Over the past few years CRM usage in dealerships has greatly increased and is still a big priority for most dealerships. As internet leads became more and more important, it has become increasingly more important to have CRM solutions that were designed to efficiently handle internet leads. The problem a lot of dealers have is their CRM doesn’t do a very good job of handling internet leads. To remedy this problem, dealers purchase an Internet Lead Management (ILM) solution which is more or less a 2nd CRM solution designed only for internet leads. ILM software, unlike traditional CRM software, is typically web based since it is designed to handle internet leads.

Internet Lead Management (ILM) solutions are great for your internet department and have special functionality that makes it easy to handle internet leads. Some of these special functions include:

• Distributing and routing leads to your internet sales staff
• Sending text messages to alert your staff about the new leads
• Allowing responding to leads on mobile devices to improve response times
• Send automated emails to customers to confirm their leads were received
• Emailing vehicle details, brochures, photos, and videos to customers
• Manage follow up processes by specific internet lead sources

ILM software solutions can help take care of deficiencies in your CRM software. The problem is your dealership is no longer working together as one team. It is important to have your showroom and internet department working together on the same CRM system.

Here are some of the downfalls of having a separate CRM and ILM in your dealership:
• ILM only solutions don’t show you the full sales and service history the customer has had with your dealership.
• Separate ILM and CRM solutions create “skating” problems between the showroom and internet department.
• When an internet customer comes in, you have to additionally log them in to your CRM to desk the deal and do unsold follow up.
• Does your internet department do sold and unsold follow up in the CRM, ILM or both?
• The ILM has powerful email functions that are not available to your showroom salespeople. Don’t all your salespeople need to email their customers?
• Reporting to see what is going on in your dealership becomes more difficult

Automotive CRM solutions have evolved over the last few years to better handle internet leads. All good CRM solutions are now web based to better handle these internet functions. It is no longer necessary to have a separate ILM solution. If you have to purchase a separate ILM, then you are really paying more money to make up for problems with your current CRM. You would be much better off purchasing a new CRM that was designed to handle internet leads as well as handle all your CRM needs.

If you are stuck in a CRM contract and desperately need a separate ILM to properly run your internet department, then I would definitely recommend doing so. When you pick a new ILM system, pick one that also has full CRM capabilities. Doing so let’s you try out the new vendor and will make the CRM switch a lot smoother when your current CRM contract is up.

If you are considering purchasing a new CRM solution, here are some of the advantages to web based CRM systems. These are some of the advantages to web based CRMs:

• No expensive servers to purchase or manage in your dealership
• Less likely to have contracts, typically a pay-as-you-go model
• CRM is available securely from anywhere via a web browser with no software to install
• Software is enhanced more often since the vendor can update it in one place
• Ideal solution for dealer groups who need reporting and BDC functions across stores
• Enhanced email features to allow easily sending vehicle details, brochures, photos, and videos
• Mobile access from your Blackberry, iPhone or other smart phones

As if having a separate ILM and CRM wasn’t bad enough, some dealers even have a 3rd CRM or BDC solution to handle the follow up of their service department. There are now good CRM solutions available that can handle your showroom, internet and service department together. Tying it all together lets you see a customer’s complete history and value to your dealership from one place.

It is important to have one automotive CRM software solution to keep track of all aspects of your customers and keep everyone in your dealership connected. Having one CRM with all the data in one database also allows you to do some amazing reporting and marketing campaigns.

Matt Watson
CTO
VinSolutions

CRM software is a great tool to monitor and measure the activity going on within your dealership. If you pull a showroom activity report and it says you are closing 90% of your ups, that doesn’t mean you are doing a great job. It means your salespeople aren’t using the system. Are they following up with the people that didn’t buy that day? Could you sell more cars if they were?

If you want to improve how your store is performing, you have to get everyone using the automotive CRM and use it’s reporting to measure and track your success. Track your response times, closing ratios, appointment statistics and much more.

How can you manage what you can’t measure? The problem is you don’t know what you don’t know.

Matt Watson
VinSolutions
Chief Technical Officer

Having the right people can sometimes be the most difficult part. CRM utilization has to come from the top down. The management team has to use the system and mandate that all the salespeople use it. If the management team doesn’t use it, or have a bad attitude about it, how can you expect the salespeople to use it?

If your dealership doesn’t have any processes in place, how can you expect anyone to follow them? I would define a process as a set of coordinated tasks and activities, conducted by both people and technology, that will lead to accomplishing a specific organizational goal.

Your dealership must define processes on how to handle internet leads, showroom leads, phone leads, unsold showroom visit follow up, lease renewals, appointment confirmations, and much more. Once you figure out these processes, you have to figure out how to use your CRM to accomplish your goals. Your CRM can keep track of these processes and help you monitor if they are being followed.

It boggles my mind how many dealerships don’t ever call a customer back if they test drive a car and don’t buy that day. Or dealers that don’t follow up on internet leads past an auto responder. Even worse are the dealers who “think” their salespeople do the follow up but have no way to track it.

If you have the right people, the processes, and the right automotive CRM, your dealership can run much more efficiently and increase sales.

Matt Watson
VinSolutions
Chief Technical Officer

Overland Park, KS, June 11, 2009 – VinSolutions announced today they have completed their integration with DealerTrack’s Arkona DMS. Providing a seamless, secure connection for their mutual dealer customers enhances efficiency and productivity. “We are constantly looking for ways to supplement our offerings and make our clients’ lives easier,” said Doug Kinney, CEO of VinSolutions. “Allowing us to provide our mutual clients with secure, bi-directional access to their data sets in a cost-effective open platform does both.”

The OpenTrack program allows for secure data encryption and either batch or real-time data processing, and interfaces with customer, vehicle, F&I, general ledger, service and parts data. “With OpenTrack we are truly delivering on our promise to the marketplace that the DealerTrack DMS will be an open and cost-effective platform,” said Raj Sundaram, senior vice president of the Solutions and Services Group at DealerTrack. “This is a win-win for all parties.”

Dealers using DealerTrack’s DMS can access this feature by clicking on the “Push to DMS” button in VinSolutions’ desking module.

About VinSolutions ( http://www.vinsolutions.com )

An industry-leading developer of Internet-based desking, automotive CRM software, and Internet lead management (ILM) software, VinSolutions provides 24/7 dealership sales and marketing information to their clients anywhere Internet access is available. In addition to CRM, ILM and Inventory control products, VinSolutions builds custom dealership Web sites, uploads inventory photos, offers their clients quality training and consulting services, as well as valuable customer support. VinSolutions is GM, Ford, Chrysler, Subaru and Audi certified and has working relationships, alliances and integrations with several automotive software service providers such as Kelley Blue Book, CARFAX, AutoSoft, Inc., Autodata, RouteOne and DealerTrack.

About DealerTrack

DealerTrack’s high-value software solutions for the automotive retail industry enhance efficiency and profitability across every department in a dealership. DealerTrack’s Dealer Management System (DMS) delivers flexible and cost-efficient functionality to manage dealership data and operations. Its Inventory Management, Sales and F&I, and Compliance solutions help optimize dealership inventory, increase sales and protect against legal risks. DealerTrack operates a leading online automotive credit application network, which includes approximately 19,000 dealers and over 730 financing sources. For more information visit www.dealertrack.com.

View the stats here

So what does this mean?

Does it mean that no one is excited about IE8? (I installed it the first day, and had been testing the beta version)

Or does it mean that Firefox users are just much more progressive than the typical IE user?

I’m going to guess that Firefox users are much more sophisticated/power Internet users. IE8 is more of a defensive/catch up release by Microsoft, and not really a revolutionary step forward. IE’s marketshare has fallen to about 67% and IE8 is not going to bring the other 33% back. At best Microsoft can hope it will just prevent further loss in market share.

Or… Does it really matter what browser we use anymore?

I would say no it doesn’t. IE8, Firefox 3.0 and Google Chrome are all so close in functionality that it really doesn’t matter. They all follow the latest web standards and provide very similar functionality.

So if you haven’t downloaded IE8 yet, I would strongly recommend it. It is better in every way than its predecessor, especially from a speed and stability stand point. Visit Microsoft’s website for a detailed list of new changes.

Be sure to test your website with Internet Explorer 8.0!

Your website provider may need to fix some things, and in the meantime they can add a special tag (X-UA-Compatible) to your website so it forces IE8 to load in IE7 compatibility mode until they fix the problems.

By the way… FireFox 3.5 is scheduled to come out this summer, which will raise the bar again for Internet Explorer to catch up to.

Even more importantly, Silverlight 3.0 was announced this week. This is actually big news.

Matt Watson
CTO
VinSolutions

http://mmod.ncaa.com/

For those of you who don’t know what Silverlight is, it is a technology similar to Flash and Java that allows running software applications in your internet browser. The ability to do amazing things that can’t be done with HTML. Silverlight is the future of web application development.

It is estimated that about 25-30% of all Internet users now has Silverlight installed on their computers. This is largely thanks to the 2008 Olympics which used Silverlight for streaming video of all the events online. This percentage still has a long ways to go to reach critical mass, but it is growing quickly. March Madness will draw millions of users and help drive the install base of Silverlight. Silverlight is now also bundled in to Windows Live and a suggested windows update to all windows users. Silverlight also powers Netflix online streaming, Blockbuster online streaming, HSN.com, CBS College Sports, and many other common sites. You can also bet it will be bundled in to the install of IE8 and Windows 7 coming up later this year. 2009 will be a huge year for Silverlight, including the release of Silverlight 3.0.

VinSolutions has been enhancing and updating our software to use Silverlight over the last year. Silverlight has helped us provide much more powerful solutions to our customers that would not be possible normally. Including new desking and ad hoc reporting systems. We are proud to be on the bleeding edge and leveraging the latest and greatest technologies to provide industry leading solutions.

About 80-90% of all emails sent are SPAM. Since real emails are the exception to the norm, email providers employ a lot of measures to prevent SPAM. Nobody likes Viagra ads, scams, and porn piling up in their email.

How does the content of the email effect its SPAM ratings?
Most large ISPs don’t even care about the subject or content of an email. They rely solely on the reputation of the IP address of the sender. A long time ago the content of the email was very important in SPAM calculations. Some ISPs do still look at it, most importantly Hotmail based on some information I am seeing.

So what effects the reputation of an email sender?

1. Emails sent to email addresses that don’t exist. If a sender sends a lot of emails to bad email addresses then it looks like they are spamming and trying to harvest email accounts.

2. User complaints. If users are clicking the “this is junk” or “this is spam” buttons on your emails then they are complaining about the emails.

The combination of these two items in relation to the quantity of email being sent create a sort of reputation for the IP address of who is sending the email. There are also a lot of other technical things about how emails are sent that must be done correctly. I won’t go in to these technical details here.

So how does this apply to CRM/ILM software?

Most vendors use one or a small number of IP addresses for all of their customers. So everyone is sharing the same IP address and the same reputation. The problem with this is one dealer can ruin it for everyone by continually spamming the world. But, it also isn’t feasiable to have hundreds of IP address either if you have a lot of dealers to provide email for.

Another thing to think about is no reputation is potentially worse than a good reputation. I mention this because if you did have your own IP address you would probably not send enough email to register a good reputation. So your reputation would just forever be unknown. So there are potential benefits of having a shared IP if every does a good job.

I’ve seen dealers send “quote of the day” emails to their entire customer database on a daily basis. You can imagine how many SPAM complaints that generates very quickly.

So how do you know if your emails are being delivered?

Only way to know is to send test emails to a yahoo, gmail, hotmail, aol and other email accounts to check. Your results could vary from day to day though. The reputation of a sender continually changes.

What can you do to ensure your email are delivered?

1. Take time to send quality and professionally written and looking emails to your customers. Don’t send size 72 point font in bold red font.

2. Make sure every email has a clear way to unsubscribe so you don’t send them any more emails. You are better off having them unsubscribe than flag your email as SPAM and a user complaint. That user complaint will keep you from emailing someone else who really wants to receive your emails.

3. Keep a clean email list. If you export email lists from one tool and import them in another, be sure to exclude emails of people who previously opted out or their emails were found to be invalid before.

4. Always include in the email your address and contact information. Be sure to list the name of dealership, other ways to contact you and the location of the store. The CAN-SPAM law requires you to list the location of the company sending the email. It is also much more professional looking and it builds trust with the recipient that you aren’t spamming them if you are genuinely listing information on how to contact you. Do spammers usually send you their contact information and address? No. This seems like a simple thing but dealers don’t do it and most vendors don’t enforce this.

5. Include in the email why you are contacting the customer. Basically you want to remind them that they are receiving the email because you did business with them in the past or they just submitted a lead or etc. You want to remind them that the message isn’t SPAM.

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Some of these items can be enforced by your ILM/CRM provider. However most vendors leave it up to you. However, since most likely you are sharing an email reputation with several other dealers because you are sharing IP addresses, the other dealer’s may not care as much as you. So it is better if the ILM/CRM vendor forces certain standards and compliance.

VinSolutions enforces certain standards for this reason. Occasionally our customers even complain about some of the content we automatically put in the emails. But they don’t understand we are trying to protect and help them….
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What if my emails are going in to the junk folder?

Unfortunately there probably isn’t much you can do. But you can start by trying my tips above. You may have to switch to a different ILM vendor if your having a lot of serious problems getting your emails delivered. A CRM/ILM tool isn’t worth anything if it can’t delivery your email messages.

As a side note, Yahoo is by far the most difficult to send email to.

What about whitelisting?

First off, to become whitelisted you would have to have a very good reputation as a sender to qualify. You have to have very low complaint rates and conform to a lot of other requirements. However, if you have a very good reputation as a sender… you probably wouldn’t need to be on a whitelist.

In all actuality, there is only one magical white list and they told me that less than 15% of companies are eligible to get on that list. One of the top requirements is the IP address of the sender can only send email for a single company. So virtually all commercial senders can’t be whitelisted. They told me to follow all the best practices and have a low complaint rate and I didn’t really even need to worry about being on their list.

For example, based on my research, IMakeNews (IMN Loyalty Driver) is not on the the white list I’m referring to. However, they have a very good reputation as a sender and probably don’t have a lot of email delivery problems.

There are some special techniques to increase email deliverability that you can not control. They must be employed by the vendor providing your email service. Of course I’m not going to share my secrets

Hopefully this was helpful!

If anyone has any questions let me know!

Thanks,
Matt Watson
Chief Technical Officer
http://www.VinSolutions.com

My last post was about a common myth about search engines: “Search Engines Love Video”

Search engines don’t love video, they love popular websites. YouTube is one of the most popular websites there is and it has a very high Google Page Rank. So any content created on the site stands a good chance to rank well in the search engines. Simply putting a video on a webpage alone doesn’t make google love it.

“Video SEO” is really using video to create content on YouTube. There are two main reasons every dealership in the country should use YouTube:

1. YouTube is the 2nd most popular search engine there is. It gets more searches daily than Yahoo, MSN, Ask and all others except for Google. So there are a lot of users searching for virtually anything. You need to get your products and your dealership in front of those millions of users. Luckily YouTube will let you do it FOR FREE.

2. Posting videos on YouTube has some intrinsic indirect SEO benefits. Listing videos on YouTube is not going to create more direct traffic to your website. What it will do is give you a chance to get good penetration in the search engines for long tail key phrases and other phrases that you post videos for. Search engines will drive traffic to your videos on YouTube which will then in turn drive more traffic to your dealership.

What kind of videos should you post on YouTube?

1. Videos about your dealership. Give your current and potential customers a glimpse of your showroom, service department, parts department, and more. Highlight your history, what separates you from your competition, and anything else that would be relevant about your dealership.

2. Your TV commercials. This is probably the easiest thing to do. Get a digital copy of your commercials from your ad agency and upload them to YouTube. You never know, they could be the next viral video sensation on the Internet!

3. Videos of your inventory. As you take photos of your vehicles and prepare them to sell online, add to that process by taking a quick video of your vehicles. If this process seems technically challenging, a product like VinCamera from VinSolutions can make it simple.

4. Anything else you can dream up! Interviews of your staff, video of the hot dogs you give away on busy saturday afternoons, video of your special Mustang club that gets together every month. Anything is possible!

Now of course you should also post all these videos on your website where they appropriately fit in.

You can also include all your videos on YouTube right on your website like so:

http://johnsonautoplaza.com/youtube.aspx
http://www.roosterbush.com/youtube.aspx
http://pontiacindy.com/youtube.aspx

Posting links on your website back to your YouTube videos will help cement to the search engines that the videos are important and will improve their performance in the search engines.

You can also use all this video content as part of your internet and BDC department. You can use your ILM/CRM system to email videos to your customers. For example, send an email to your sold customers with a video about your service department and their scheduled maintenance that needs to be performed. Anything is possible!

For more information visit http://www.vinsolutions.com/motosnap-videos.aspx

Matt Watson
CTO
VinSolutions

This is simply a myth and not true.

Web pages don’t rank higher because they contain video. They rank higher because of other SEO reasons.

Google spiders web pages and ranks them on primarily 4 factors in no particular order:

1. Page titles
2. Page content
3. Back links (how many people link to your page?)
4. Google Page Rank

So why do web pages on YouTube.com rank so highly in search rankings?

Two simple reasons:
1.YouTube.com has a Google Page Rank of 9
2.YouTube.com has millions of back links to it

YouTube videos ranks well because of these SEO factors of course, not because the pages have video on them. Videos are embedded on websites using OBJECT tags. Tags that I highly doubt the search engines even pay attention to, yet alone figure out they are streaming videos and what they are streaming videos of.

So what is “Video SEO” then?

Video SEO is really being able to leverage video to create content on a website that has one of the highest Google Page Ranks there is. Regardless of how good or bad the video is, it enables you to create content on a website that has millions of visitors and a great Google page rank. This is the secret to the success.

More info about Google Page Rank:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

For comparison sakes here is how some popular sites compare when it comes to Google Page Rank:

YouTube.com: 9
autos.aol.com: 8
Cars.com: 8
autos.yahoo.com: 8
Edmunds.com: 7
eBay Motors: 7
AutoTrader.com: 6
CarsDirect.com: 6
Average dealer website: 3-5

So based on this you can see how probable it is for your video on YouTube to rank well on long tail searches, if listed on YouTube optimally.

Listing on YouTube is free and fairly easy to do, but has to be done the right way to maximize the SEO benefits.
http://www.vinsolutions.com/motosnap-videos.aspx

Matt Watson
Chief Technical Officer
http://www.VinSolutions.com

Part 1 – “We’re Talking Back”

One definition of Web 2.0 is the ability for everyday people to change the Internet.

A few years ago the Internet was mostly created by businesses for shopping, news, travel, research, forums and other important things. The Internet was largely a “read only” collection of information where everyday people had no input.

Today, a very large percentage of the content on the Internet was created by everyday people. Wikipedia, blogs, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and dozens of other websites are all based on content created by every day people. We now have the ability to create our own web pages (ex. MySpace & blogs) and make our mark on the Internet. You could say that Web 2.0 gave us our freedom of speech online.

So how did we get here? Well… it didn’t happen over night.

In 1996 web communities like Geocities became common. They allowed users to create their own websites. By the end of 1997 Geocities had 1 million users and was the 5^th most popular website on the Internet. Geocities was eventually purchased by Yahoo and still lives on today as a simply way to create your own website, including a blog.

Blogs aren’t really that new either. A web blog, as a concept of online commentary or online diaries started in 1993. Although the term “blog” didn’t come around until 1999. However, blogging didn’t become mainstream until 2004. I created my first blog in 2003… and it still exists today.

Web 2.0 can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. To me, one of the things it means is we have the ability to create the content of the Internet.

We’re Talking Back.

Matt Watson
Chief Technical Officer
VinSolutions