PSM Marketing

60 Units Sold With Zero Face-to-Face Interaction

Eric Pedretti | 09/17/2020

Yup, you read that right. A couple months ago, we had a client sell 60 units through text with zero face-to-face interaction on 328 text conversations with Customer Connections with their showroom closed!

Customer Connections enables texting on your main business line so customers can text into the dealership to inquire about a unit, book service or order parts.

If you look at your Google Analytics, you'll probably find 80% of your website traffic is looking at inventory but only 1-2% actually fill out a form. We're proving customers are much more likely to text about a unit than fill out a web form because they know it will result in a phone call from the dealership; something they want to avoid at all costs. In the same month our client generated 328 text conversations, their website generated a total of 50 unit leads. The addition of Customer Connections generated a whopping 6 times the number of leads!

Customers Start the Conversation

Customers will start the conversation with you by choosing Sales, Service or Parts from your website.

Department texts are automatically routed to your individual department managers and their teams. First rep to answer it handles it!

Desk Deals From Start to Finish

Many dealerships were closed or not fully open for most of the spring selling season; requiring them to figure out how to improvise, adapt and overcome to find creative ways to continue selling units. As dealers became overwhelmed with customers and leads this Spring and early Summer, Customer Connections helped make their staff much more efficient. Think about it, how many phone calls can you handle at once? One of course. But the same sales rep can be working up to a dozen or more deals all at once! Grabbing a driver’s license from one customer, texting a finance application to another, swapping photos of trades and the unit the customer is interested in with another, negotiating terms with another, or even giving driving directions to the dealership with another customer all at once! Below is a real text thread from one of our clients closing a deal through text.

Reach Thousands of New Prospects Through Social Media Integration

In addition to enabling texting on your website, Customer Connections also drastically increases your reach on social media with our Photo With Purchase feature. Did you know the average Facebook user has 281 friends? Every time you sell a unit, simply snap a photo of the happy customer and hit send. It automatically adds pictures of happy customers to social media and gives them directions to tag themselves in the photo, to get your dealership in front of their friends and family members to increase referrals and sell more units!

Grow Google My Business Reviews

Last but not least, it will also automatically post that photo to your Google My Business Page and text customers asking for a review to grow your Google Reviews. Google recently increased the weight your GMB Reviews play in your primary website organic ranking by 20%! Google continues to move towards a zero click search results making it more important than ever before to be optimizing your page. Growing reviews and adding hundreds of smiling photos from happy customers who just purchased from you is the best way to do that, and all it takes is a quick photo and hitting the send button! You can also automatically grow reviews to other review sites online to make your dealership the obvious choice in your market to do business with.

Call or Text (770) 692-1750 for a 10 Minute Demo!

Ask Tory - Have you heard of Customer Connections?

Tory Hornsby | 05/04/2020

A recent study showed that 87% of Americans experience anxiety when answering a call from a business or calling a business… that’s why customers don’t answer the phone anymore. And it’s not just anxiety stopping folks from answering. Not too long ago I called my 19 y.o. son. He didn’t answer, of course, but as I was going to his voicemail he sent me a text that said, “What’s up?”

That’s when it hit me. People simply prefer texting over a phone conversation. It’s the world we now live in, and texting will continue to replace phone calls the same way that email replaced fax machines.

This is good news for dealers though. In fact, I just bought a new Ram 2500 truck and didn’t talk to the dealership one time before showing up. If they wouldn’t have had texting capabilities I would not have purchased the day I did, and maybe not at all. I’m too busy to talk on the phone, but I do have time between meetings, webinars, helping clients and team members to reply to a text here and there.

And think about it, you can only handle one call at a time, but you can handle lots of text conversations at once. Plus, customers get more frustrated when they’re put on hold, and at some point a phone call ends, but the nature of a text conversation is it always stays open.

That’s why we built Customer Connections. It’s a texting tool designed for one-to-one communication, and there are 3 primary ways dealers use it.

1. Number 1 is to increase incoming leads from your website. Website visitors are hesitant to fill out a form because they know it results in a phone call. They don’t want to talk, but they don’t mind texting. It’s their preferred way to communicate. We place a Text Us button on your site to increase leads and provide a simple and efficient way to communicate with prospects.

One of our clients in Mississippi had 329 text conversations in Customer Connections and sold over 60 units in a single month! Over 60 people showed up ready to do paperwork without ever talking to someone at the dealership, and it lead to a record month.

2. The second way dealers use this is to follow-up with customers. The Parts & Accessories department might text when a special order is ready to be picked up. Service might text a picture of worn brake pads and get a quick authorization to replace them, so this is great for upsells. And salespeople use it to follow-up with website leads and other customers to desk deals and get folks into the dealership.

3. The third way dealers use Customer Connections is through our mobile app. This app enables your team to quickly follow up with prospects without having to go to a desktop computer. Your staff can use their cell phones or tablets, without having to use their personal cell phone number. The app also enables them to use the Photo with Purchase feature, which is the third way dealers use the app.

Photo with Purchase sends a text to each customer with a picture of themselves smiling ear to ear with their new unit, which increases loyalty and CSI scores. And while they’re looking at their smiling face, we ask them to write an online review for your dealership. Then, the app posts their picture to social media and gets the customer share it with their friends in family. This boosts your social media engagements and puts your dealership in front of new prospective customers with every single unit sell.

Dealers have a real love-hate relationship with Facebook. They know they should post customer pictures at the time of purchase, but when they do, it often only gets a couple of likes, so it’s an awful lot of work for very little return. Now, the reason dealers don’t get many likes or comments is because Facebook only shows a business’ posts to people who have liked, commented or shared one of their posts in the past. Customer Connections gets customers to engage with your social media automatically and grows your overall Facebook presence. Over time, your engagements grow in a big way.

Plus, the app features an Employee Leaderboard that recognizes your dealership’s top-rated staff. It increases competition among your staff to use the app more frequently because it shows the number of conversations, review requests, and the number of Photo with Purchases each team member has sent.

If you’d like to increase your business in every department, you’ve gotta see a demo of Customer Connections. Call or text us at 770-692-1750, or visit www.customerconnections.io for more information.

- Tory

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