Reply.com soups up its auto loan leads

Online lead marketplace Reply.com launched a new auto loan category this week, something the company believes is a natural extension of the lead categories it currently offers: real estate and mortgages.

The company has formed a partnership with the Detroit Trading Company to help create what it claims will be the largest repository of consumers interested in securing car loans.

Payam Zamani, CEO and chairman of Reply Inc., said auto advertising spending is increasingly moving online.

“We simply follow the market,” he said.

He said the company plans to launch several new lead categories in the coming months, including homeowner and auto insurance.

Zamani, who has been in the online lead business since 1994 and is founder of Autoweb.com, said Reply.com was designed to enable smaller businesses, as well as large ones, a cost-effective way to generate sales leads from the Internet.

“We are giving an unprecedented level of control to buyers – they can determine the quality of the leads and which ones they purchase,” he said. “They can segment the leads on many different filters, such as income level, geography, the price point of a consumer and so on. They can really manage their ROI.”

He said Reply's methodology is meant as an alternative to Google's pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, which Zamani said is quite complex and many small businesses can't use it effectively. “We believe pay-per-lead marketing is an evolution of pay-per-click,” he said.