The company says the new option increases sales opportunities for dealers who advertise inventory on this marketplace by providing an additional channel for communicating with customers.
“It’s a way for dealers to expand their reach without expanding their sales team, capture customers who might not bother to contact them any other way and keep an open line of communication that can help close sales,” says Amanda Ayala, vice president, commercial brands, Trader Interactive.
“81 percent of adults use text messaging; 98 percent of texts are read within four to six minutes of delivery; and 97 percent are opened compared with just 22 percent of emails. That makes texting a powerful sales tool that most marketplaces in our space don’t offer,” Ayala says.
When a potential buyer texts a dealer from a special button on a Commercial Truck Trader listing, that message now displays in real time within the Dealer Center, the dealer-facing backend application. The service automatically responds to the consumer’s inquiry with the appropriate vehicle link to maintain customer interest until the dealer is able to answer and returns all dealer responses in seconds to keep communication flowing, the company says.
Buyers also can click on any listing to instantly connect with dealers by phone, email or chat as well as access dealership location maps, creating multiple points of contact to help move users through the sales funnel.
The Dealer Center tracks each connection while also providing reporting tools to help dealerships optimize their sales strategy, Commercial Truck Trader says. Those tools range from detailed search metrics on the dealer’s inventory to comparative market data such as rankings of the top-performing vehicles in local and national markets, the number of listings currently available for each model and other filters for more complex competitive market analyses.
The text messaging feature is available to dealers as an optional listing add-on at no additional cost. It is part of a series of enhancements for both dealers and consumers that will be introduced across the Trader Interactive portfolio over the next year, the company says.
