CDK Sites Launch New Price Watch Button

[Chris Leslie]

So yesterday I was doing some changes to one of our sites and I see that on our VDP's there is a new button that says "Price Watch". I click it and it pops open a nice little box that says to enter my email address to get updates when the price of this vehicle changes. I'm thinking to myself "Awesome, i've been asking for stuff like this for 3 years".

I put in my email address and it says to go check my email. I go check my email and there is a nice looking email that basically asks me to Opt-In to get price notifications. At this point I'm stoked because this is the kind of stuff that is a marketers dream.

So i opt in and it takes me to a thank you page back on my website.

Here's where the whole thing falls down.

I go check my CRM to see how this stuff comes across because it isn't really a lead email address as much as a "ok to market to" email address.

Long story short the notification never comes in. I call to CDK and ask whats the deal with this thing. Without going to deep in the weeds. The email address never comes to the dealer. Where it goes nobody really knows.

I can't even begin to explain how absolutely insane this all is.

So what better place to share it than on Refresh and see if anyone knows any more than I do about this.

 

[Jeff Kershner]

Long story short the notification never comes in. I call to CDK and ask whats the deal with this thing. Without going to deep in the weeds. The email address never comes to the dealer. Where it goes nobody really knows.

Let's get deep in the weeds Chris. I'd like to know what their reasoning is behind this... I would also be curious to know if CDK has in any way updated the Privacy Policy to consumer on your website?

 

[Chris Leslie]

So a little bit of an update.

I've been told that there is a way to have this turned off on your website. However, by default it is turned on and you will need to get in touch with your CDK rep to have them turn it off.

It's really unsettling to see where this might be headed.

 

[Alex Snyder]

Sounds like CDK finally got around to copying Uncle Joe's MyCars feature. And with our experience over the past few years with it I can understand why they'd make it difficult to for a dealer to see the "lead notification." .....not saying I agree, but I can see why they'd do it.

The expectation of the shopper is that they'll receive an automated email simply informing them of a price change. That's it. When a lead is submitted to the dealer a CRM or ILM process typically takes over firing off other automated emails and follow-up tasks. This is not what the customer expected.

The same goes for those "email a friend" features and some of the social media shares where someone's information can be captured. It is a tough balancing act for the vendor because some dealers want to comply with customer expectations and others just want to carpet bomb anything the bats an eye in their direction.

 

[joe.pistell]

MyCars & the 'price change alert' feature isn't a lead gen tool, it's an engagement tool. My signature sums it up:

"An Internet Car Shopper's satisfaction is worth more than their leads."
#UncleJoe​

Not attacking leads is hard for many dealers to understand. All you need to do is to 'walk a mile in a car shopper's shoes' to get it*.

That being said, all MyCars price alert emails are sent to dealers. We highly recommend not soliciting these shoppers. Your price change has already done that for you. For those that do, we highly recommend a soft sell with a consultative tone.

HTH
Joe


*Empathy is a secret weapon.
Empathy is the ability to experience the feelings of another person. Working in a store does not automatically give you car shopper empathy, you need to see the world thru their shoes.
http://forum.dealerrefresh.com/threads/uncle-joes-make-over-diary.1683/page-22#post-40306

 

[Jeff Kershner]

The same goes for those "email a friend" features and some of the social media shares where someone's information can be captured. It is a tough balancing act for the vendor because some dealers want to comply with customer expectations and others just want to carpet bomb anything the bats an eye in their direction.

I was thinking about this exact example. Many of our industry websites offer the "email to a friend" feature where the friends information being shared AND the friend doing the sharing becomes 2 separate leads from the website, sent to the CRM, both receiving the same auto-response and triggered follow-up.

 

[Chris Leslie]

Thank you Joe for always referencing your big book of acquired knowledge. But we aren't talking about car shoppers here. The context of the button has no relation to my feelings on the subject.

Whether or not its hard for dealers to fully understand the various levels of digital marketing and what they should and shouldn't do with bits of information doesn't matter here. At the end of the day it's me (the dealers) to decide what we are going to do with that information.

The excuse of "dealers are dumb and don't know how to properly handle things" seems to be the de facto response in these types of cases and I think it's a weak argument.

The facts here are that I pay for a service in which the vendor has placed a widget to capture information that only the vendor keeps and is not shared with me the customer. plain and simple.

 

[jon.berna]

A problem that exists with this type of soft approach is the lack of CRM lead scoring in Auto. Since we don't have procedures or architecture to handle what is a 'sales qualified lead' each CRM essentially treats every lead as sales qualified. I explained the automotive CRM process to a close friend who works in marketing automation using eloqa, marketo, exact target in salesforce, etc. He couldn't believe we don't have lead scoring with personas. This use case is perfect to nurture the customer until the take enough actions that signal - contact me.

The problem with CDK on this issue boils down to execution / communication imo, Chris is right about this. The dealer deserves the right to mishandle leads all they want.

 

[BHavican]

I'm with you Chris. One of my biggest pet peeves is when vendors determine what's best for me and add/subtract/limit features because other dealers may not know what they're doing. I've ended partnerships with other vendors because of this.

 

[craigh]

I was thinking about this exact example. Many of our industry websites offer the "email to a friend" feature where the friends information being shared AND the friend doing the sharing becomes 2 separate leads from the website, sent to the CRM, both receiving the same auto-response and triggered follow-up.

We added this really dumb feature to our leads after talking about this with our Sales BDR trainer.
Every lead comes in with a "How to handle this lead" box at the very top with some very basic information in it.
This was especially important when it came to Email a friend, price alerts, returning visitor alerts and marketing acquisition follow ups.
Sometimes we send a lead to the dealer that wasn't submitted by the consumer.. that notice is the only way we can at least try and stop the dealers from ruining the whole process.