Visit Henson Brand Dealerships’ website, and a pop-up will appear within a few seconds on the home page.

“Click here to see our current giveaway,” it reads, with a button inviting visitors to “register to win.”

That button leads to a form asking for your name, email address, cellphone number and ZIP code. The giveaways — a used car is the prize — are a regular part of Henson Brand’s promotional strategy, designed to increase engagement and leads at the group’s three domestic brand stores, said Eric Barbosa, its operating partner. The stores are in Madisonville, Texas, located between Houston and Dallas.

Henson Brand Dealerships — part of Foundation Automotive, which has offices in Houston and Calgary, Alberta — started the contests in 2019, and they have helped spark about 200 daily social media leads to the group’s website.

About 35 percent of Henson Brand’s business comes from social media, Barbosa said.

Barbosa, 41, spoke to Staff Reporter Lindsay VanHulle about social media and engaging with customers. Here are edited excerpts.

On the group’s marketing strategy

The whole reason we have these 200 leads per day is we’re getting people to land on our website. We use a mobile-first website. And what we wanted to do is to increase our database. Our database three years ago had 35,000 people. We’re over half a million now.

I wanted names, numbers and emails and people landing on our page so that later we can retarget them with our email blasts, text blasts, video blasts, social media — whatever we’re doing — and keep them in the pipeline for branding purposes. It’s hard to gauge what the sales are. I mean, we sell 40, 50, 60 from social media, easy, a month. But the strategy behind it was to get those people in our database.

On giveaways

We give away a free car every month, a used car, to somebody in need. After they click the giveaway, they start shopping. After they start shopping, they find a car. After they find a car, they send an appraisal or they send a credit app. So the strategy for us is to keep them engaged. So we’re really big on engagement and driving them not to just our social media platform, but to our website. And that website’s got to be able digitally to respond to a consumer.

Most people that land on that page, and they see that, they’re going to fill that information out. And we promote that, to go register. That’s the way we do our promotion to get them on our page.

How do you track if your branding is working well? This is the way we do it, through social. And it’s by how many followers, likes and engagements we have. And it’s worked out. The goal still is to have 1 million people in our database here in the next, hopefully, three years, by 2025. And then at that time, now we’re talking about sending them emails, sending campaigns, sending them targeted stuff with a dealership that they’re familiar with. And I think that will have big results when that time comes.

On mobile-first website design

If we know that 90 percent of our consumers [are] finding us on mobile and they’re on their mobile, why would we give them a desktop experience when they’re using a phone?

Sometimes you’ll notice in analytics when they land on a desktop, if you’re seeing people bounce in and bounce out quickly, that means they don’t like the site. What we’ve seen on [the] mobile site [is] they stay longer. You got three seconds to be able to capture them. That site has to be a good, user-friendly, easy on the eyes, straight to the point. If they’re looking for inventory, they should just be able to click, not have to go through 10 different links to find what they want.

On delivering vehicles beyond a small-town market

We’re delivering everywhere. People find us from social, and because they know us, because they see us so much on their phone, on social media or any of the campaigns, the experience is easier. They feel like we’re easy to deal with. And then on top of that, we literally tell them on the phone, “You don’t have to make an appointment to come to the dealership. We can do everything over the phone. We can FaceTime you. We can send you videos of whatever it is you’re purchasing and deliver for free. And on top of that, if you’re not happy, we’ll take the car back.” That removes all the anxiety or pain points.

The consumer wants all the information before they make a decision, and for us, they’re not going to drive three hours to make that decision. We give them everything upfront. Now, if they want to come down and go through that experience, great. If not, we give them the option. And what we’re seeing is just a better experience. And we deliver a lot of cars, and out of state. Some people have driven all the way from Tennessee to buy a car, from Florida, from Boston, just to come out here and experience what they feel they liked about us on social.