The Better Business Bureau reports that car dealerships are the most complained about business type with cell phone sales a very distant second. No big surprise that car dealers are the brunt of consumer complaints. Car dealers have historically had a reputation for underhanded dealings which is why the term, “car salesman” evokes images of plaid jackets, patent leather shoes and toothpick sucking shysters.

To be fair, not all car dealerships are bad and not all car salespeople are scam artists, in fact most of them are quite the opposite. There is no shortage of bad salespeople and unscrupulous businesses in every industry, car dealers just seem to have gotten permanently tattooed with an unethical moniker.

In my marketing book I rant about the uselessness of car dealer websites. I ramble about the absurdity of practically every car dealer on the planet using one of three companies to develop their websites, email marketing and just about any other type of online advertising a dealership does. 

When it comes to marketing why would you use the same company that your competition uses? Every car dealer website seems to be a variation on every other car dealer website. The same useless information used over and over again.So why do car dealers do this? I’ll tell you why, because it’s easy. They have to put zero effort into it. They pick a template and all the content is created automatically. Even in their email marketing they just have to choose a few canned articles and voila! Instant email!  Sounds pretty easy right? When was the last time anything easy produced worthwhile results? The same car dealers that have been accused of scamming consumers seemingly have forgotten one of the oldest rules in the book when it comes to sniffing out a bad deal. “If it sounds too good to be true…”

With the car sales industry taking a major hit due to our current economic landscape it seems that dealerships are taking a second look at the web as a marketing tool and an even closer look at the services they are paying for. Recently I was called into a very prestigious Mercedes Benz dealer in New Jersey to take a look at their Internet marketing efforts.

After looking at their website, pay per click programs and email marketing it became abundantly clear that they were being ripped off. First off their website was exactly what I expected it to be, useless information. What I didn’t expect to see was a search engine spamming technique called, “cloaking”. Cloaking is where you use technology to show a search engine spider one thing and a website visitor another. This type of tactic is what got BMW banned from Google a couple of years ago.

On the Pay Per Click side of things they were paying for a ridiculous amount of irrelevant key phrases. One of the first questions I asked was, “do you sell Mercedes Motor Homes?” the answer was no so I wondered why they were paying to show up under that search phrase? The company handling this program for them gets paid on the clicks so they targeted lots of phrases even if they had no relevancy or benefit to the dealership.

Their email marketing program was no better (big surprise). Again, they are using the same service as all of their completion. Here’s how it works. Every month they select a few canned articles and an email newsletter is sent out to their list of 27,000 names. I asked if all the email addresses were people that purchased vehicles from their dealership. Half were and half were just people that requested information or stopped in while shopping for a car and end up purchasing elsewhere.

At first glance you may not think this is a big deal especially since they told me that they are getting some response. Here’s the catch. If I did not purchase a car from them and I’m on their mailing list chances are I’m on the mailing list for other dealerships as well. If they are all using this email marketing service that means I’m getting the same content from lots of dealerships. This is not only annoying but shows a lack of effort on the part of the dealership. They can’t event take the time to create something original? Here’s an opportunity to show your expertise and all you do with it is show that you’re the same as every other dealer and that I’m not worth the effort.

Long story short (too late) make sure you are involved in your marketing efforts. Know what people are doing on your behalf and stop being lazy! Nothing good happens without effort. If you truly want to connect with your customers show them that you care enough to put the effort in.

Some of you may say that it’s poetic justice that car dealers are being ripped off. Keep in mind each time they rip off a car dealer we the consumer end up paying for it in the end so if you happen to run across any of these car dealer centric marketing companies be sure to show them your appreciation.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 at 8:01 pm and is filed under Email Marketing, Marketing & Sales, Search Engines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.