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Dealership websites that track online shopping behavior

If you have purchased goods on Amazon.com recently, take a minute to go back to their website. Did you notice that it recognized who you were and even made recommendations for you to consider purchasing today?

If you book travel online, sites like Expedia and Travelocity are designed to use your shopping behavior to trigger special promotions and offers. Would it surprise you that travel sites mighty offer you a $20 a night room rate discount on the third visit to a particular hotels reservation page?

Personalization of website pages by online shopping behavior is common practice in the larger ecommerce industry so it begs the question, why should dealership website be a “one size fits all” design? Would conversion and engagement INCREASE if automotive web designers used online consumer shopper behavior and cookie data to personalize the shopping experience?

The answer is simply yes. A personalized website experience has proven to be effective in other verticals yet the automotive industry has just scratched the surface in personalization. The first vendor to knock personalization out of the park will gain significant market share.

Personalized Dealer Websites

TK Carsites a few years back introduced a website feature that changed the home page banner based on the search keywords used to land on the dealer’s home page. This feature was slick but the rest of the website shopping experience was “one size fits all”.

Today, the opportunities for personalization are endless. Let’s say a consumer visits a Chevrolet dealer’s website for the first time and clicks on the used car inventory search page. During their first visit the consumer searches exclusively for used Chevrolet Silverados. The consumer leaves the dealer’s website without submitting a lead or calling.

On this consumer’s second visit to the dealers website personalization could present a home page with three used Silverado’s featured and/or on sale. It could change the used car search page to default initially to display Silverados. Personalization could also change the home page banner to include a slide on new Silverado lease specials.

I use this simple example as a means to illustrate the potential of personalization. Of course consumers will search for a variety of used car models on a dealer’s website, but patterns can be distilled from the consumer’s click activity. If it is determined that the consumer is looking at cars under $13,000 then on a return visit, the dealership website can morph to showcase cars in that price range.

Taking personalization to the next level would be to integrate off-site consumer shopping behavior. Dataium introduced a data model that would capture consumer shopping data and search history that could be used by dealers and industry vendors to personalize CRM systems, website design, and engagement tools.

Dataium is not the only player in the market that has vital shopper data. VinSolutions for example, could be in a unique situation to benefit from consumer shopping behavior on KBB.com and Autotrader.com. I wrote about this potential back in September of 2011 on DealerRefresh.com: “Will Autotrader Build An Exclusive ZMOT Data Network?”

For example, a consumer searches for a used Ford F-150 on Autotrader.com and then decides to open another browser tab to visit the local ford dealer listed on the Autotrader.com Vehicle Detail Page (VDP). If this dealers was using a VinSolutions website, in the future the site might “morph” on the FIRST visit to showcase Ford F150 trucks on the home page, truck incentives, or trucks on sale.

This functionality does not exist today for VinSolutions customers but the potential is there based on VinSolutions being part of the Autotrader Companies. As an industry watcher and commentator, I see many exciting possibilities in the years ahead.

Another example would be Cobalt’s website platform leveraging shopping behavior on General Motors OEM websites. A consumer visiting www.Chevrolet.com and searching for information on the 2013 Chevrolet Impalas could be presented with a “Impala” morphed website when they visit a local dealer the following day that had the Cobalt platform. Again, this functionality on Cobalt websites is not publically available to dealers but could be a personalization outcome.

Personalization is the next big step for automotive retailing. After that would come better CRM integration with the shopper’s online search history. You get the idea, the degree of information that is available could dramatically improve the customer experience and I believe increase conversion.

Question:

Do you agree that personalization and data integration will be a game changer for the automotive retail website experience?

 

I have got great news for all of the GMs, GSMs, Internet Managers, Corporate Marketers, and even all of those vendor partners out there serving the dealership. Did you know that 39% of the valuable phone leads that you drove to the dealership were left stranded on the phone?

Isn’t that great!!

Doesn’t it pump you up to know that more than 1/3 of all the hard fought, expensive phone leads you actually get to convert to a phone call are left hanging on the phone?

Our trained Humanatic call reviewers listened to almost 2M inbound sales calls (1,956,624 to be exact) over the past two months from 346 dealerships and tried to answer one very simple question:

Did the caller get to speak to a qualified person who could help them?

The study spanned dealerships across the country from several different dealer groups and independents. There were large dealerships and small dealerships included, and the result was consistently the same. Once the shopper takes the initiative to pick up the phone and convert, dealerships do a poor job of connecting these shoppers to someone who can help them. The biggest contributor to the 39% was callers asking for a specific employee and not being reconnected if that employee not available. News Flash People!!! - the requested employee is almost never available!

Believe it or not, this is actually really good news for a couple of different reasons. Let me explain.

You are driving calls!

The fact that you have calls that can be stranded is tangible evidence that your marketing efforts are working. In all but pure eCommerce, a call conversion is the most valuable conversion out there. In fact, according to an ATG/Oracle survey 67% of online shoppers will call for any purchase greater than $100. In a car deal where the number is 50 to 500 times that dollar figure, you can assume that number goes up to over 90%.

If your sales lines are ringing then you have inventory that people want to buy and perhaps even more importantly, a marketing approach and messaging strategy that displays your inventory in a way that people are responding to. So go ahead and pat yourself on the back for creating the calls that were stranded. But really think about what that number means. If your dealership is moving 200 units a month, just think about all of the opportunities that you are leaving on the table. Whatever your top line revenue was last month, think about what it might have been if this number was 91% instead of 61%.

This is a problem that is incredibly easy to fix!

This is only a problem because you couldn’t see it before now. You can’t fix something you can’t see. With our new answer the phone pod (below) you can see in real time what your staff is doing with those valuable leads. It’s simple; you want all green arrows up at the top. Whether you start at 52% or 82%, you want to see improvement week to week from your staff. We’ll also let you see how you are doing against your competition.

The report below is a Toyota dealership, so they can look at how they fare week to week, month to month against other dealerships using Dealersocket CRM, other Toyota Dealerships, or other dealerships within their own group. That is a feedback loop that drives improvement. People change their behavior when this is posted on the message board every day. People start craving green arrows. Green arrows = increased revenues.



Answer the Phone! - PLEASE

With all of the complex tracking and analytics tools available today, don’t lose site of the basics! The best way to improve your business is to improve the way that you handle phone leads. This begins with getting that valuable phone up connected with someone who can help them as quickly as humanly possible.

Our Answer the Phone! report will show you your success rate for connecting your leads in real time.
Step 1 – answer the phone. There isn’t anything much more important than that, but step 2 is close.
Step 2 – get them connected to someone who can help them ASAP. A pick up time of 3 seconds looks good until you realize that the call was answered by the receptionist and then got bounced around the dealership before being connected to the right person at the 2 minute mark. That’s not good.

Our reviewers listen to the call and mark the True Connection Time when that caller is connected to a qualified agent. This needs to be less than 20 seconds. Anything over 20 seconds and you start to risk a shift in the caller’s mood. From “I’m excited about a potential purchase!” to “I hate this hold music.” This is not a shift you want. Challenge your team to post green arrows on true connection time. People want to spend money with you, make it as easy as possible for them.

Once you figure out how to answer the phone, you can move on to the next challenge.

Did you know that out of the 61% of calls that did get to talk to someone who could help them, only 6% of the calls included an attempt to set an appointment? I bet that is some information you would like to know.

Questions:

What are you doing to make sure that you convert those phone leads that you fight so hard for and spend so much on?

Are you investing in call tracking products to give you visibility into the sometimes scary reality at your store?

What happens at your store when someone calls and asks for Steve, but Steve isn’t there?

It’s the second Tuesday in September and the phone rings at your dealership. Are you confident that you know what happens next?

 

*Note - Our reviewers also listened to 6,104,017 outbound calls. I think you might be surprised to learn what happens when you tie that data to what is happening on the inbound side. I will hit that on my follow up post. Spoiler alert – there’s lots of opportunity to improve.

Have you looked at your Google Analytics data lately?

Have you noticed the rise of visitors to your dealers website that are using mobile devices?  When you look, you will see that 10-20% of website traffic is coming from consumers using mobile devices. It should come as no surprise that a majority of those users have Apple devices.

 



What are your MOBILE WEBSITE numbers? - Click here after reading this article to join the discussion.

 

Most dealers have been coached to engage consumers using social media. Dealers have active blogs, Facebook, and Twitter accounts but has anyone told them that they are disappointing the same consumers they seek to engage?

How are consumers being disappointed? Dealers share a link to a page on their website via Facebook, Twitter, Digg, or LinkedIn and mobile device users can’t always get to the page. The page is viewable from a desktop device but not a mobile device.

Technology Gaps Complicate Seamless Internet Shopping

This phenomena is caused by a current technology gap in most automotive website platforms. Most website vendors have created separate desktop websites and mobile websites for dealers. So, when a mobile user clicks on a link shared on Twitter or Facebook, it often will just dump the mobile user to the home page of the mobile site because the mobile site does not have page referenced in social media posts.

When you think about it, aside from the home page URL, how many pages that your social media team shares via social media can be viewed on a mobile device?   You may be surprised at that answer. Take a minute to test the experience by clicking on your Twitter and Facebook links from a smart phone.


Testing A Pre-Owned Specials Page

I went to Andy Mohr Nissan’s website and clicked on their Pre-Owned Specials Page.   As you can see above, the page displays perfectly on my MacBook Air.

If the social media strategist wanted to share this page on Twitter or Facebook or include this page as a hyperlink in a blog post, they would just copy the page link and post.

Unfortunately, for mobile users, there is no mapping of this page to an equivalent mobile page.  When I clicked on the same link from my iPhone, I was dumped on the home page of their mobile site, shown on the right.



Is this problem unique with this website provider? No. In fact this is what is happening on most automotive social media posts read by mobile consumers.  The reality is that mobile consumers get a poor conversion experience on primary automotive websites.

Of course if you are using a WordPress blog and tweeting/sharing those pages, your blog may have a plug-in to convert content to a mobile format. But step back and ask yourself how well is the article formatted?

Since mobile traffic will be increasing, what can dealers do?

First, they need to test that their current website platform has this problem. Most will have a problem.

Second, they need to contact their vendor to see if they have a AWT solution in the pipeline.

Adaptive Website Technology

The future of automotive website platforms will be the implementation of Adaptive Website Technology (AWT) also known as Responsive Website Design.   You can read up on this topic my starting with this book with the same name by Ethan Marcotte.

With Adaptive Website Technology (AWT), dealers would have one website that automatically configures the layout of pages to fit the screen size of the visitor.   If the visitor has a mobile device with a smaller screen, the technology decides which elements to display to create an elegant and engaging design.

This will simplify content development and management and larger auto groups can easily identify why Adaptive Website Technology will be a time saver for keeping multiple mobile sites updated.

Of course you can imagine that it will take some time for vendors to offer this as part of their standard solution but companies have started to come to market and others have shared with me that their programmers are busy implementing similar technology.



Dominion First To Market?

One of the first to market with Adaptive Website Technology (AWT) is Dominion Dealer Solutions with their latest upgrade to their Dealerskins platform.  You may have noticed the Dominion display ads on DealerRefresh touting their “Chameleon Like” websites. I decided to reach out to Brice Englert at Dominion and ask him some questions.

Their new Dealerskins product offering will indeed support AWT and dealers will start to see the first live examples of their technology upgrade in August.  Brice indicated that the Dealerskins websites will create a seamless web surfing experience regardless of the device used by local car shoppers.

I have to give the team at Dominion kudos for not only turning around the Dominion/Dealerskins technology platform last year but now to be the first to market with Adaptive Website Technology.

Is AWT a Big Thing?

Yes it is. If you are running Google Adwords campaigns you should realize that mobile campaigns can convert three times better than normal PPC campaigns.  If mobile paid search is so hot, then dealers better have a better landing page experience.  Dealers must have the FULL website content available to web shoppers and not a scaled down inventory search tool.

Adaptive Website Technology will allow dealers to maximize their content, video, and photography investments and maximize engagement regardless of which device a consumer chooses to use to shop for a car.  This is long overdue and a welcome change.

Of course, the top website platforms will be announced this fall in Las Vegas at the 2012 Automotive Website Awards on September 5th.  All of the best website providers have been showcasing their technology to the AWA review team and I have to say that there will be many new offerings for dealers to consider this year.

If you are planning on attending AutoCon 2012 you should make sure you arrive on the 5th to be part of the awards ceremony which kicks off the opening night.

Until then, I will keep readers updated with live tests of the new Dealerskins platform and other vendors that come to market with AWT platforms.

Click here for more discussion around Dominions Adaptive Website Technology.

[highlight color="#fde1c3" font="black"]This is a guest post from Bill Playford. If you don't already know Bill by his name, you may recognize him from the videos he and Joe Webb are featured in. Bill is Vice President and Chief Rocket Surgeon over at DealerKnows. We were on the phone earlier this week discussing some of the false claims in the industry. Our conversation fueled this article..[/highlight]

For those of you who have entered a supermarket in the last twenty years, at some point in time, I’m sure your eyes have fallen upon a tabloid. Is the Pope an alien? Is Lindsay Lohan dead? Is Pat Buchanan a transexual? Unless you just woke up from a coma, you probably just snicker to yourself, and buy your spirulina and flax seeds.

Sometimes, though, throwing out random “facts” can be dangerous. A few weeks ago, I was sitting through a sales pitch that was thinly disguised as a presentation. The audience was subjected to a barrage of “statistics” without any listed sources or sample sizes. In fact, this likable gentleman guaranteed a 20%-23% closing ratio (on third-party leads, no less) if you followed his five-step plan. He GUARANTEED it!

Now I’m guessing most of you are probably scratching your heads, thinking aren’t there a lot a variables to be making those assertions? Inventory? Pricing? Market? Value proposition? Salesperson hygiene? After seeing the results from 30,000 leads/month (give or take) for about 9 months, I would tend to agree with you. Imagine, however, you’ve never read an article or attended a conference regarding automotive Internet sales. You’re a Green Pea. You don’t really have any reason other than to take these proclamations as the rule because you have nothing to compare them to. Therein lies the problem.

I am a big supporter of continuing education and I encourage dealer personnel, no matter what department, to learn as much as they can about their craft. BUT, don’t take everything at face value. The old “don’t believe everything you read” adage still holds true. If a speaker starts offering up benchmark numbers, put on your referee jersey. Here are a few things you should be considering when you’re presented data (dare I say, call someone out on it):

They don’t include source data on their slide
Only a handful of companies commission large scale studies (e.g., Cap Gemini, comScore, JD Powers, Cobalt, etc). If the presenter is trying to position themselves as an authority, they should be confident enough to let you check on the data yourself. Also, since many of these studies are conducted annually or semiannually, the data frequently changes from year to year.

They present the biggest dealer/manufacturer as the rule

Unless you are the biggest said dealer, how can you possibly compare? What if you only have six new Hyundais on the lot and no allocation? What if you live in Juneau, Alaska? What if your dealer insists on retaining dial-up? What often works for the top ten, rarely works for the bottom 1,500.

They use a tiny sample in their study
We work in an industry where 10 million sales is a disastrous year. Think about it. One thousand sales in a national study borders on irrelevant. Would you make bets on 1/10,000 odds? Look for context, qualifiers, and/or statistics based on bite-sized chunks (e.g. 10,000 Jetta buyers, 36,000 non-GMS Buick owners, 100 regional Ram dealers, etc). This is what makes it relevant for your dealership or market.

They use one city in their study

I love slides that start with “we sampled 20 Metro Detroit Ford Dealers,” or “8 Orange County Lexus dealers, or “10 Toledo Jeep dealers.” Those markets are hardly the representative of the whole based on their regional demographics, or proximity to manufacturers and tier one suppliers. If best practices are truly the best, they’ll work everywhere, and not just one area.

Now imagine you are closing your new-vehicle third-party leads at 4%, and the national average is 4%-6%*, and some “expert” tells you that you should be closing at 20%-23%. What do you do? Believe that Elvis does indeed work at Burger King? Take it with a grain of salt. If a dealership just started from zero and it flips 50% of its leads to bad, then it’s plausible. There are always exceptions to the rule, however I personally feel that presenting the “only case” scenario is just plain irresponsible. Start doing your homework, ask questions, and analyze your own results. Don’t be the kind of person who believes that an octogenarian gave birth to a 48 pound baby.

What about you...how do you react when you see or hear false claims or numbers with little to no supporting evidence?
*Data culled from Trilogy’s SmartLeads program

On March 10, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell spoke one of the more historical quotes: “"Mr. Watson, you to need to come over here, I want to see you. We have the silver 1876 Honda Accord in stock and I’d love to show you in person. When can you stop by?”

Wait, that’s not right! So maybe Mr. Bell didn’t try to sell Watson a car over the phone in 1876, maybe he simply invented one of the most important technological devices in human history: the telephone. The evolution of the phone is fascinating and something we can all relate to. Likewise, outbound call tracking technology has evolved over time too.

That’s right, I said outbound call tracking. It’s no secret that tracking inbound calls is a key piece to advertising and operations efforts, but for some, outbound really is the ticket to success. It started years ago with an idea to blindly call prospects and see if they were still in market, set appointments, and confirm appointments. Then the “black box” moved in which added a little clarity by allowing managers to see how many calls sales reps were making and when.

The next step is here: Outbound calling that tracks, records, categorizes, and integrates to CRM adding a layer of transparency in your sales efforts never known before.

The Hawthorne Effect….Revisited

First, let’s not forget about the Hawthorne Effect which says that “What gets measured, gets improved.” Listening to your team’s phone calls and coaching their efforts will improve phone performance. It’s simple: Measuring and monitoring improves performance. It’s the guy at the gym who pushes himself a little harder when a beautiful blonde walks by (Not me I swear…) or the basketball player who stops goofing around at practice when coach walks in the gym.

This has long been understood and utilized on the inbound side but it’s equally important and valuable on outbound calls. Listening to the calls your sales team makes will improve their performance. Why? Because what gets measured, gets improved. Are they asking for an appointment? Discussing models other than what’s been requested? Offering directions? Simply being courteous and friendly? Track outbound calls, listen to them, and find valuable coaching opportunities on both good and bad efforts. Don’t be afraid to push a little harder to impress the beautiful blonde!

Changing the Metric

Let’s say Salesman Sam is required to make 20 outbound calls per day before he can check out and go home. The problem? What do those 20 calls even mean? Did he reach a prospect? Was there actually a live conversation?

This mystery was solved by our outbound call review and categorization feature, Humantic. The data is pretty depressing. In fact, when we started, less than 15% of outbound calls actually reached the intended person for conversation. Salesman Sam’s 20 phone calls a day doesn’t seem so hot knowing he only talked with 2 or 3 people.

A dealership in North Carolina took note and the GM declared “That’s not good enough!” He changed the metric needed for Sam to check out. The GM used the Humanatic outbound call categorization feature to identify all outbound calls as either Live Conversation, Left a Message, or No Conversation. Now Salesman Sam could make as few or as many calls as needed, but he must have 8 live conversations per day. The results were pretty incredible: his success rate more than doubled over a month. Sam realized logging calls wasn’t good enough. He got smart about paying attention when to call and how to reach the right person. The GM didn’t hire another body, expect long hours, or demand hundreds more phone calls. Instead, he got his entire team to double their live conversations by simply paying more attention to when they called. All he did was change the metric! Beautiful!

You already know outbound calling is important to your dealership’s sales and accountability efforts but is a blindfold slowing you down? Outbound call tracking provides clarity, improves your business operations, and ultimately, you may just get the beautiful blonde!

Are you tracking your outbound calls?

If so, are you using it to track the performance of your sales and or BDC personnel?