February 5, 2011 (Burlington, VT) – Dealer.com, the global leader in online marketing solutions for auto dealers, today announced the launch of an entirely new online web platform, a significant upgrade to its core website offering. The new functionality is the direct result of the company’s extensive investment in research and development, which more than doubled again last year. The overall impact of the new platform, which is fully integrated and accessible through a single login, will be to significantly enhance efficiency and reduce costs for website users.
“We’ve built another groundbreaking product, reflecting in part our deliberate strategy of focusing all our development resources in a single location under one cohesive, synchronized and highly effective team, which in my experience is unparalleled in this industry,” said Dean Evans, Chief Marketing Officer at Dealer.com. “The new back end of the platform is truly revolutionary, and we are the first company to meaningfully infuse analytics into a dealer’s daily routine, with unique dashboards for every module. We are moving well beyond generic data reporting to provide input directly into the decision-making process and help dealers run their businesses more strategically and profitably.”
The heart of the platform is a new ControlCenter, featuring a user interface that is more intuitive and easier to use. With the new ControlCenter, which is compatible with the Apple iPad, dealers can work faster and more efficiently. Users will be able to multi-task easily, and will enjoy full browser functionality even from advanced web apps. ControlCenter also now provides increased flexibility to support product innovation and to enhance the ability of advanced users to customize their solutions.
Another feature of the new platform is a powerful suite of analytics, including a welcome screen highlighting the latest readings and trends in three high-level performance metrics.
Other dashboards feature a variety of new measurement and monitoring graphics to help dealers visualize their business better and make comparisons with their own past performance as well as industry benchmarks. The goal is to educate dealers and enable them to make more informed business decisions.
With the new platform, Dealer.com’s SmartSites are getting even smarter, increasing flexibility and conversion capabilities. Potential car buyers enjoy a more targeted experience, including incentives integration, enhanced CarFlix™ videos, the ability to save searches and retrieve recently searched vehicles, and the automatic population of forms on the website. Dealers have more flexibility in page layout and tool configuration options, such as the ability to use different vehicle details pages depending on their marketing focus.
Also now available with the platform is Dealer.com’s new SocialRelationship Manager™(SRM), the industry’s most comprehensive set of tools to help dealers manage their social relationships. The SRM solution makes it easy for dealers to monitor the online conversation, and aggregates and tracks the trends in reviews from all of the major ratings sites. It also empowers dealers to talk to consumers with a stream of suggested content, and through several new Facebook Social Apps, and provides cutting-edge analytics to enable dealers to track and fine-tune their social activity.
Dealer.com’s Service Marketing Package is also integrated with the new platform, providing a powerful, comprehensive solution to help dealers drive growth in their service business by improving customer retention – and even regaining customers previously lost. The package includes an individualized “online garage” for each customer, “set-it-and-forget-it” functionality that delivers personalized emails regarding scheduled maintenance, vehicle recalls, and timely incentive offers, a monthly newsletter with a wealth of relevant content, and much more.