Since dealers first began receiving Internet leads, they have sent an auto-responder at the on-set. They’re traditionally blasted out within the first minute of a lead’s arrival and this has been a customary action for most dealers for 15-20 years. The question has always been, if it doesn’t stop the clock, what benefit does it serve?
A better question may be, how do we as an industry make auto-responders beneficial? The answer? Yield positive responses from the prospects.
Our findings:
Consumers respond back to traditional dealership auto-responders only 1.4% of the time. That’s right. Under 2% of auto-responders yield a response.
When measuring the response rate our clients receive with our “DealerKnows Best Practice” auto-responder, consumers respond back at a rate of 38.2%.
The auto-responders that yield the lowest response rate were either dealership-created, OEM-approved, or CRM-provided. If you’re sending an auto-responder (read: not “automated emails”, as those are different), the key is to either elicit contact or build value in your dealership within the text. However, the purpose of lead management is engagement.
DealerKnows Best Practice
To generate an engagement from an auto-responder, you need to:
- Time the auto-responder to send 3 minutes after the lead’s arrival
- Ask pertinent consumer-based questions
- Create the content in plain-text with no links/images/unusual formatting
- Write the text and signature to appear as a personal response rather than an automatic reply
We are proud to introduce “DealerKnows: Data”. Through our solution, TaskTeacher (the industry’s first ever lead monitoring and coaching tool), we’ve been able to statistically analyze over 3 years and 17,000 Internet leads (and counting) on a multitude of criteria. These data points from an unmatched sample size have given us unparalleled insight into the evolving best practices of Internet lead management. This is the first installment of “DealerKnows: Data”, and we’ll continue to provide eye-opening best practices, supported by data, to the dealership masses.
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