, rebates, and more.
Once the social media revolution arrived that changed. Dealers began advertising for in-market transactional shoppers, people who were ready to buy based on the price they could get.
This new customer base is somewhat problematic. These are people who expect the very lowest prices. This causes a rush to the lowest price by all of these dealers. Many were within a few dollars of losing money. While dealers were making sales, they were barely making money on a sale.
Using Social Media to market your dealership
One of the most powerful aspects of social media marketing is that you can market to both types of people.
With Facebook advertising, dealerships are able to run multiple ads to multiple audiences. This allows dealers to speak to each type of buyer in their own language.
Emotional Buyer Marketing
For the emotional buyer, the key is to try to get them to imagine themselves behind the wheel.
The power of social media to use images, videos, and more to set the emotional hook. Then you can convert these emotional buyers and get them in the door at the dealership. This makes Facebook incredibly powerful and probably the ideal way to market an auto dealership.
Selling to emotional buyers requires an emotional buy-in from the salespeople. Salespeople need to love the cars that they sell and be able to convey that.
This is a problem for dealers. Most salespersons are set up to handle transactional shoppers, those looking for great deals, not for those who are buying for the experience of the vehicle.
How to Leverage Facebooks Ads to the Two Types of Buyers
Facebook ads can bring both types of buyers to your auto lot, but each type of customer needs to be treated differently.
For the transactional buyer, the logical way to get started is to simply pull out a calculator and start crunching numbers. Get to the bottom line, talk about financing, and keep everything aimed at how much they’re going to spend.
With emotional buyers, salespeople need to learn to take their time. This is the time to get them into the car that they saw in the ad or into an upgraded vehicle.
This will be difficult. If you’ve ever walked onto an auto lot, you’ll get the breathless feeling that the salespeople need you to sign on the dotted line and make way for the next person. With emotional buyers, they’ll want to slow down, take their time, and love the cars with the buyers.
Where to Start
The key to getting these two types of buyers in your door is to set up two separate Facebook ad campaigns, one for the emotional buyers and one for the transactional buyers. Use the audience information to retarget those people with different types of ads that will keep the conversation going.
Using the specificity of Facebook ads, your dealership can work to bring both types of buyers to the table. Once there, you can adapt your selling style to the customer’s approach. You’ll end up with more closes and have loyal-new customers, who feel heard and appreciated.
The Training Process: What you’re doing wrong!
Every day, we talk to dealers who tell us that they’re frustrated with their staff. The employees come in for a few weeks, make one sale, and leave. Even if the dealerships spend thousands of dollars sending them off to sales seminars, the staff still leaves.
Turn over on the sales floor is near 100% for most dealerships. The sales people seem to be constantly looking for greener pastures. Or at least ones where the sales are more reliable.
So here you are:
- Spending thousands on sales seminars every year.
- Spending thousands more on advertising.
- Trying to turn leads into sales.
- Replacing 90% of your staff every three to six months.
So what are you doing wrong?
Did you learn to read and write by attending a weekend seminar?
How about math? Did that take more than one evening?
What about how you learned to sell cars? Did that take more than a day?
The problem is that most dealerships approach sales training as a one-off event. Maybe four times a year, everyone goes to a sales webinar.
The rest of the time, they sit in the showroom texting their girlfriends or boyfriends, floundering when customers come in, and complaining that they’re not making any money.
Learning to sell is like every other skill; you have to teach it every day for your staff to truly understand it.
It sounds like a lot of work and a hassle, especially for a staff that’s unlikely to stick around. But they’re guaranteed to leave if they stay with you and make no sales.
Even the most money-hungry salesperson wants to be able to take pride in their accomplishments. If their accomplishment is that they got the base in their paycheck, it’s not going to take long before they’re gone.
Role playing, training, morning meetings, Q&A sessions, and group brainstorming is vital for your team to succeed.
Consider having everyone arrive an hour early. Spend thirty minutes every morning teaching a new technique, discussing what people are struggling with, or asking the veterans how they succeed. Your staff will be well-informed and every day will be an accomplishment, even if they don’t make a sale that day.
What if they leave and I’ve spent all this time and money?
There are two answers to this question:
- What if they don’t leave? Do you really want a half-trained, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants staff wandering around taking care of the customers you spent thousands trying to get into the showroom?
- You already are! You’re spending money on advertising, marketing, and more just to get people to your showroom. You’re paying a staff member to be there that might not know what they’re doing. You’re throwing good money after bad now.
The best part is that this technique doesn’t have to cost a lot of money. It’s a low-cost, time-based idea that allows you to tap into your own experience and that of your existing team.
What are we teaching?
The first thing to teach is your expectations. What do you expect your staff to do when someone arrives at your lot? How should they be greeted? How fast should they be greeted? Should they “pressured” or left to wander? How long should they wander?
Here’s a suggestion that one of our customers came up with: Watch your three best salespeople and make a model out of what they do. There are no rules. Every town and every dealership is different. If you’re most laid back salespeople are successful, you can use them as a model.
It’s a bit like what Tony Robbins teaches: Watch people who are successful and do what they do.
Every day!
Just like going to school when you were younger, right through college, repetition is the key to success. That’s why you need to make sure that you train your staff every day.
The Best Way to Talk to Customers
Not that long ago, we had only one fast way to talk to customers that weren’t right in front of us – the telephone.
Today, we have multiple ways: phone, email, chat, text.
Each of these methods serves a purpose, but only one has been ignored by auto dealerships and could open the door to a whole new customer base.
Let’s look at each tool in your toolkit and see what we can learn.
Phone – Calling customers is still a useful way to talk to customers, but it has lost its appeal as a way to initiate contact. Less than half of phone calls get answered. That number drops, even more, when the person doesn’t recognize the phone number.
Can you still use the telephone to reach out and make sales? Yes, definitely, but it’s harder than ever. The telephone should be considered a last resort for contacting customers.
If you use the phone, expect to leave a lot of voicemails. Make sure that you have a voicemail script written.
If you’re calling about something of personal interest to the customer, like the car they wanted is on the lot, don’t be coy. Tell them in the voicemail. Otherwise, it’s just another unheard voicemail along with robocalls and marketing attempts that everyone gets every day.
Incoming calls are still a powerful way to make sales. If the sales team takes that ringing phone seriously, they’ll find themselves making more sales. The phone should be seen as an asset, not a nuisance, every time it rings. At least a significant percentage of the time, it’s going to be someone looking to see if the car they want is available.
Email – If you’re already corresponding with someone or they are expecting to hear from you, email is a great way to communicate. The customer can get the message when they’re ready and can respond to it anytime, day or night.
Email marketing, outbound marketing, is a lot more difficult. The best way to make sure that you get your emails read is to offer value. Don’t just offer discounts and give sales pitches, but give information that can be useful to your potential customers. For example, tax information for businesses that buy a company car this year instead of next. A look at auto loan rates for consumers is another way to add value.
For the money, email is still a fairly great way to communicate and make sales, but it’s getting harder to be heard above the noise.
Chat – This is 100% in-bound from your website. A great chat function on your website can capture sales as people are looking at cars.
All the customer has to do is click the button and they’re on the line with someone from your dealership. It will be helpful if the person they’re talking to has information, like prices, monthly payments, details on the car, etc. It’s a lot less helpful if it’s someone from the Business Development Center who is in the dark about what’s on the lot and what things cost.
Your chat function, like your phone, can be a huge asset. If one person is assigned to it for the day, they can convert those contacts into sales and really give great customer service.
One major downside is that you have no contact information unless the customer gives it to you. You have no way to get back to them unless they want you to.
Text – Text is the most effective way to communicate for auto dealerships, but most dealerships don’t use it effectively. In many cases, the salespeople will text with contacts from their personal phones. This is convenient, but a salesperson will take all of your contacts with them if they leave your business.
A company text number can be used to capture the texting market. It can pop up on multiple phones at once or can be sent to a shift phone that one person is assigned to. You can also send texts to a desktop of someone who is in their office all day. This makes it easy to respond.
For outbound marketing, texting is awesome. Depending on the study you find, 94% to 98% of all texts are opened and read. In fact, most phones will keep a text unread until you consciously open it. That’s powerful. Your message will pop up instantly in their pocket, and it won’t go away until they click it.
There are lots of online services that will let you do bulk texting and help you grow your business. Working with a marketing team to develop your message can create a lot of loyal contacts that will buy from you.
All of the communication methods are great for what they do, but text message marketing and interaction with customers is the big-untapped resource that most auto dealerships are missing.
Website Down! The problem with the old way
“The website is down again!”
How many times have you heard that? If you hear it more than once or twice a year, you might have a problem.
How it used to be
If you have an older site, it might be located on a single server. That means that if it gets too many hits at once or there’s a problem in that one location, your website will go down.
That was the old way of putting up a website. Some smaller companies will still offer you “on-site hosting”. It’s usually inexpensive and they push it because then they can have it right there in front of them.
How it is now
With the advent of cloud computing, websites can be set up to be redundant. This means that your website can be repeated all over the globe.
Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and many more have cloud servers all over the world. The goal for these servers is to shorten the distance between your site and the end user. For example, if you have a website hosted only in Florida and someone in Seattle wants to take a look, they might have difficulties if there’s a lot of traffic in between. Also, if the server in Florida is down for maintenance or lost power or is simply overwhelmed, the consumer might not see your site.
With cloud computing, your site is copied on servers everywhere. The person in Seattle is really looking at a complete copy of your site on a server in, say, Seattle. Every day, the cloud system will go out and look at your website to make sure everything matches. Also, every time you make a change, the cloud system will send out a message and new copy to all the servers.
What about the big national hosting sites
Every day, you’re contacted by big dealer website companies that want your business. They can set up a site in a few days and might even make it seem less expensive.
The problem is that many of those companies haven’t updated their infrastructure. They aren’t using cloud computing to store your site. They still have everything on the server they installed in 2001. This means that if they have a problem on their server, you’re out of luck.
Almost every dealership has tried working with these companies once or twice. It all sounds so awesome and easy, but you’re just a number. You’re one of thousands of other dealerships that have hired them to make a cookie-cutter website that looks exactly like everyone else’s.
The cost savings is not worth it. The hassle is definitely not worth it. There’s a better answer!
Buy local
Instead of taking what looks like an easy path, talk to your local website design companies. They’ll help you build a great website and they’ll put up on the cloud systems for you.
Smaller companies don’t generally have their own services to put the website on. Instead, they build on cloud systems that will automatically install redundancies. There will be copies of your website everywhere, making it easier for consumers to access it from anywhere, instantly.
Service outages aren’t necessary any longer with websites. That’s all very 1999. Today, with the massive cloud server systems, your website should be up and available every day, all day.
If you have any problems or aren’t sure what to do, contact us. We’ll help you find a great vendor for your website.
The Auto Sales Process – Brace Yourself
If you take a moment and Google “auto sales process,” you’re going to find a lot of different answers.
Everyone breaks the sales process down to steps. Three, 5, 10, 15…everyone talks about the process that they use and how many steps they can break the process down to.
One person talks about four steps:
- Get to know the customer
- Find them a car
- Sit them down and negotiate
- Finance or payment
A few other sites stretch this process out to 10 steps:
- Greet the customer
- Discover their needs
- Walk around the lot
- Test drive
- Post-test drive
- Negotiate
- Close
- Financing
- Deliver
- After-sale review
Who’s right? Everybody.
Consider something you do everyday without thinking about it, like tying your shoes. The process of tying your shoes can be broken down into about 15 discrete steps. And you do that without thinking about it. Imagine how many steps your drive to work would need to be broken down into and you probably barely remember doing it.
Is Selling Dead?
Back to Google. Let’s google “the sales process dead”. Here’s what you get:
“Everything in sales is dead”
“Traditional selling is dead”
“The sales process is dead”
“Selling is dead”
Those dramatic statements don’t really mean what they say. When you read the articles, you find that they don’t think the sales process is actually dead, as if things will sell themselves, but that the process has changed.
So what has changed?
The change that has happened is that the salesperson no longer controls the sales process. The customer is in control. They have all the tools they need in their hands to put them in the power position.
For example, they can buy a car from a vending machine. They can have a car delivered. They can see how much the car is worth, if the car is a deal, and what they should be asking for in the deal.
Back in the good old days, the dealer had the power. She was able to control the flow of the process from start to finish.
“According to AutoTrader.com’s 2015 Automotive Buyer Influence Study, more car buyers have already decided on the vehicle they want to purchase when they first visit a dealership. In 2015, 72 percent of recent car buyers reported that they purchased the vehicle they had in mind when they first visited a dealership.” – AutoTrader.com
Think about that. That means that three-fourths of all the people who come to you to buy a car know what car they want. They don’t need to walk the lot. They don’t need to get to know the salespeople. They might just walk up and ask for a test drive.
This means that the old ways of selling might have changed.
How to deal with the change?
Get over yourself.
That’s the whole thing. You might think that the lot walk is the second step, but the customer might want to do it after the test drive. You might want to discuss financing at the end, but the customer might make it the first thing they do.
As dealers, it’s time to understand that the customer is in control of the whole process. Some will go along for the ride with you as you go through the 143 steps of the sales process. Many simply want to get to what they came in for.
Here’s an experience that some friends had recently. The couple went to look at a Volkswagen that they really wanted. They called and set up a test drive. They had the car looked at and it was a mess. When they went back to the dealer and said so, instead of being redirected to other cars or even having a conversation, they were accosted by a manager they had never spoken to about what a great car it is and how dare they have it looked at. Needless to say, they went somewhere else. In fact, less than two hours later they had purchased a Fiat for less money, fewer miles, and in perfect condition.
What happened was that the sales process as it is “supposed to go” was interrupted by a customer who was in charge. The dealer lost the sale and the customer. Oh, and their parents bought a car a month later from the place they bought the Fiat. The parents didn’t even go to the first dealer.
The sales process is still there, but as the family recipe for spaghetti or fried chicken, it’s just a guideline, not a hard set of rules.
Be ready to make changes because the customer is in charge now and they have more information and resources than ever before.
Relationship Marketing – The "Not Optional" Modern Way
What is relationship marketing and how is it different from transactional marketing?
How can internet tools, like social media, email, and text messaging, help with both but particularly relationship marketing?
In this blog, we’ll take a look at how you can use these tools to grow your business and make more sales.
“I’ve got a guy.”
“You’ve got a guy?”
“Yeah. I’ve got a guy.”
Everyone wants to be able to say that.
Everyone wants to have a person in the right places to help them get through whatever they need.
Every auto dealer wants to be someone’s “guy”. We all want the phone to ring with someone saying, “Hey, <insert your name>, it’s <insert their name>. I wanted to schedule a time to come down and look at trucks.”
That’s the call we work hard for.
So, how can internet tools help us make that happen?
First, we should look at the differences between relationship marketing and transactional marketing.
Relationship marketing is marketing that’s designed to create long-term bonds between a vendor and a consumer. It’s not about a single sale, but about the relationship that’s built in trust and familiarity. Here’s an observation: Until recently in all but the very largest cities, all sales were based on relationship marketing. Everyone knew everyone else, so of course, they knew who their car dealer was and asked for him by name.
Transactional marketing is marketing based on a sale. That’s the goal. When you see an ad for a cheeseburger, they aren’t asking how your kids are or how you might like your burger cooked. They want you to buy the burger as they serve it. The auto sales industry, these are the dealerships that simply stand around waiting for someone to show up and then sell them a car. Once the sale is made, that’s it. There’s very little contact.
Why is relationship marketing better?
The answer to that is simple: Would rather sell one car to a customer or a new car every three years? Do you want to have one member of a family come and buy a vehicle or have an entire family referred to you for their transportation needs?
The answers are obvious.
Relationship marketing takes longer, but it lasts longer. It’s there to make sure that you have business going into the years ahead.
How to use modern tools for relationship marketing?
There are a lot of ways to use email, texting, and social media to build a relationship.
Social media – Posting surveys, fun contests, and even just useful information will forge a relationship with your customers, even if you don’t know who they are. They’ll see what you’re doing and refer to you as a business they trust.
Email – Sending a message to someone’s inbox is an excellent way to bring to personalize the relationship. You can send them longer, more in-depth things that they need to know. You can also customize your message for them. For example, if you have your CRM track everyone who clicked on an ad for pickup trucks, the emails you send them will feature pickups, not economy cars. You can also email personal messages to people to inspire action.
Text messages – The most intimate way to contact someone is through text messages. You can reach out with messages that ask how they are, how their car is running, or if they’d like to stop by. You can send messages inviting them to a BBQ at your dealership or any of a thousands other things. Your messages can be signed personally and help to build that personal relationship.
Using SimpSocial to do it
SimpSocial makes this all very easy. With the help of SimpSocial, you can have ads that inspire people to contact you and then those leads can be put directly into marketing messages.
The tone of the messages is up to you, but our team can help you get it all set up.
Even more important, everything someone does, from the first click on a Facebook ad to buying a car is tracked in a CRM so you never forget what you know about someone. When someone makes an appointment, you can look up their name, their kids’ names, know what type of vehicle they’re likely to want, and much more.
Building relationships takes time, in life and in business. Using the modern tools that are available, it’s easier to do than ever!
Staying inside the lines: Texting and the FCC
The Federal Communications Commision made a ruling about the use of text messages for marketing. It was prompted, they say, by monthly calls and complaints from consumers about unwanted calls and text messages.
“Month after month, unwanted robocalls and texts, both telemarketing and informational, top the list of consumer complaints received by the Commission.”
The new ruling is an enhancement of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA). The goal of the new ruling was to provide protection for wireless consumers who might be paying per call and for whom text messages are very intrusive.
The TCPA was passed by Congress in 1991. Not only is the bill designed to protect consumer privacy where robocalls are concerned, but it’s designed to prevent robocalls to public safety phone numbers, like 911 and police station non-emergency numbers.
Here are some of the highlights that you should know
“The TCPA and the Commission’s implementing rules prohibit: (1) making telemarketing calls using an artificial or prerecorded voice to residential telephones without prior express consent; and (2) making any non-emergency call using an automatic telephone dialing system (“auto dialer”) or an artificial or prerecorded voice to a wireless telephone number without prior express consent.”
Here’s how this works for those of us who are following the rules: If a consumer opts into messages with you from a Facebook ad, you can, legally, send them text messages. If they opt out or if they never granted you permission in the first place, you can be fined by the FCC. While they have the ability to jail you, they’re unlikely to, but it can get very expensive to have them come after you for abusing texting systems.
How do you record consent?
If you use Facebook ads, there will be a record of consent there. There will also be a digital record of the consent in your CRM that Facebook sends it to. This means that if you’re asked, you’ll be able to show the date and time that the person opted in.
This is part of the importance of maintaining great records. While you’re unlikely to get into trouble with a single person, if there’s a pattern of abuse, you might find yourself talking to FCC investigators.
Why the changes in 2015?
The addition and clarification in July of 2015 was promoted by autodialers or robo calling software. This was made even more important with the advent of VoIP (voice over internet protocol). This technology has been around for over 20 years, but in the twenty-teens, they became inexpensive enough that everyone was able to access them.
There was a sudden explosion of their use by all kinds of companies, including some of the country’s biggest firms. It’s an inexpensive way to reach thousands of people every day. Using a sequential dialer, the software will simply call every number, one after the other, without any input from humans.
What not to do?
Never text someone who hasn’t given you permission. It’s possible to buy lists of phone numbers, but not only are those usually a waste of money, it’s a violation of law.
It’s really that simple. If they didn’t say yes, it’s not allowed.
What to do?
Using Facebook and Instagram ads, you can invite people to share their mobile numbers and grant permission to receive occasional messages.
Make sure you’re not messaging them every day. Be polite about how often you message them. If you’re in an active conversation with someone, that’s different, but for marketing messages, once every week or two is plenty.
Don’t send videos and rarely send photos. Images take up a lot of bandwidth. While many people have unlimited data, not everyone does. If you send a video, you can crush someone’s data allowance for the month. Even photos are too much.
If you want to share a video or a photo, invite them to click a link that will take them to the internet to see the image. You can also have a link that requires them to click it to download what you’re sending. Either way, they’re in charge of how much data your message uses.
If you’re not sure what to do, let the experts at SimpSocial help you. We create messages for you that will nurture your leads and grow your business. Our Facebook ads are designed to inspire people to give you permission.
Be respectful of the privilege of being allowed to communicate with people and you’ll do fine.
Also, if someone contacts you and says that they have a ton of people in the area who’ve said yes to receiving messages from you, politely decline. Those people have no idea it’s you they’ll hear from and they’re probably not even your target audience.
Texting & SMS for Auto Sales Marketing
Everybody has a smartphone. It seems that they’re all on their phones all the time. Oddly, you don’t see people talking on them. You see them tapping out messages.
Texting is how the majority of all communication is happening. “US smartphone users send and receive five times more texts than they make and receive calls.”1
Consumers don’t pick up the phone to ask questions anymore. The first thing they do is search the internet. When they don’t find what they need, or if they want more information, they look for a way to get it without having to talk to someone.
The Car Salesman’s Rep
Let’s face it, car salespeople are famous for being high pressure and provide very little information. If you call a dealership for information, you’ll often get someone who’s not terribly forthcoming with information. Either they don’t know it or they are pushing for you to get down there so they can shove keys in your hand.
They also have a reputation for being poorly trained at using the telephone to sell. Most are used to face-to-face interaction and don’t really work well with a phone on their ear, at least not from someone just looking for information.
Customers considering buying a car might just need a simple question answered, like “Are you open?” or “Is the Fiat in your ad still on the lot?” Most expect that when they call a car dealership, however, they’ll get a ten-minute interrogation into their needs and wants with a strong push to “talk to me when you get here.”
The Power of Texting
Auto dealers are still just discovering the power of texting. There has been a very slow move toward allowing customers to text dealerships, probably because it feels like you can’t then sell to them.
Since your customers are sending and receiving five times more texts than phone calls, why wouldn’t you make texting part of your marketing?
Including texting on your marketing materials will quickly increase contacts from customers. “Call or text 888-829-1110,” will get you lots and lots of texts to ask questions. The customer doesn’t feel like they can be pressured that way, but they get the answers they need.
Your sales team can answer many more questions via text than they can phone calls. It takes a few seconds to answer a text, but a single phone call to answer a single question will often take three or four minutes.
Managing Text Messaging
There are a huge number of text messaging management systems available. Most will allow you to send out text marketing messages on a schedule.
Importantly, they will also show you messages that are coming to your textphone number. You can use a computer to answer questions.
Both Android and iOS have message-to-web applications built-in. These will allow you to display the messages to and from a phone number on a computer. You can set up the manager’s phone, or a company cell phone on the manager’s computer, or for someone else who is in front of their computer all day. They can answer questions, send photos, and do anything else you can do with texting, all from their PC.
Another way to manage text messaging is to have a company phone that is passed around to an assigned person on every shift. There should be someone who is responsible for answering texts. That person keeps the shift on them for the day.
It’s not a great idea to allow your staff to use their personal cell phones to handle company texts. There is no way for you to track what has been sent and what has been responded to. Also, you’re not later able to use those numbers to market to.
Text Messaging is a Powerful Tool
With just a little effort and a change in your ads, you can add text messaging to your toolkit. Your customers will love it, since they’re texting already. Your staff will get more customers and more sales because they are now responsive without being pushy.
Best of all, it’s cheap to do. There are viable solutions that cost no more than a single cell phone line each month. Even a text message marketing platform is about $30 a month for unlimited use.
Turn this “new” way of communicating into your secret weapon.