Devoted to lead generation, lead generators, and successful lead gen campaigns

Auto leads can be profitable, but make sure you can trust the car dealer!  Auto Sales Leads are valuable to a car dealer, because it is one additional source of car buyers.  We found it fairly easy to generate an auto lead, but found it much harder to get a dealership to pay what they owed.

Car dealers pay $400-$600 per car for advertising costs.  If you can figure out how to bring new customers into the dealership, you can work a deal for either a per new visitor rate or get a percentage of each car sale from those you brought into the dealership.

We worked a successful “Fresh Start” program where we got a list of people in the area surrounding the dealership that had poor credit.  With approval from the dealership, who had worked out a deal with a “B” or “C” paper lender, we contacted these people through a call center and told them that they were preapproved for a car loan at Dealership “X” and if they were able to come down before the end of the weekend, we could offer them an additional deal of “x”.

We were quite successful at stimulating traffic into the dealership.  To get the deal, they had to mention that they had been in contact with us (you can give them a code, ask them to ask for a special offer by name or some other way to track the number of auto sales leads you have generated).  The dealerships seemed pretty good at converted the traffic that we brought into the sales floor and selling them used and new cars with “B” paper loans.

Our biggest problem was getting the dealerships to pay us.  Once we were done with the campaign, we were able to show that our cost per lead (and cost per sale) were in the acceptable range and that this project would work for the dealership.  However, once the cars were sold, and the dealership had their money, it was a hard and difficult process to get them to pay up.  And it wasn’t just with one dealership.  Getting them to pay for an auto lead was a challenge with almost all of the 6 or 7 dealerships we worked with.

Also beware that many dealerships have a tendency to pay once and then drop you and copy what you were doing in-house.  Many car dealerships run successful auto lead generation programs in-house. 

There are a number of successful firms out there who have figured out how to drive auto sales leads into a dealership and get well paid for it.  Often the programs include a combination of telemarketing, direct mail, newspaper, and radio to help drive the car leads into the dealership.