Car Dealerships Boost Sales with Text Message Marketing

Text for Info for Car Dealerships
A popular option for car dealerships is to use the text for info feature. Text for info differs from the regular text marketing campaigns in the sense that you are not gathering permission to text people in the future. People are texting in to get one-time information from you. This option is perfect if you want people to be able to walk on the lot and text in a keyword to get information about a particular car on the lot.

Let’s take a look at how this would work. If you choose the keyword auto then you could set up a group for each individual car and update the information as it sells or you move it from the lot. This article tells you how to set up groups. Each group can have a unique autoresponder message set up that will be returned to the recipient within seconds. When you create the groups you will assign an extension to each one, this could be a letter or number – something simple that will be easy for people to text in. If you assign the first group an extension of 1 you would then put signage on a car saying text Auto.1 to 77948 for more information on this car. You can then return a short message with details about the car.

Using text for info on your text message marketing campaign doesn’t give you permission to text them in the future so all ‘send message’ features will be turned off on the account, the phone number is recorded, however, and you could have someone calling those leads that request info on a particular car to see if they have questions or would like to test-drive the car.

Text Promotions for Car Dealerships
Another way to use text message marketing is to send out text promotions for specials at your car dealership. Remember that a text for info campaign does not establish permission for you to text them in the future so if you want to use the service to text out promotions or service appointment reminders you will need to establish that permission through a regular text marketing campaign. With a regular text marketing account a legal default message is sent immediately following the opt-in, letting them know they have opted to receive messages from your company. Recipients only get that message one time and as long as they do not opt-out of the campaign you have the rights to text them as often as you would like to.

Every time anyone texts your keyword to the shortcode their phone number will be added to your contact list. You can create separate groups if you want to have a group for staff and another for current customers that are using your service department, or even groups for those interested in a particular car brand; the options are limitless. Using groups is particularly helpful if you want to be able to send out notices to a specific group. An example might be sending a reminder to the staff that all sales people need to arrive early for a special event, or a message about a service discount or promotion to owners that will be needing to schedule a maintenance appointment.

Your account will also have a master list of all phone numbers so you can send a message to everyone if you are having a big Labor Day or Memorial Day sale or other special event. When scheduling the message you can choose certain groups or even all numbers that are not in a group (this would be good if you just have one group that is only employees and you don’t want to send the promotional text to them.)

As you can see, there are many different ways you can use text message marketing for your car dealership. If you have questions about any of this you can find great examples and video tutorials on our website www.txt180.com or give us a call at 877-989-8180 and we would be happy to assist you in any way we can.

Originally Posted on: September 9, 2021

Posted in: SMS Marketing Uses by Industry
Tags: car dealerships, sms marketing, text message marketing