A Better Experience
Customers in any industry, want a better experience. Yet all we do is email, email, email. Engagement rates (responses from the customer) are only around 10% on a good day. Engagement with text is 3 times as great as email, hovering around 30% greater on average. Texting initiatives totally make sense for dealerships, but how do we change the dealership mentality of email as the default form of communication?
Texting is Quick and Effective
Ask your sales team if they had a party, and wanted to invite their friends, how would they contact them? By email? Probably not these days. One person doesn’t make a very good party. Let’s talk to customers the way most people communicate today. Texting is quick, short, personal, and can be effective in getting people on the phone.
Achieve Your Goals
If we know texting creates higher engagement, how can we measure it to ensure salespeople are texting their customers? Below is a chart of several stores showing their texting and email activity in one month. Challenge your team to be at a 1 text to 1 email ratio (1:1). Meaning, if your store sends out 5000 emails, you should also have 5000 texts. Once this metric is practiced, it won’t be hard to achieve your goals. In the case studies below, you can see that some very successful stores are at a 2:1 ratio (twice as many texts as emails).
Effective Communication
As managers, engagement is the key to your success. We need to ensure that all salespeople are using the most effective forms of communication. Remember, the simple question to ask your team is “what is your text to email ratio?” The results will speak for themselves. It’s the 21st century and texting is the new dominant form of communication between tech adaptive people. Embrace it, and use it to your advantage!
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