"Get your ePrice" for new car inventory?

[ddavis]

DD, look at the RANKING of the "request a quote". For reasons I don't fully understand yet, this button has POWER This ties right to my belief that shoppers tire out and let the sales rep in.

Joe, I have believed that "click for price" encourages customers to get quotes from multiple dealerships. I am seeing this in action at the two Lexus stores. I see the same people requesting a quote from both stores. It isn't common knowledge that they are owned by the same person.

 

[ddavis]

Going to jump back in here! I have been wanting to price our inventory, but also don't want to give up the Get ePrice button to entice the consumer to submit their info. dealer.com is now changing how you can price your vehicle and will include the incentive in the pricing automaticly. For some reason they have not been pulling our invoice price, but are going to start next week. (Actaully they are going to pull the "commissionable cost of sale" so that all RO charges and other charges are absorbed.)

With that said, what we are doing is pricing our inventory as the best price on Used, then we have the Get ePrice button renamed "Duke Discount" and the wording "Our Internet price is our best price upfront with no hassle's. Click the Duke Discount to see if this vehicle qualifies for any additional daily discounts!" What we do IF they ask about the discount is give a $250 off the posted price. This has worked very well for us so far, and we explain our market value pricing, people are very receptive.

That is somewhat our work around to have the best of both worlds, giving a price, and using the Get ePrice. Once DDC gets our invoice correctly pulling, I am going to start pricing more new inventory and pad it to use the $250 discount if it comes up.

Eley, I really liked the DDC website. I haven't seen the back-end tool, for a couple of years, but it was a pain to price vehicles. I hope they improved it. Like you, I saw an immediate increase in conversion rates. I haven't met any of them but they have an office out in the middle of nowhere. I picture it as a halfway house for some very strange characters.

I think you are on the right track. You will tweak it and see the response. It might become less effective and you try something else. Then you will repeat the process. That is what people do that have a passion for it.

 

[Alex Snyder]

"Our Internet price is our best price upfront with no hassle's. Click the Duke Discount to see if this vehicle qualifies for any additional daily discounts!"

Love it :thumbup:

Checkered Flag has had a lot of increased success with "check availability" on used cars since they're diehard on vAuto bottom-line pricing there. If anyone wants to give these a shot I advise two things:

1. A very clear SINGLE call to action. That means one extremely obvious button or form to better entice a consumer's lead-giving willingness.
2. Use pricing rules either in your inventory tool or website tool to make pricing easier to manage. i.e. +300 over invoice for all new 2012 Honda Civic LX models.

 

[Rick Buffkin]

I took our epricer form and turned it into a lead generator $200 Internet coupon form. Before I did this, I had my Internet Coupon in the coupon section on the website and posted on the vehicle details pages as well but I really couldn't track how effective it was from a numbers stand point. Once I converted the epricer into a coupon, it took off like wildfire and now it is my highest lead generator on the website and it has the highest closing ratio out of all the other forms ( 32% this month ). Now in order for a customer to get that coupon, they have to submit their info and it's automatically emailed to them with the info about the vehicle they requested the coupon on. It works great for me.

@ Alex- Talk to your guys there at DDC and see if this is possible with my other coupons on the website. I would love to have my service coupons as lead generators as well. Just a thought

 

[Eley Duke]

I took our epricer form and turned it into a lead generator $200 Internet coupon form.

Now I love this, way to go Rick! I might give this a try and see what happens. Great idea!!

Damn Rick, now you got my ADD in overdrive on this, trying to figure if I try this or if I stick with what I am doing. I wish I could test this and what I am doing at the same time to measure the results.

John????

 

[Rick Buffkin]

@Eley- I promise you that you will not regret it. It completely blew my mind at how many ppl were/are requesting this coupon.

I see other ppl's websites with 3rd party pop-up / pop-in coupons all the time that are DDC sites and it baffles me. You can do this with your own DDC site. Call up tech support and change the label on the epricer. Remember to change it on both the listings page and details page. Upload the image of the coupon you want to send to the customer in control center and plug that image into your epricer auto-responder you send to the customer and your done!

Your sales reps will be jumping all over the epricer leads because of the closing ratios. It happened at my stores.

I've spoken to tech support about making the service coupons as lead generators but for the time being, theres no way to do it but the tech was very surprised with my use of the epricer. Here's a link to my Toyota site.

Beaman Toyota | Nashville Camry, Corolla, Prius, Sienna, Tundra - Serving Murfreesboro, Franklin, Madison

 

[Rick Buffkin]

Eley- One other thing. If/When you edit your eprice auto-responder, don't forget to go into the website manager into the sitemap and edit the epricer form (Header) and confirmation page as well. This way when a customer submits their coupon request, the form can refer to the coupon and the confirmation page can as well.


If your still on the fence about the coupon, remember that coupons are a really big thing right now. Have you seen the show on TLC? Plus, alot of 3rd party vendors are making some big bucks by putting coupons on dealers websites. Keep in mind, you can use this epricer for just about anything. If you want to give away gift cards for test drives, just plug the image in the auto-responder and dress your site up a little and change the epricer lable. Your gonna capture all the lead info and your gonna send the customer their info they requested and it's automated.

Some dealers are not fans of coupons / gift cards and they say they don't work. I think the problem is they don't have an effective way to measure the results. This gives you the measuring stick without having to pay a 3rd party do it for you. All it cost you is a little bit of time and effort!!!!

 

[Alex Snyder]

@ Alex- Talk to your guys there at DDC and see if this is possible with my other coupons on the website. I would love to have my service coupons as lead generators as well. Just a thought

I like it a lot :thumbup:

 

[john.quinn]

Some dealers are not fans of coupons / gift cards and they say they don't work. I think the problem is they don't have an effective way to measure the results. This gives you the measuring stick without having to pay a 3rd party do it for you. All it cost you is a little bit of time and effort!!!!

We implemented -- I should say, we piloted -- the Hook Logic program (I believe) for all of automotive a few years back.

Let me make it QUITE CLEAR that offering a $25 Sheets/Target/Starbucks card for walking through the door is quite a bit different than offering a $200 coupon for purchase.

The Hook Logic concept provides an additional "Hook" to get people to 1. Fill Out a Form, 2. Walk through the door. You can keep your other effective tools without having to sacrifice/change/alter existing lead generators.

I can tell you what it did for us. First, know all those people who "browse" your site, but you never know who they are or if they buy? We started putting 100 more people a month through our ILM process. You're not going to believe my close rate on Hook Logic leads, so I'm not going to bother posting it. Suffice to say BIG. (for those of you who I've had this convo before about our overall close rate, add 15%).

Next, how 'bout this conversation with an I-Lead, "I see you're about 25 miles away -- how about I pay for your gas on your visit? Is tonight too early or tomorrow morning better?" Think outside the box a little...

Next, take "scale" into account. OK -- if you're Mom & Pop, go ahead and buy a couple of Gift Cards, keep them in your pocket, and hand them out when you see the coupon. The rest of us? I'm not gonna mess with all that. I'll validate that they were in the store, and I'm done: click, click, out-of-mind.

I'm quite certain that a $25 Gift Card stacked next to a $200 coupon will outperform the later every which way and how -- I'm speaking from experience.

But maybe this is the coolest thing: you don't have to take my word for it -- 100% trackable and 100% accountability -- no guesswork. It worked for me. More leads, traffic and sales -- for $28 bucks or so a delivery. 'Nuff said.