How important are email lead conversions?

[joe.pistell]

Off the top of my head, here are a few factors that can swing conversion metrics, that have nothing to do with the website...

• Franchise
• Inventory Profile
• Dealer's distance from it's major market.
• Dealer's Marketing footprint
• Dealer's Marketing/Merchandising message
• Competition
• Size of Sample

Franchise Matters.
Different Franchises attract different clientele. Their brands also set up expectations. Kia franchises create more leads than Audi (several hundred percent higher). Kia shoppers are price and credit sensitive, where as Audi shoppers (luxury shoppers) have high service expectations, are more brand loyal and more dealer loyal (than other brands).



Inventory Profile Matters.

• Ratio of New vs Used.
• Age and price range of used.
• Franchise(s) covered.
• Width and depth of avail inventory.
• Scarcity of Inventory (100 toyota camrys vs 100 diesel Audi's)

Dealer's distance from it's major market Matters.
A dealers location that is located away from a major market & requires a "planned trip", are far more likely to get a lead than if that same dealership was located in the heart of the metro market (stop by on the way home from work).


Dealers Marketing Matters.
Dealer's Marketing spend and the Dealer's Marketing/Merchandising message can also tweak the numbers. A big luxury one price store with a great following that's located in the city that funded a wing on the children's hospital may have a very low conversion ratio.



Francise Competition matters.
Is the dealer in a competitive market, or, is the dealer all alone and shoppers have little choice?



Time of year matters.
If your study is too short, it may pull in bad weather. Bad weather keeps people at home and makes shoppers more likely to communicate via email. I am sure you've done this, but for those doing homework, make your snapshot wide enough to avoid seasonality.

 

[Pwillits]

Consumers don't fully appreciate the complexity of a car deal until after they've purchased the car. And they forget that until after they've purchased the next car. So, when they're looking online, they're remembering the bad experience they had from giving the dealership their info last time....all the email newsletters they've tried to unsubscribe from, all that junk mail that came to their physical mailbox, and all those voicemails left for them. It was annoying, irrelevant, and hounding.

It is no wonder lead conversion is stagnant or sinking across all dealer websites while the actual visits are increasing. We did it to ourselves.

And more leads = more problems. They do not = more money anymore.

Alex,

I could not agree more. I have been back with my current dealer for two years now after a stint in the "bigs," and after moving from a high profile, website pounding, in your face dealer back to a smaller hometown group, the one thing our clients tell us is, "That was easy!" My goal as an Internet Director is to simplify the process, and for customers to buy-in, we need to build trust. The old hat process has done nothing but sour our previous net savvy clients which in my opinion gave birth to the online review. (Which I welcome!)

My current plan is to focus on weaning the sales managers off of all 3rd party, non OEM, lead providers and move that expense into a web model that provides relevant, up to date inventory, dealership information i.e. (reviews, social and community) and transparent pricing. All with the primary purpose of building trust.

Thank you for your insight and good selling!

 

[csabatka1]

Alex,

I could not agree more. I have been back with my current dealer for two years now after a stint in the "bigs," and after moving from a high profile, website pounding, in your face dealer back to a smaller hometown group, the one thing our clients tell us is, "That was easy!" My goal as an Internet Director is to simplify the process, and for customers to buy-in, we need to build trust. The old hat process has done nothing but sour our previous net savvy clients which in my opinion gave birth to the online review. (Which I welcome!)

My current plan is to focus on weaning the sales managers off of all 3rd party, non OEM, lead providers and move that expense into a web model that provides relevant, up to date inventory, dealership information i.e. (reviews, social and community) and transparent pricing. All with the primary purpose of building trust.

Thank you for your insight and good selling!

This is a very similar strategy to what we are taking. Customers have a lot of mistrust in dealerships in our area and we are hoping to overcome this with a negotiation free one-price strategy with our best prices posted online and on the lot. We switched 2 of our locations almost 18-months ago. We try to market ourselves as Fast, Fair, Simple, and Stress-Free. Up front it was more difficult since we're the first dealership in the area to adopt this model and we are gaining trust that our prices are a percentage under local market value.

We recently dropped Autotrader and focusing more on driving traffic to our group or location sites (one website for group, similar website for each city we are located) through paid SEM with a dynamic Google Adwords campaign which ads are created based on our current inventory. We would like to quit paying for non-OEM 3rd party leads, because the cost per lead and cost per sold for those leads are extremely expensive. With focus on our website and an in-house marketing and web team, we are able to produce a highly effective website that delivers what our customers want. We focus on competitive fair pricing, inventory that customers want, and an easy to use website to deliver those results. I have put a lot of focus on trying to build trust on our site and increase conversion.

 

[csabatka1]

To the OP:

Lead conversion on a website is a tricky metric and everyone has their own method of measurement. There really is no industry standard measurement and I feel this should be a dealer specif measurement. Visitors to a dealer's site has 1 of several motives - shop inventory, view specials, view service, get service, body shop, parts, or just get contact or location information. Using the unique visitor to get inventory form submission factors in visitors that weren't even shopping for vehicles.

To get a better handle on lead conversion for our websites, I take a couple things into consideration. We handle our websites and monitor traffic in-house so their are no vendor shell games or unrealistic numbers thrown out there. I label unique visitors to our listing or detail pages as an "Unique Shopper". A Unique Shoppers is usually 55-70% of our unique visitor total each month. This allows me to get a better conversion for auto leads because I'm eliminating those non-shoppers visitors (visitors for service, parts, body shop, etc) from the calculation. With custom trackable phone numbers on our sites we can monitor phone-ups from our site and I can track our form submission leads from our site. I present 3 numbers for conversion - Total Web Leads (phone/form) / Unique Shopper, Phone Leads / Unique Shopper, and Form Leads / Unique Shopper.

I recently redesigned our Vehicle Details Pages with focus of form lead submission in mind. With a modern design and usability in mind, I saw significant form lead submission increase over our previous design. I don't have the exact numbers in front of me right now, but previously around 1.7% of Unique Shoppers were submitting a form leads, with the new design 2.7-3.1% of Unique Shoppers were submitting web form lead.

Example redesigned VDP:
Used 2008 Buick Enclave For Sale in Lincoln, Grand Island, St Joseph | Anderson Auto Group

 

[TuneyFish]

Chad,

Nice work! If more dealers understood the value of what you've built they wouldn't need to change web providers every few months, and would have complete control over the functionality, UI, and eliminate problems that hurt conv rates like slow page load time, etc.

Dealers need to pay very close attention to what Chad has built and hire a php dev that can do this type of work.

 

[TuneyFish]

To the OP....

Firstly, don't rely on conversion rates that website providers claim to have achieved because they are usually inflated heavily.

If you are seeing poor conversion rates, I would start with the easiest to detect issues first before doing an on-page optimization, ie. install Yslow, a Firefox browser plugin and look at the page load time. If its > 5+ seconds, narrow down the script that's taking long to load, sometimes it's a chat widget or some JavaScript that's delaying the page. Also, install Firebug, another browser plugin and look at the size of the page. The smaller the size, the faster it will load. You may find that they are resizing images in HTML, rather than actually resizing the images.

Test the page in multiple browsers and operating systems, and check analytics to see if conv rates are hurting for a particular browser or OS.

Also, look at Chad's VDP and his "call to action" on the form, as well as the fact his form is above the fold.

If you provide a link to a VDP, I'd be happy to look at it and see if I can see any problems that could be hurting conversions.