Automotive Social Media | Automotive Internet Marketing | Automotive SEO.

Shifting gears from wholesaler to rEtailer!

Burton Motors LTD has been wholesaling 150-300 vehicles per month for years now. The operation has been highly leveraged and produces small returns on investment per unit. 5 years ago, Lou Bledsoe was hired on to figure out how to sell cars to the public through the internet to boost revinue per unit. Now, www.burtonmotors.com sells about 20 cars per month, and they have hired me on to get that number up to 50 per month.

I am focusing on boosting the organic search engine traffic, redeveloping our web presence, developing an email newsletter campaign, blogging, as well as photography and selling cars! We use eBizAutos as our backend and list our vehciles with Vehix, Auto Trader, Cars.com, KBB, Ebay, and probably a couple more that I can't think of right now. Always looking to sell more cars without adding more monthly costs, hence the focus on organic traffic. .

I am always open to ideas, comments and tips, so feel free to let your opinion be known! I will be using this blog to document my steps and our successes, so hopefully some of you can learn from our trial and error process, too!

Matt Watson said…: What software do use to handle those leads? Having a powerful ILM/CRM tool is critical to growing a department.

Burton Motors LTD said…: Matt,
Currently we are trying to decide what CRM would be suit our needs. There are many options, and some seem much more complex than others. This is definitely one of the main areas where we are seeking to focus on in order to improve our closing ratio.

That being said, does anyone have any recommendations of ILM/CRM's they have used and are satisfied with?

Paul Rushing said…: For starters if you are running email newsletters CRM software currently on the market is not the way to go if you care about deliver ability.

Any of the web based CRM tools out there have that issue. They just don't want to talk about it.

I current use a system that delivers over 99% even to yahoo and msn accounts with mailing list over 10K and it only cost $20 month, but it is not a CRM just an email provider/autoresponder service.

Let me know if you want to learn more about it.

Autoguy said…: To add to Pauls statement I have read articles wher ethe email CRM approach is an issue. For instance- if someone finds a car on lets say AutoTrader- submits an inquiry then this is treated as 1 email. Then if that same person goes to another website like Cars.com (finds the same vehicle) and submits another inquiry then they get another email- but for the same vehicle. People tend to think they are getting responses back from 2 different dealer centers- but instead they get the same one. Add to it that once the person enters their email address for the vehicle inquiry- the software sends the customer not 1 email, but 2 seperate emails back when following up with them (quarky).... but it happens. I am going to try and find the blog I saw about this occuring. I willl be keeping my eyes peeled for some suggestions for your new transition! :)

Take care....

Matt Watson said…: They key is the CRM providers have to pro-actively work to stay in good relation with the major ISPs and conform the their standards. Like AOL requires all emails have the dealers physical address and opt out links. Yahoo requires a special technology called domainkeys. You can also have the CRM company send you the list of your customers and you could use a 3rd party to send out bulk newsletter type emails.

If you are looking for an easy to use, but yet powerful web based CRM, I'd recommend you look at VinSolutions' MotoSnap http://www.vinsolutions.com they will do a quick online demo for you and show you the whole system.

Also a good CRM wouldn't send the customer an email if they went to AutoTrader.com and Cars.com that is really a duplicate request from a customer. MotoSnap catches that sort of thing.

Stan Sher said…: A good CRM tool should be web based in any scenario because it will allow you to work effectively from anywhere. We use webcontrol avv which is powered by autobytel. Reynolds and reynolds have contact management.