Cobbler’s Shoes For as much time as we spend on our customer’s websites, it seems we’re always neglecting our own.  “Yeah, yeah, I’ll get to that right after I finished this up for customer X”.  Our last redesign was a good first step and improvement from the previous site and while that gave us a better platform to share our expertise about what we do, our industry and our opinion on things – it fell a bit short in the “explaining what we do” department. So, with the help of a lot o...

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In the coming months you’re going to be hearing a lot from us about helping you to attract, engage, convert and cultivate customer relationships in 2010, all performance programs that are designed to help you sell more by turning anonymous prospects into happy loyal customers.  But there is one area where we consistently spot opportunity for dealers to increase revenue without increasing costs. – customer loyalty.

We all know we should do it.  Customer retention and lifetime value are well documented opportunities in the RV business.   Customers who stay in the lifestyle typically trade every five years and cost 1/5th to 1/10th as much to sell as a brand new customers.  But we rarely do it well – if at all. 

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Strong Online Trends Reinforce Industry Optimism.

Louisville, Kentucky – December 15th 2009:  MyRVAdvantage reported today that both average web traffic and qualified leads generated across all MyRVAdvantage customers is up significantly compared to the same time last year.  “Dealer website traffic was up at least 10% and as much as 54% for both October and November and qualified leads generated are up 32% for October and 23% for November 2009 over the same months last year” said Steven Webster, Vice President and Co-Owner of MyRVAdvantage.  “Our initial data for December shows a slighter lower increase but follows the same trend line.”

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It seems like RV dealers are getting hammered these days by marketing, web and search engine optimization companies telling them how bad their website’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is performing and promising them amazing improvements.  Almost daily we’re hearing from customers who went to a seminar or 20 group meeting where another dealer or a vendor pulled up their Alexa rankings or searched for “RV Dealer” and proceeded to lampoon the unsuspecting dealer’s traffic and rankings in front of their peers.  Oh, and for a small fee, they can “fix” all of that for you.  One of our customers pulled inbound phone reports and figured out that they received 367 calls about websites, online marketing or SEO in one year.  That’s more than one call every day! 

So how are you supposed to learn the truth when you’re being bombarded by companies telling you what you’re doing is just terrible and they can help you “fix it” all (for a fee)? It’s actually easier than you think! With just a few fundamentals, you can decide for yourself if you’re on the right path or not.

 

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If you haven't already checked out the new features in the MyRVAdvantage Showroom Module you really should consider taking a look.  Most of our customers have already made the transition from the 3.0 Inventory Module to the new Inventory Showroom and are already taking advantage of all of the new features including; improved Search Engine Optimization (SEO), automatic human friendly URL re-writing, better looking inventory presentation, more customization over the layout and look, faster and easier inventory management, one click multi-image uploads and our newest manufacture content syndication features and more. 

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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.

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We knew our traffic grew and grew every month, after all it’s part of our job to help dealer’s increase their overall traffic (not to mention we have the monthly bandwidth invoices to prove it) but a careful analysis of our overall traffic revealed that our customer get A LOT of traffic. It turns out that our customers, combined, are seeing more than 2,000,000 Page Views and over 300,000 Unique Visitors every month.

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Strong Sales and Operations Leader takes the Reins at MyRVAdvantage.

Louisville, October 6th 2009: MyRVAdvantage announced today that Tom Mattes has been promoted to Vice President of Sales. “Tom has been a leading force within the MyRVAdvantage team; effectively working with dealers to develop our new performance based programs and solutions while ensuring that the company delivered on sales promises, met deadlines and generated results for our customers” said Paul O’Daniel, President of MyRVAdvantage “We’re excited to see Tom take over the entire Sales and Account Management Operations and expect even bigger things in the future”

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Virtual Business Development Delivers Up To 20% Closing Ratio on Pre-qualified Leads.

Louisville, September 30, 2009: MyRVAdvantage announced today that is has refocused its business as a turnkey virtual Business Development Center for dealers delivering pre-qualified leads on a pay-for-performance basis. “We began implementing a fundamental shift in our business model about a year ago,” said Steven Webster, VP of Product Development & Marketing for MyRVAdvantage. “Our Web and CRM solutions have always been among the best in the industry but in the past they could seem too complex and technical to our customers. We realized that at the end of the day dealers care about one thing – more sales. We know that ninety percent of real buyers visit the Web first so MyRVAdvantage became a dealer’s virtual Business Development Center. We create traffic and convert visitors into qualified leads, we attract new customers, engage and pre-qualify them and send dealers leads that are ready to buy today. Then we cultivate the rest so they’re ready to buy tomorrow. We simplified our approach and aligned ourselves with our customer’s goals - changing not only what we deliver, but how dealers pay for it.”

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Before we can elaborate on this very important question, let's first define the word "prospect." A prospect is a suspect that has engaged with you in some way, whether it be an action taken on a web visit, a phone inquiry, etc. Your goal in this stage is to qualify this prospect to the point that you know the decision-maker and you have identified an interest level in your products and/or services. But it's more than that really.

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A few years ago, many of our customers scoffed at those online RV wholesalers who sold “paper units” only on order, often shipping directly from the factory to the consumer at markups that made it very difficult to compete with on the open market.  Then, a couple of years ago, one of those dealers became the largest volume dealer for a major manufacturer.  Today with the continued tightening of floor plan financing, the evaporation of available used inventory and the public’s increasing comfort in ordering online – some of our customer are reconsidering the is this model or at least a hybrid version of it. Could this be the future of the RV dealership?

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MyRVAdvantage will be attending the 2009 Recreation Vehicles Dealer’s Association International Convention in Las Vegas October 6th – 9th.  Stop by and see how MyRVAdvantage customers are selling more RVs by leveraging our performance based solutions everyday. 

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A few of our dealers are just beginning to experiment with social media sites like facebook and twitter.  Since we launched our new website a few of them noticed our twitter feed that we display on the homepage of myrvadvantage.com.  Quite frankly we were surprised anyone noticed – but good catch!  This is a new module that allows you to connect your website to your twitter account and display the last few posts right on your homepage (or any other page on your site).

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Everyone is doing it;  Celebrities, news anchors, athletes and teens.  And guess what – more and more of your customers are doing it too.  What are they doing?  Tweeting on Twitter of course!  Now you may have been living under a fifth wheel lately and you might not know what Twitter actually is, how it works and what it has to do (if anything) with selling units on your lot.  We’re here to help.  This is the first in a series of articles will explain what Twitter is, how it’s used and how some dealers are already using it to market their dealerships.  We’ll also include some real world examples along with some do’s and don’t to keep you on track.

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The SEO (Search Engine Optimization) engine built into the MyRVAdvantage web platform is designed to deliver terrific search engine rankings right “out of the box”.  By using our “built in” SEO Engine we’ve seen our dealer’s rankings improve within weeks of switching platforms or targeting specific keywords, increasing relevant traffic and increasing the leads generated from their website. 

Well, we’ve been able to make this even better with our latest release of the Inventory Showroom module, ensuring that not only the dealer’s web pages and content get found and properly indexed on search engines, but their inventory does too.

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