A car dealership in Ohio has decided to get into the world of mobile apps and try using one to help them sell cars on their lot. Just about any business that wants to make money from mobile minded customers has to have a mobile app to support their business. Many agree and some are still trying to figure out how a mobile app can really help them. Well, the Glockner family has a bunch of dealerships and they were not going to just sit around and assume that mobile apps could not help. The group of dealerships in Ohio has about 320 employees, who work at 3 new car dealerships, 6 used car lots and other businesses in the area.
Tim Glockner is the head guy over at the Glockner Family dealerships and he said that when his daughter was looking for games on his smartphone he got to thinking. Since he is a Honda and Toyota dealer, he naturally searched for those terms and found two dealerships in California using an app created by MobileAppLoader. A $13 a month fee and a one-time setup fee of $150 later and the Glockner family had their first smartphone app for their customers. Right now, the Glockner business spends about $650,000 on advertising and that is actually down from $1 million about three years ago, so paying a couple hundred dollars for a mobile app was an easy call.
“The app was cheap enough. We’re spending a fortune on advertising, so I thought if nothing else we’ll advertise it in our conventional marketing and it sounds cool–it might portray us as cutting edge,” said Tim Glockner about the decision to get the app going. Glockner also mentioned that the dealerships are completely paperless and all salespeople have a smartphone or iPad on the floor with them. A mobile app just goes along with the culture at the dealership.
Glockner said that right now the app isn’t generating as many leads as he thought it would but it does help people to schedule service and all the salespeople have the entire inventory right at their fingertips. Another advantage to the mobile app is that Glockner can send mobile messages about sales, service information and new car specials to those customers that opt-in. Through today, about 2,000 people have downloaded their app.
