Greetings!

As we know, coronavirus badly affected the global economy but it put very adverse effects on the travel industry and dealerships. Though many companies can work from home in this coronavirus crisis but it hard to work remotely for dealerships and their employees. In this thread, I am going to share my ideas about how dealerships can survive in the current pandemic.

First of all, the safety of your staff and customers should be your priority. As in the many states of America and other European countries, administrations are opening businesses gradually so you should get proper safety equipment like a mask, hand sanitiser and disinfect sprays etc. for your staff and dealership at first. 

Secondly, to deal with social distancing instructions, you will have to train your employees. In this regard, you can also hire medical experts and conduct a proper workshop. Withal, if you don't have enough budget to organize such workshops then you can also follow resources like DOCS4OpenDebate to know about the accurate coronavirus measures. This forum is all about the advice of medical experts and their suggestions about Covid-19 measures. 

Now, we need to talk about business survival. It is tough because people are facing severe financial setbacks and most businesses and individuals are not much interested in buying new vehicles. However, it doesn't mean you wouldn't find clients because many companies like retail and courier etc. are still working. To engage more clients, you need to show your online presence. In this regard, a website or few social media pages wouldn't be enough, you will have to make banner ads and need to run banner ad campaigns on related platforms. These efforts would make potential clients able to notice about your dealership. Hopefully, you would aware of how banner ads display on the bottom of websites, YouTube videos and other places. 

Similarly, to stay connected with your clients the use of the web or mobile applications is also very effective. With the help of such apps, you can receive car instalments from them quickly and can also update their portfolios rapidly if you are using the real-time database.

Withal, if you don't have enough development knowledge then you can also go with this serverless app development option to host your application and update data in real-time. Indeed, web and mobile applications are also a part of any business's online presence strategy. By the way, if data privacy is your major concern and you have enough budget then you should try these custom software development services instead of the cloud ones. 

On the contrary, if you are not familiar with online booking of vehicles, inventory tracking and payment procedures and also offer vehicle rental services then Reservety is the best all in one option that you can consider. In this regard, you would just need to pick a website template from here and can subscribe to their rental booking software to track your inventory and allow clients to make payments online. This is one of the best eCommerce software that also supports a variety of languages that's why you can definitely engage numerous potential customers. Hopefully, you would double your sales by using this outstanding software. 

Moreover, you will have to respond quickly with user-friendly details. Don't forget competition is going to be tough. In this regard, you can get inspiration from the Royal Car Center who are offering used cars, vans and SUVs on monthly instalments. It is easy to select a vehicle of your choice from their virtual car showroom with great ease. 

It is also essential to engage potential buyers will competitive prices and additional features. Likewise, you can offer them aftersale services and repairs or can share expert advice with them about the insurance of commercial vehicles. Although to compare van and trucking insurance quotes, you can get help from here but to get the competitive edge, you can ask your own teams to conduct researches for it.

On the other hand, dealerships should stay connected with their customers and should share recent details of the auto industry via messaging or emailing them. In this regard, you can go with two types of email marketing strategies. The first one is inbound marketing where dealers try to engage their existing clients. The second one is outbound marketing where you target the new target customers and you can see this complete guide about outbound emails from here. Indeed, the use of outbound email marketing strategies could also beneficial to engage more customers. Especially this database can assist you in finding potential B2B dealership leads. No doubt, appropriate customer communication is the key to survive in this crisis.

Hopefully, you will improve your communication skills as a business and will try to include more and more online sources to keep in touch with your existing client and attract new clients as well. 

All in all, I provided a few suggestions to you to survive this pandemic. If you have more ideas, you can share them.

I am waiting for your responses.