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Text Us message conversion from Website and VDP?
- Thread starter Jeff Kershner
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- Feb 11, 2015
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- Alex
It's a piece of technology that could easily allow dealerships to make smarter marketing decisions, so yes it could easily help sell more cars.
Verdict is still out on this type of technology (biometric data for marketing purposes) and as you well know things generally come late to the automotive vertical or at least products that have been branded as "automotive-centric." I don't see anyone doing this in automotive and I've incurred with various companies to find out about reselling or configuring their wares.
Tools like https://findface.pro/en/industries/face-recognition-for-retail.html (where offline is gathered and then can be cross-referenced to online) would be an efficacious tool at the dealership level. Someone out there is going to make a mint off of this offering in the near future. The reality is, there are security mechanisms placed into those retail systems (aforementioned) as well, not that anyone is stealing cars very easily from showrooms or lots, but...
Online, both Facebook and Google have been on the forefront of developing facial recognition algorithms. The first time you uploaded and tagged a party selfie you signed up for the program. For many consumer and privacy advocates, however, the use of facial recognition and biometric profiling in the physical world is more troubling. You can delete your cookies and your web browser’s cache, and control your social media or phone’s privacy settings. But there are no privacy settings for walking down a city street, or browsing in a mall. And you can’t delete your face.
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- Feb 11, 2015
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I see, yes it's all coming down the pipeline and frankly, I'm surprised someone isn't already doing this and wide scale. The data is valuable.
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Uncle Joe Rule #121:"Just because it's a good idea doesn't mean it's going to work"
I see a shiney new widget that "makes smarter marketing decisions", but, I don't see how it produces more sales (or how it improves my marketing yield).
It's not a completely new concept, do you know of any autodealer / pioneers that are testing it now? If not auto, how about any other ROBO* retailer (e.g. best buy, real estate, etc)?
FWIW, being a laggard in automotive retail is a great place to be. You get to study the concepts deployed in other markets avoid the ideas that delivered under their launch-hype (e.g. iBeacon)
HTH
Joe
*Research Online, Buy Offline.
- Feb 11, 2015
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That could be said of any tool or process in its infancy, and there are plenty that have been doubted over the years (within automotive digital) that greatly convert leads and customers.
"Just because it's a good idea doesn't mean it's going to work"
I see a shiney new widget that "makes smarter marketing decisions", but, I don't see how it produces more sales (or how it improves my marketing yield).
It's not a completely new concept, do you know of any autodealer / pioneers that are testing it now? If not auto, how about any other ROBO* retailer (e.g. best buy, real estate, etc)?
FWIW, being a laggard in automotive retail is a great place to be. You get to study the concepts deployed in other markets avoid the ideas that delivered under their launch-hype (e.g. iBeacon)
HTH
Joe
*Research Online, Buy Offline.
Like any form of valuable data, dealers would have to know what to do with it (most don't). Garnering a better understanding of who your target audience is, in order to market and remarket to them, is absolutely valuable. It's going to reduce your marketing costs. Reducing or killing marketing dollars focused at demographics that in no way shape or form will convert is smart. Focus on those that do and your sales will go upward. It's just smarter thinking and this stuff is just the tip of the iceberg.
Frankly, most dealers don't even know what an RLSA (remarketing list for search ads) is https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6212951?hl=en, https://developers.google.com/analytics/solutions/data-import-user, https://developers.google.com/analytics/solutions/crm-integration.
I would think educated dealerships would be eager to introduce new tools and data such as this. There are plenty of boutique retailers doing this (saw a special on CNN not long ago) and there are probably dealers doing it (those that are don't want to give away any competitive secrets, so I highly doubt there are use cases).
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, because you're damn right. If it doesn't help sell more cars, what's the point, right? At the end of the day, it's about ROI and how a marketing channel converts and this needs to be constantly measured.
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I've said it before, but it bears repeating, "The only conversion that really matters to a car dealer is the one that happens on the showroom floor."
- Feb 11, 2015
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Yes and based upon that logic dealers should be using all best practice technologies in order to get in-market buyers in to the showroom floor. Don't waste your marketing budgets by shooting at out-of-markets and missing (far too many do).
How much waste do you think there is in automotive marketing per year, out of curiosity? I know dealers would want to know this number, because I see a plethora of it via dealership ROI reports.
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@Alexander Lau - Direct Response marketing in automotive works - very rarely. That is the reason why 'leads' still make up a small portion of sales. The consumer shopping process - the customer journey - is way too complex to attribute a sale to any one source.
Dealers may need to start thinking about automobiles as the highly considered, high involvement purchases that they actually are; rather than treating them as impulse purchases (where conversion matters).
This is why Google is talking more about Micro-Moments and less about conversion.
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@Ed Brooks, of course there are many variables that bring in a customer to a showroom and everyone is different. It's a combination of many variables and much of it can be linked to both traditional and now digital marketing.
"Micro-moments" are just a component of Neuromarketing. We could get into a greater discussion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromarketing). Research that studies consumers' sensorimotor, cognitive, and affective response to marketing stimuli. Researchers use technologies such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure changes in activity in parts of the brain, electroencephalography (EEG) and Steady state topography (SST) to measure activity in specific regional spectra of the brain response, or sensors to measure changes in one's physiological state, also known as biometrics, including heart rate and respiratory rate, galvanic skin response to learn why consumers make the decisions they do, and which brain areas are responsible.
Regardless, leads are a crucial component of the automotive dealer sales process. Mapping lead generation to your sales funnel is an essential part of all marketing strategies, it's just much easier to measure digitally.
LeadGen is crucial for eCommerce. #AutoMarketing is NOT eCommerce - not yet anyway.
