Reynolds and Reynolds Marks Early Success with CarLocate.com

DAYTON, Ohio, Jan. 5 /PRNewswire/ -- Reynolds and Reynolds today marked the first three months of CarLocate.com with strong, steady growth in consumer visits to the site and resulting sales leads to dealerships. In October 2009, Reynolds publicly launched CarLocate.com, which is a new and used vehicle search Web site for consumers. Since that time, the site has steadily picked up traffic momentum, week-over-week, drawing an increased number of consumers to the site, increased page views by car shoppers, and increased numbers of sales leads to dealerships.

The site features vehicle inventories from automotive dealerships using either a Reynolds ERA® or POWER dealership management system (DMS).

"We know we bring several unique, important strengths to the table for CarLocate.com and dealers on the site," said Trey Hiers, vice president of Corporate Marketing for Reynolds and Reynolds. "Our track record of automotive retail experience, our technical expertise, plus the insights we gain daily into dealership operations all help guide our product development. For us, CarLocate.com is a logical extension of the computer systems we provide to dealers. It's one more powerful tool we can offer to help them create more business and gain more share of the market - a critical concern especially considering the record number of customers whose primary dealership may have closed in 2009.

"With the help of the tremendous early enrollment to CarLocate.com from dealerships - many of whom signed up well in advance of our nationwide launch - we had a strong momentum that we have been building on since the start. Now, we're really seeing results from our search engine optimization, marketing, and advertising strategies with significant increases in site visits and leads to dealerships."

After the site launch in October, Reynolds quickly added a number of product enhancements to CarLocate.com to further improve the car-buying experience for consumers:

• Green search capability for both new and used vehicles helps consumers quickly and easily shop for eco-friendly cars.
• CarMatch alerts enable registered users to automatically receive e-mail messages when cars that meet their search criteria are added to the site.
• The Share button allows car shoppers to easily bookmark and share their favorite vehicle listings from CarLocate.com to social Web sites so they can seek feedback from people in their social networks.

The company also launched the CarLocate.com Blog to offer consumers one more source of information to help them with buying a car.

Hiers concluded: "In 2010, we expect to build on our branding and marketing activities to continue to increase consumer awareness of the site. We also have a number of feature enhancements planned to improve the usefulness and convenience of the site for car buyers - and for dealerships. All of these activities will help us cement CarLocate.com as one of the premier destinations for car shoppers, which in turn, should increase the number of leads from the site to dealerships and add more value for our ERA and POWER customers."

About Reynolds

Reynolds and Reynolds is the automotive industry's largest and most trusted provider of automobile dealership software, services, and forms to help dealerships improve business results. The company is headquartered in Dayton, Ohio, with major operations in Houston and College Station, Texas, and Celina, Ohio. (www.reyrey.com)

About CarLocate.com

CarLocate.com (www.carlocate.com) combines the best in search technology with the best in site design to make the experience of locating and buying a car simpler, easier, and more effective. With CarLocate.com, anyone can quickly search new and used cars from thousands of dealerships, conveniently narrowing their search by a dozen criteria until they locate the car they want to buy. Consumers also can connect with CarLocate.com on Facebook (facebook.com/carlocate.com), Twitter (twitter.com/carlocate), or e-mail at [email protected].

SOURCE The Reynolds and Reynolds Company