Welcome to DealerFire Spark Notes
Each month, we host an internal #allhands meeting to announce some of our most impactful enhancements over the past four weeks. While we’re really good at making sure our employees know what’s going on with the DealerFire products, we haven’t been so good at making sure our customers are informed. This is why we’re starting Spark Notes – a monthly email newsletter that dives deep into our product enhancements from the previous month. As well as a brief snapshot into the upcoming initiatives that we’re really excited about.
What are Product Enhancements?
Our product and engineering teams work in two weeks “sprints”, which designate a period of time in which a specific project is completed. Product enhancements refer to the end product of these sprints, resulting in new features, partnerships, integrations and functionality for the DealerFire product line. Each sprint produces up to three enhancements, which are automatically rolled into your current website platform. Enhancements can be specific to the website, digital marketing, and/or Precise Price platforms. The majority of our product enhancement request come directly from our customers, which we try to highlight each month. We want to ensure you’re using the product efficiently and effectively, so we also include the ability from DealerFire.com to submit a product enhancement request. Just fill out the form, add details on what you’d like to see enhanced, and one of our product team members will reach out to get more details and provide insight on our current capabilities and capacity.
How Do I Know If a Release Applies to Me?
One of the unique offerings from DealerFire is dedicated website account management (or, WAM). Your WAM is assigned based on service and region, and their job is to ensure you are using our tools to the best of your ability. you have the luxury of getting a special consulting call each month. Please check with your WAM to confirm time and logistics, but this is a great opportunity to learn all the new things happening with the company. Including new products, OEM programs and partnerships. Your WAM will have all of the information pertinent to your website and what potentially applies to you. Most enhancements are simply for the benefit of the platform, while others promote new services for a monthly cost.
March 2019 Release Schedule
We had a busy month. March marks the end of the Q1 development cycle, which means that over the next 2-3 weeks, you’ll see a large influx of release communication. Here are some of the featured releases for the past four weeks:
Stock Specific Advertising
If you’re looking to find a new strategy for merchandising your VIN-level specials, this is a great approach. It combines discount, finance and lease offer logic with our Manage Offers module. Now, you can use manage offers to add stock (or VIN) specific offers to pages on your website. Just use the “special offers” module in Engine6 and populate your specials in manage offers.
Facebook Lightbox
We’re added the ability for your Facebook page to overlay on your website as a “lightbox” module, which essentially allows you to keep customers on your website, as opposed to opening a new window or tab and forcing them to jump. This is actually a required functionality in most OEM programs (only for Facebook), and show be used as default linking. While the module is available, you’ll need to request your WAM, or DealerFire support, to install on your website.
Vehicle Status in Ignite
Depending on the structure of your dealership, you may want to create SRPs based on vehicle status. These values include:
- In stock: a vehicle is active on the lot and is available for sale
- In transit: a vehicle is en-route to the dealership and is available for reservation
- Sold: a vehicle has been sold and is not currently available for sale
By using these statuses (dependent on IMS provider) you can create flags within Ignite to set your SRP filters, for example, a new SRP that only contains vehicles that are “in-transit”.
Looking Forward to April
April 2019 will see the addition of two new OEM programs: FCA and Toyota/Lexus (TDDS). We’ll also be announcing some new partnerships to address A/B testing and ADA compliance. More to come soon!
