I am currently reading a book about President Lincoln, and the book details much about life in the United States 150 ago. I often get distracted from my reading as I contemplate the huge changes that have occurred in this country in that brief period of historical time.  Then, they were traveling by buckboard and communicating by letters delivered by horsemen.  That is a far cry from the jet airplanes and emails of today.  And our world seems to be changing at an increasingly faster pace as each year rolls by.

Operating a business in today's environment requires that we stay on top of these changes, or get left behind.  In our case, it is more than we can individually handle so we rely on a staff of very good, experienced people to help us stay on top today's newest challenges.  One of the elements of operating this business for the past 14 years that has changed dramatically is advertising.  We used to mail out eight printed newsletters each year to our customer base, which has about 10,000 names on it.  This was an expensive operation but reached our existing audience and kept everyone that wished to read it up to date with the dealership and upcoming events.  Now we send this monthly email newsletter, and occasional by-monthly updates.  It is obviously much less expensive as well as more time sensitive.  The printed version had to be sent to the printer about two weeks prior to the desired mailbox date. And for several years we used four page inserts in the local newspapers (like the grocery store fold outs).  These were really expensive and required a lot of time.  And from time to time we would use radio and some television.

But times change.  The newspapers have lost readership and their rates have gone stratospheric, even the classifieds.  Radio and television have also become way too expensive for us, and there are so many stations and channels now that it is difficult to know what our customers are listening to, or watching.  And so we join the digital age, and your news and content is brought to you via this medium.  It obviously has reduced our cost of advertising significantly.  There is a problem, however. The old way(s) of advertising allowed us to go to the public in general---we could advertise and broadcast to everyone.  With the web, we have to hope that the customer will come to us.  If you do not click on the email or bring up our website we can not reach you.  So for us, collecting emails and keeping them current is now of utmost importance.  We now have about 3500 active email addresses and are continually striving to add to the list.  It is imperative for us to do so to grow our business.  So, we thank you for reading this missive and please keep us informed of any changes you may make to your contact information (phone, address and digital).  There are not many of you out there reading this, and we need as many of you listening to us as possible. 

Thanks.