A customer walks onto your lot and you knock on the glass window of your store to alert the salesperson on the point to greet the customer. The minute the customer steps foot out of their car and shows their face, your sales team surrounds them in an

I wanted to begin the last part in our e-mail marketing series by repeating two statistics: 1. According to the Direct Marketing Association’s annual Power of Direct report, e-mail generates an average ROI of $40, nearly double its closest comp

When I speak to dealers or controllers, the two most common questions that I get are: “What is the best DMS system?” and “How many people do I need in the accounting office?” Both answers to these questions depend on your situation. The best

In last month’s article in the July 2012 issue of Digital Dealer magazine: “What changed with CAN-SPAM? E-mail Series, Part II,” I discussed the Federal CAN-SPAM Act, created to curb the growing problems of email spam, otherwise known as un

A typical day for a dealership employee is guided by their job functions. An example of various job functions are answering the phones, cashiering customers, writing customer repair orders and selling vehicles to customers. Of course if an employee�

We can send 20,000 e-mails in less time than it takes to write and mail one letter, so why do we have less time than ever before? Both technology and regulations are the culprits. But, there is one department in the dealership that seems to use time

In Part I of this series (A Brief History of E-mail), I used Hotmail to illustrate how quickly e-mail use skyrocketed in the mid-nineties. Hotmail gained eight million users in its first year, after which Microsoft quickly purchased them for $400 mil

I have both Android and Apple devices and a very limited amount of apps for each. When I first watched my friend scroll through 15 pages of apps on his iPhone, I decided that I wouldn’t download an app unless I had the time to learn how to use it.

This is the first part of a four-part series on the current e-mail landscape and Inbox placement.  Let’s start with a quick look back at how e-mail has developed and grown over the last several decades. The roots of e-mail lead back to the 1960s w