42 replies to this topic

[Pete Z]

Kevin, here is a C&P of the Sea-Doo dealership proposal e-mail for your reading enjoyment. Any and all comments or revisions welcome.

When we come up with a final draft, any member should cut & paste it to thier e-mail program, change the greeting to fit thier circumstance - ie: "Hi, my name is Joe Boater, and I purchased 2007 Challenger from you. I have really enjoyed my boat, but today I would like to tell you about something else......." then e-mail it to thier local dealer. If enough forum members do this, I'm sure that a few dealers will get on board. Optimistically I would expect a dealer participation rate of maybe 10%.

Anyways, here is what I came up with last night:

~BEGIN C&P~

Attn. Owner / Manager / Dealership Web Site Manager

Hello, you may or may not know me, my name is Peter Zaritsky and I am the parts manager at Performance Recreation just north of Orillia, Ont. We are a full-line Kawasaki, Yamaha Marine and Polaris dealer. However I am not contacting you today to tell you about our dealership or products, rather I would like to direct your attention to an on-line community of Sea Doo sport boat owners located at http://seadoosportboats.com. This is a growing and active community of Sea Doo boat owners, of which I am one (I personally own a 2009 Speedster 150 SCIC).

It has come to my attention that there is a unique opportunity for Sea Doo boat dealers to promote thier dealership and products at no expense to them other than a little of thier time. Currently the management of the SDSB website is looking for ways to promote the website and forum. Although there are already over 5000 registered members and the site is currently sponsored by Hydro Turf, we know there are lot's more Sea Doo boat owners out there to attract. We intend to make SDSB the largest and most comprehensive source for Sea Doo boat info on the internet.

That is where we could use your help. If you or your webmaster could put a live link to SDSB on your dealership's home page you can register for the forum and our suggestion is that you set your user name to whatever your dealership name is. It would then be appreciated if someone from the dealership could occasionally monitor the forums, comment on topics and especially provide info or answers to any tech questions forum members may have. The benefit to this is three-fold. You can help to clear up a lot of the Sea Doo boat mis-information that is circulating out there on the internet and promote the product. Your dealership will gain exposure and credibility in the Sea Doo boat community. Last but not least, good information will drive traffic to the site like nothing else. The length of time out of an employee's day to do this would be minimal. The intention being to make this as inexpensive to your dealership in man-hours as possible.

Now the real benefit to your dealership will be realized if you agree to live link http://seadoosportboats.com on your dealership home page then join and participate in forum discussions. In exchange the site management has proposed to create a dealer-only forum where you will be able to post your dealership's in-store specials and deals available to forum members. This would be a great place to advertise used Sea Doo boats that you may have taken in on trade, non-current boat deals, obsolete sport boat accessories that you are clearing out or even service specials that you may be offering. The best part is these posts will be read by a target audience currently comprised of over 5000 Sea Doo boat owners (and that number increases daily). For your protection, no other member, dealer or not, will be able to comment on your posts in the dealer forum. If a SDSB member wants to contact you about a particular item you are offering they will do so by whatever method you indicate in your post, be it telephone, forum messaging or e-mail.

Of course paid advertising on the site in the way of banner ads, live linking to your site, etc. will be available to dealers that wish to pursue such options. Our hope is that when you see the benefit to your dealership of participating in this on-line community that you won't mind paying a little to help support it's continued existence. If this offer is of any interest to you plese feel free to contact Kevin Leclair in SDSB website management via e-mail using the following link: http://seadoosportbo...t&do=Mail&MID=1. Kevin will be able to answer any questions that you may have as well as provide info on live-linking to SDSB from your dealership website. Kevin eagerly awaits your questions or feedback on this unique opportunity.

Best Regards, Peter Zaritsky

~END C&P~

So there its - what say ye?

edit - fix spacing the C&P didn't translate (still not perfect but more readable)

[Kevin Leclair]

Pete this looks great thanks for putting it together! I only made one change which was the link from www.seadoosportboats.com to http://seadoosportboats.com/ - this is done mainly for indexing purposes in the search engines. We have told them to "prefer" the domain without the www. so I would like to keep the inbound links consistent with that.

The only tricky part about the copy and paste is that the link to email me has been auto-shortened via the forums so if someone copies the text straight from here it will present a broken link. I have put your post in a text document so it can be copied from here, hopefully this will take care of it.

 sdsb-dealer-contact-guidelines.txt   4.77KB   7 downloads

Apart from this let's start sending it out and see what kind of response we get, how do we want to keep up with what dealers have been contacted so we don't hit them twice?

[Pete Z]

What if you start a couple dealer e-mail contact report threads divided regionally? For intance, Canada West, Canada East, USA South East, USA North East etc. That way it would be easier for forum members to look up thier own dealer to see if they have been contacted. If not they can take the initiative and send an e-mail themselve's. We could also track dealer response in these same threads.

[Kevin Leclair]

In effort to leverage our Wiki more I have created this http://seadoosportbo...=Dealer_Network to manage our dealer network. This will allow us to track the dealer responses by region and add any other relevant information regarding these contacts. If you guys have any other ideas or anything further you would like to add there then please do, the Wiki has the ability to be edited by any member of the website.

Let me know what guys think, thanks again.

[Mod]

Looks really good so far.

[Kevin Leclair]

I sent it out to two dealers in the Southeast and updated the Wiki. Let's get this going and see what kind of response we get.

[Pete Z]

Sent it off to 8 dealers in Central Canada area and updated the Wiki page accordingly. A few of them I deal with as they are fairly local to me, so it will be interesting to see if I get any response. Keep us posted Kevin if any of the dealers contact you directly.

[Kevin Leclair]

Will do, thanks Pete!

[Pete Z]

Kevin, here is the content of the first (and so far only) response that I have recieved. If he doesn't contact you directly you might want to use the contact info below and send a follow-up e-mail.


Thanks Peter,

Definitely of interest and will follow up.

Regards,

Paul Prentice
Prentice Power Sports Ltd.
P:705-286-2750
F:705-286-4510
pprentice@interhop.net
www.prenticepowersports.com

"QUALITY PRODUCTS BACKED BY SUPERIOR SERVICE FOR A REASONABLE PRICE"

[Kevin Leclair]

Sounds good, thanks Pete. I have yet to receive any responses from the ones I sent out. I will keep sending them out and hopefully we will start receiving more responses.

[Kevin Leclair]

Pete and Mod,

How are your contacts coming along? I have reached out to quite a few more dealers today and updated the wiki - http://seadoosportbo...=Dealer_Network. Still no responses from the first round I sent out so I wanted to see if you guys had received any additional responses or reached out to any new dealers?

[Pete Z]

Been busy with work and whatnot the last few days, but I will send out some more e-mails when time permits. Still have only heard back from Paul Prentice on the first round.

[Kevin Leclair]

Thanks Pete!

[Kevin Leclair]

I hit the remaining dealers in Florida today and a couple in Alabama - updated the wiki, http://seadoosportbo...=Dealer_Network.

[Kevin Leclair]

I have created the Dealer Network forum section too - http://seadoosportbo...dealer-network/

We can also see who is currently in the Dealer Network via this list since I have now created a new group - http://seadoosportbo...splay_name&st=0

[Kevin Leclair]

Pete Z and Mod,

I really appreciate the help from you guys on this, any new dealer contacts yet?

[Kevin Leclair]

Stephen,

Would you be willing to help us reach out to new dealers to see about getting them engaged in the dealer network here?

[STEPHEN X-20]

Of course I will! Since our season is so short here and this is still peak time, I plan to wait until after Labor day to send my e-mails.

[Kevin Leclair]

Sounds like a good plan, thanks!

[gmt]

Hate to complain, but the site loads and runs very slowly. I think that all of the embedded ads etc. are too big. I understand that the ads and pictures are a necessary evil, but any work that could be done to decrease file sizes and scripts running in the background would make for a nicely browsing experience.

Thanks