Promoting Your Dealership 2.0 – Modern Social Networking using Old School Email.

As business owners, marketing geniuses and salespeople, we all want to tell you about ourselves.  We want you to visit our website, read our blog, “friend” us on facebook and follow our Twitter feeds on your iPhone.  I think we all know that the marketing game has changed and social networking tools are here to stay.  Many of our dealers now have facebook pages and twitter accounts that we maintain for them as part of our “Attract” strategy and they can be very effective for connecting your store to a new audience.  But how to you get people to follow you or be your facebook “friend” or even know about your last blog post if you don’t tell them about it? 

There is a solution staring you in the face.  It’s been there all along and it’s plain, old, low tech, email.

Using Everyday Emails to Promote Your Dealership’s Social Network

Think about how many emails you send every day.  Personally, I send out between 50 and 100.  Many are replies to other email, but still that’s a lot of email.  And they go to customers, friends, employees partners, vendors…lot’s people.  So, based on my own email volume, I’m already reaching hundreds of people a month with email and usually it’s related to some specific topic or purpose and most importantly, a very welcome conversation.  Unlike SPAM, the recipient expects my email; they’ll open it, read it and reply.  It’s warm.  It’s Opt-In already just by it’s nature. 

Multiply that by every single person in your dealership.  You could easily be reaching over 1000 people from customers & manufacturers to partners & friends. 

What if in every email sent out each day you could let people know about your dealership’s latest promotion or blog post, or your facebook page or twitter feeds?  What if you could quietly let them know about the sale you have coming up this weekend with links back to key pages on your dealership’s website if they want more information about you, or your dealership or your products?

While you wouldn’t want to send out a broadcast email to everyone in your outlook contact list that sais “SALE, SALE SALE!” (after all that would be SPAM), you can very easily include all of your social networking information in a nice, presentable, unobtrusive way using signature lines or “stamps” at the bottom of every single email that lets people know how to connect with you and your dealership. 

It’s kind of a soft. “opt-in” way of saying; “Pssst. Come over here.  Check us out.  We’re hip, connected and plugged in and we have some good stuff going on.”

Stamps and Signature Lines – The Anti-SPAM Promotion Tool

You can easily provide this type of “soft” promotion by including some consistent text at the bottom of every single email you send.  There are really two ways to do this; signature lines and stamps.

Signatures are little blocks of text at the bottom of emails that let you automatically plug in your contact information at the end of every email.  Typically they include your name, title, phone number, email address and maybe your website address. 

Stamps take this a step further.  Stamps began on sites like facebook and Linked-In and include a lot more information, including a photo, links to your site, facebook page, twitter account, etc.  There are even free tools out there (like this FireFox plug in from WiseStamp.com) that not only allow you to create a great looking stamp, but can do things like automatically include an RSS feed from your blog, and even embed your stamps automatically in your emails.

Personally, I prefer the stamps; they look better, are easier to setup and don’t require any work to maintain. 

Here is the stamp I use with my business GMail account.  I create it using WiseStamp.com.  It includes my contact info, a photo (avatar) that represents me, my company info and also my twitter, facebook, linked in and even the latest article feed from our website’s blog.

While signatures can be used easily enough, stamps make it easy to keep things up to date automatically.  For example, when I publish this article, my stamp will automatically update my blog link at the bottom to point to this article instead of the last one I wrote. 

Stamps are designed to make people aware of your networks, click on them and hopefully - connect with you through those networks.  As with all social networking tools, connecting to people who know other people is key.  If just one of your customers “friends” you it has the potential to connect you to their friends…and so on and so on.

Tips and Guidelines for Using Stamps and Signatures

Like anything else, it’s wise to make sure you’re using this technique correctly and professionally for business purposes.  You want this to benefit your dealership, not detract from it.  So, here are a few easy tips to make sure things work correctly:

Be consistent.  Make sure everyone in the dealership uses the same stamp tool and includes the dealership’s social networking links, not their personal pages.  Setup every employee yourself to ensure things look right. 

Be professional.  Stay focused on the business and keep things on track.  You don’t need (or want) your service manager linking to their favorite poodle sites in their signatures.

Keep it simple. This is not the place for blatant advertising or 50 links.  Keep it focused and “opt in” oriented.  People will click on these links, but keep it to five or less.

Have a Policy.  Ensure that this last with employees by publishing a policy for use.  Remember, this is your dealership’s email system…not their personal email.  Treat it as such and make sure your employees do too.

So there you have it.  Another way to quietly market to a lot of people for very little effort and no money at all.