Online, Are You Studying
The Right Metrics of Success
For Your Dealership
Online are you measuring results based on activity (impressions, clicks, visitors, leads and calls) or sales and gross profits?
In your dealership, would you rather have:
- 100 Internet leads yielding 10 vehicle sales?
- Or 30 Internet leads yielding the same 10 vehicle sales?
Other than cost per lead, do you know what your total cost of selling (advertising, training, software, staff) to get those results is?
How are your gross profits on your various sources of sales?
Do these sources have experiences that encourage consumers to maximize their price obsession on the vehicle?
Do these sources allow you to build value in your brand, vehicles, your dealership and in you?
Do they inspire trust?
Do they leave or encourage the consumer to arrange their own financing? Is that good for your profitability? How successful are you upselling extended service contracts when your consumers arrive with bank drafts for the amount of their purchase?
Here is why I am posing these questions. In working with the dealerships running Ai-Dealer's shopping cart we are seeing a transformation of response levels from consumers as they are able to self-serve the early stages of the sales funnel and stay online deeper into the process than leads have ever let them. The image below captures graphically what many of you have experienced so far. Your web based efforts have brought you a lot of activity and awareness (blue) with consumers... but drastically fewer consumer hand-raisers than in the showroom (leads and calls)... then even fewer who will engage and respond to your follow up efforts... from there, your sales vary according to your Internet sales processes. At least that is the typical model. Naturally there are exceptions.
Difficult questions for many car dealers. I know many of you are not technology folks, but you are retailers, so in layman's terms, this is my explanation of how you/we got here:
- You were told by NADA to get a website because consumers were going online in droves
- You got a brochure website containing generic vehicle info and a contact us form
- Sometimes you wrote an About Us page, but no one ever went there
- Sometimes you put your commercials on your site, but your traffic and leads plummeted when you did
- You put various staff in charge of "figuring it out." Young kids who knew computers, sales veterans, etc. Most failed.
- You went to dealer 20 meetings and shared that "the web doesn't work for my dealership. That you've had a website for years and barely gotten any sales from it."
- You started buying leads from 3rd party services (Cars.com, AutoTrader, etc.) because they seemed able to attract + get consumers to identify themselves to you.
- Your manufacturer started sending you leads and "encouraging" you to follow up with them promptly.
What is wrong with this approach?
- Your own website in its current form is likely all about You, You, You. Customers want to know what you can do for them and will only consume information within the context of what they want from you.
- You haven't marketed your website. If you build it, they will come. So cliche. So not true. And be careful what messages you use to get them to come to you. SEM, PPC, banner ads. What message for banner ads? Where will you place them (which online media properties)? Will they convert into selling opportunities when they do arrive at your site? Have you designed your website for that? How are you going to get them to do that?
- No relationship. If your website design proposes marriage on the first date, before consumers have formed any idea about whether they can or should trust you, you are not maximizing the results you could get. Your online sales funnel will be too wide at the top and too narrow at the bottom.
The self-serve shopping cart change some of these dynamics. Part of the reason most current Internet funnels are too wide at the top is online consumers have no means to get the information they really want related to buying a car without calling or emailing you.
Is it a good use of your staff's time preparing sales quotes for consumers that are just forming initial ideas about what they want to buy? Have you watched what your Internet department goes through to prepare a quote on the vehicle requested, a similar one with more equipment and the nearest used one that you have? Is that an efficient use of their time where the medium allows little opportunity to really know where the consumer is in their decision making process / timing?
If they can self-serve such information (after identifying themselves to you as in market consumers), isn't that a better model until they get further down in the sales funnel?
We are definitely seeing higher Interest and Engagement levels with the shopping cart than by ending consumers' online shopping experience with "call or email." Depending on your baseline and competing calls to action to express interest on a dealer's website, we have dealers experiencing:
- a doubling of the selling opportunities their website produces
- 50-60% engagement rates of consumers responding to dealership follow up efforts
- most of these will make an appointment to come in to the dealership
- some direct buys
- but most importantly significant levels of consumers who buy when they come in
- and they do so at regular showroom closing rates and at regular showroom grosses
Just something to think about. We'll discuss this in more detail at the upcoming Digital Dealer show, April 21st-23rd in Orlando. Ai-Dealer will be exhibiting there (booth #3) and I will be doing the opening presentation for the session which starts out the second day titled "Selling Vehicles, Service, Parts and Accessories Online - like Books and Music" We'll cover topics like the above and some of the myths that exist in automotive about "selling online" by car dealers.
Hope to see you there!
P.S. If you would like to post a comment on this topic, please do so by making a "Reply" at the topic posting we have created in our online forum.
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