Many of today’s luxury car brands are promoting their December holiday campaigns. But which luxury car drivers see the current month as a December to forget campaign for their car?



Swapalease.com analyzed all listings of its recent Black Friday holiday promotion, which offered deep discounts to people looking to escape their car lease through transfer. Of all popular luxury brands, Mercedes-Benz saw the largest population looking to escape at 21.6% of total listings. BMW drivers…

The battle for customers in the automotive industry is hyper-competitive. Dealers advertise low price loss leaders and court an Internet buyer with competitive pricing that sometimes results in negative gross deals. Service departments advertise low priced oil changes to both upsell and win a new customer.  Dealers send mailers, direct mail, use traditional and digital…

What? WHAT!?!? There have to be required fields on contact forms, right? There have been required fields on contact forms for two decades. Nothing could have changed so quickly that they have become unnecessary, right?

Actually, they're no longer necessary. In fact, they're a hindrance. Here's why:

People aren't stupid

Seriously,…

General Motors has named Mary Barra CEO recently. This is big news for anyone involved with the GM brand and the automotive industry for that matter. We want to know the DealerELITE community thoughts on this news!

What are your thoughts regarding GM's new CEO, Mary Barra?

With Mary Barra at the helm, what do you…

The folks over at DiGiorno Pizza seem to have given someone their Twitter password and said, “Go for it!” They are engaging people in the Twitter-verse in ways that would make many companies cringe. I’m fairly certain that football fans are in their target demographic so it makes complete sense that they are engaging football fans – both real and fantasy. However, they aren’t just talking to them about stats or complimenting great performances. They seem to have an affinity for trash…

Here are a few scripts that you can implement immediately while speaking with prospects and while working a deal. Merry Christmas & Happy Holidays! 

Customer on the showroom while working a deal:

Customer: We're going to wait until after…

Making the decision to add live chat to your dealership website can be challenging, deciding to use a hosted service with outside operators can make it even bigger – even if it's only as a backup option. So, why worry about having a hosted live chat service now? Continued below graphic...…

How Often Should Your Advertising Messages Change?



► How Consistent Is Your Content?

► When Should You Update Website Sliders?

► How Long Should Campaigns Run?

► When Do You Need A New Commercial?



Do you have the type of personality that you feel you must always be changing your marketing strategy for it to work? To build your brand you need to convey a consistent message with content that is recognizable across multiple platforms. That's this week on…

“Third Wave” dealer-branded mobile app leads the mobile revolution for auto dealers, bringing their customers closer than ever before by providing a mobile platform for customer service and increased sales

Daytona Beach, FL – December 10, 2013 – DMEautomotive (DMEa), the science-inspired, results-based automotive marketing leader, today launched Driver Connect 2.5, an innovative upgrade to its leading…

How easy is it to do business with your business? How easy is it to get help? …resolve a problem? …answer a question? The answer to those questions is probably that you don’t know because you’ve never tried to do any of those things.

Want a real report card on how your staff is doing? Try being your own customer.

Here are some things you can do over the phone…

With the holiday season almost upon us, it might be a bit too late to jump on the Christmas sweepstakes bandwagon but it’s certainly a good moment to rethink your marketing strategy and to plan for the next year.

Usually the goal of a competition is to either build a newsletter list or increase following on Facebook or Twitter. Staging competitions with a view of gaining leads for your dealership is not the best mindset to have. Yes, some of the followers/subscribers may convert…

We'll take care of that.

  The Judge sits to decide, which is it? Was the car sold AS IS or as the salesman said, "We go over every car with a fine tooth comb, believe me if you have a problem we'll take care of that."

  I meet with dealers all the time who tell me they…

The next age of advertising is right around the corner. With Google's announcement of +Post ads, we…

Hello and welcome to this week’s Used Car Market Report from Ricky Beggs and Black Book. The Thanksgiving holiday and Black Friday are well behind us and we have had a full week of retail and wholesale activity to…

So what about Aristotle?  Aristotle’s the Art of Rhetoric contains the ‘Three Means of Persuasion’ which are Ethos, Pathos and Logos.

1. Ethos - The moral cause to agree or the audiences perceived character/reputation of you
2. Pathos - Emotional, can be either negative or positive, fear of loss > fear of gain
3. Logos - The logical justification to make a choice, the cold hard facts, figures, specs and…

ALBANY, N.Y. – December 9th, 2013 – Auto/Mate Dealership Systems (http://www.automate.com) announced today that its dealership management system (DMS) is now integrated with Innovative Aftermarket System's (IAS) suite of SmartDealerProducts for automotive dealerships. Dealers using both Auto/Mate's DMS and IAS' SmartDealerProducts solutions can now benefit from real-time information exchange between the two systems.

"A typical…

A car salesman used to spend long days on his feet. Now he's becoming like everyone else—stuck most days in a chair in front of a computer screen. The Internet has…

On October 24, 2013, Instagram announced that they would become the next social media giant to offer up advertising space on their mobile platform. From the consumer’s perspective, it’s easy to understand the resentment towards the announcement. One of the biggest perks of the platform was that users could actually choose the content they were exposed to. You didn’t…