Is your car dealership text messaging ready to move to the next level of shopper engagement? When was the last time you analyzed, you’re follow up process with shoppers? Now is the perfect time to keep reading about moving your dealership into the Digital Retailing world.
Your Internet 2.0 automotive lead process at your car dealership needs to start with a text message. Click To Tweet If your current process depends on a call or email for the first contact to engage an automotive sales opportunity, it is wishful thinking, and the data supports it. Here is another article that talks more about the power of conversational commerce.Less than 20% of emails are opened, and less than half 48% of calls are answered. These numbers go down when you consider SPAM filters on email and people’s hesitancy to answer calls from unknown numbers. This leads to tons of frustration amongst your sales team, resulting in miss opportunities and cherry-picking leads. If you are looking for even more statistical data to support using texting at your dealership. Here is a great place to start.
Car dealership text messaging is a powerful yet often underserved tool in the average dealership’s current sales process. Yet, it could have a profound effect on results if implemented correctly. Look around you right now, and if you are in public or even at home, I would not be surprised if they are texting. This is how we communicate now, and it is time we put it front and center in our automotive sales process.
First is giving your team a texting tool that can be used anyplace and at any time. Suppose you are restricting your team to texting only out of your CRM. In that case, most likely, your sales team is taking the conversations onto their personal phones, which negates even having texting in your CRM in the first place since much of the dialogue is lost since it is now resting in your sales people’s phones. Plus, now your dealership is operating outside of TCPA compliance, leading to big trouble and even bigger fines if your dealership ever comes under legal scrutinization.
Second, whatever texting tool you give to your sales team, it must align with their existing workflows and habits. If you force your sales team to re-engineer their entire sales process to make up for the shortcoming of your texting tool, then that is a huge mistake that will fail. Your sales team will again revert to using their personal phone to engage your shoppers.
Third, using the right texting tool helps to speed up your Digital Retailing process by understanding what content your sales teams needs at their fingertips to share with shoppers that are both helpful and engaging to deliver an outstanding shopper experience.
Car dealership text messaging needs to become a cornerstone of your Internet 2.0 lead engagement process. It should be put right up front using a TCPA compliant opt-in automotive text messaging platform.
The key takeaways for dealerships are to have an automotive texting platform that is industry-specific that can be accessed anywhere to engage your shopper. So whether your salesperson is at there desk, out on the lot, or on the couch at home, they need the right tool to share pictures, video, inventory, and anything else the shopper needs to build trust in the relationship. Driving revenue with texting is possible and should be at the top of your list to develop your Internet 2.0 automotive lead process.
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