Complete Dealer Solutions

If you’re not sure what an RSS feed is, please read our post “RSS Feeds”.

RSS feeds allow your customers to get the latest news and information in a single place — their RSS reader.  This prevents them from having to go to web page after web page each day.  It’s a way to consolidate information they view regularly.

For marketing, getting into your visitors RSS feeds is like striking gold.  This place is constantly visited, watched for changes, almost as much as their e-mail.  It can constantly be updated with new information and you don’t have to worry about spam folders or the customer not getting your message.

But it also comes with many responsibilities, since it is very easy to be removed from their eyes for abusing the relationship you’ve established.  So be careful what you post, but don’t pass up the opportunity.

So what are good ideas for RSS feeds?  We’ve come up with a few ideas:

• Your service specials.  Creating an RSS feed to showcase all your current specials provides benefits for the customer.  It reminds them their vehicle requires regular maintenance while showing your dealership is there to help them.  Once the oil change notification comes on, wouldn’t it be great to have your oil change special appear in their reader?  Now they don’t have to worry about calling around or finding a deal — you’re already providing one.  Another great way to get them to sign up for your RSS feed — offer RSS Only exclusive offers.  Using our web solution, it’s easy to setup a service special for RSS only.  It’s simply a check box away.
• Your New Arrivals.   If they are casual car shopping, this keeps them abreast of any new vehicles, in case they haven’t found what they were looking for yet.
• Cars matching their needs.  They can register their search options/request and once vehicles arrive, they can be notified through their feed.
• Keep them updated of specials, events and promotions coming to your dealership.

These are just a few of the possibilities with RSS feeds.  The main thing to start them, and keep working until you find what works.  And make it clear what the feeds are.  Many people are new to RSS feeds, but would love the benefit (imagine how happy they would be if you helped them discover it!).

- Aaron

First, the biggest question may be “What’s an RSS Feed?”.  The easiest way to think about it is that it’s like a news ticker, but anyone can publish anything using it.  It’s basically a text-based website, that is constantly updated with the latest information the publisher wants people to have access to.  Then, visitors subscribe to the feed (keep in mind that subscription doesn’t imply a cost — in fact most RSS feeds are free).  By subscribing, you tell your RSS Reader (more about this shortly) that you want to be kept up to date by that feed.

An RSS Reader is a program that will download the feed on a regular basis (usually every few hours, or when the feed tells it that the information will change.

A few examples:  A Large news corporation like CNN will have multiple RSS feeds for the interests of their varying readers.  They may have 1 feed with the latest money news, another feed for the top stories in the US, another for entertainment news, another with baseball highlights and so on.  You can subscribe to as many of the feeds you want.  So if you want info on your stocks and baseball scores, you would subscribe to their money feed and their baseball highlights feed.

Or, for example, if you want to stay up to date on this blog.  We post an RSS feed that will update with changes to the blog, such as new posts when they are added.

Now generally RSS feeds do not include the entire story.  They usually have a title, description and a link to view the whole article.

To view RSS feeds, simple do a Google search of RSS Readers.  Many sites, like Google’s iGoogle page, you can add an RSS feed directly to your portal page.  Or just use their reader at www.google.com/reader.  There are also window applications if you prefer those over web pages.

Stay tuned for more information on how to use the RSS feeds in your business marketing.

- Aaron

So, does bigger = better?  Even though I’m a bit biased, I have to say no.  Actually, for web providers, I’d say the opposite is more true.

Case in point:

A client just switched over to ADP CRM.  (This isn’t a bash against ADP, they were just unfortunate to be the latest example proving my point).  Our client thought they had an issue with the software not parsing a lead properly.  ADP support sends an e-mail back to them stating the lead was not in the proper ADF format, which was then forwarded to me.

Looking at the e-mail, sure enough, it wasn’t the ADF Format, but HTML.  But none of our leads are sent with HTML, all are correctly sent as ADF.  After a quick glance, even I could see that this wasn’t a lead, but actually a message generated BY ADP software!

Now this begs the question about bigger being better?  Sure, they offer 24/7/365 support, but honestly what kind of support are you getting?  The representative didn’t even recognize their own system’s message.  They also jumped to look at just the last message, and not follow the trail back to the source.  The lead parsed just fine, but our client wasn’t used to seeing it where it was.  When dealing with smaller companies (such as us) we are more intimate with our software and can easily update, fix, whatever.  The others, it may take days to find someone who knows what they are doing to help fix it.

Food for though.

- Aaron

Here’s is a great reason why small companies such as Interlink Computing has a definite advantage.  We don’t have entry level web designers hacking away unmercifully at your biggest advertising asset: your inventory list.

Some larger providers (I will leave them unnamed, but check your website to see if it’s them), have decided to only show a vehicle’s thumbnail when the user hovers over the listing.

Now, this really bothers me.  (Yes it’s great for my business, but it’s extremely basic.)  Why on earth would you make the customer work like that to see a picture of your inventory?  It’s like going to the grocery store and having every item on the shelf covered with a black box that only has it’s name, ingredients, and price.  I don’t think you’ll be selling much there.

Even 3rd party portal sites know better.  More pictures are proving to sell more cars, and yet these sites are hiding even the most basic image from their customer.

Not only can they not see it, and you’ve frustrated them by making them hover over the images, but they also now have no point of reference to compare multiple vehicles.

Sorry for the rant, but some things are just inexcusable.  And the person hurt is the unknowing dealership who isn’t web savvy, but still runs an honest business.

Regards,

Aaron