Obstacles, Observations and Opinions of an Automotive Internet Sales & Marketing Manager
User story: “I like this car and this dealer is on my way to work, I’ll ask to see if the tires are new…”
Lead is Sent…
Woa, that’s underhanded! It happens to EVERY lead on any car that’s NOT a ‘great deal’.
What do you think? Comment over in the dealer forums.
Let’s be honest: This is not an uncommon question. We have discussed before here on DealerRefresh in the dealer forums.
It’s important to understand best practices for all digital marketing strategies. The answer, most times, is the same. Let the customer’s intent and expectations drive your decision.
Consider these two examples:
The VDPs that shoppers land on will likely have a high bounce rate. That’s because you drove them directly to the last webpage of their journey; thus, you’ve satisfied their search. In these cases, the bounce rate is a false positive.
If you have great on-site SEO and deep linking, you’ll more likely see a high bounce rate. You are, however, reducing the number of people who exit at the wrong time. This bounce rate should also accompany more leads because you offered a streamlined user experience. People got to where they wanted to go.
This isn’t the only false positive.
Yes, VDPs visits are a goal to work towards. When you drive more VDP views from many channels, it can be a false positive that your site experience is creating the shopping behaviors you want. That’s why you must always consider the customer journey and how well you’re getting eyes on inventory from your homepage.
As with any metric, this can be skewed. Third-party sites spend money to get VDP views, but that’s not the same as consumers visiting your site and conducting searches. You can have a site with a poor user experience, poor design, and poor performance that has a lot of VDP views because of the many traffic sources. Remember to analyze user flow throughout the site and make it easy for car shoppers to find what they want.
I got a call from a colleague who is the marketing director of a large auto group and he said he got a call from both Facebook and Twitter stating that one of the dealer’s employees was spouting hate speech on their platforms and that the person has been removed.
My friend removed the employee from their social sites, but the threads were already out. He said the owner wanted to immediately make a statement online. My friend was resistant.
What say you, dealers?
I sent out several emails to some social media vendors and only one responded with “we have not been in this situation.” There are a lot of obvious serious legal and HR issues here (social media policies, training, HR, etc.), but what about the marketing side of things?
Not saying anything might look like the dealer condones (or is ignoring) the speech. Saying something might bring light to a subject that the buying public might not be paying attention to.
Imagine you walk into your neighborhood hardware store – let’s call it Joe’s Hardware and Lumber. Joe’s has been around for decades – family owned, involved in local charity, and a brand that has a strong local reputation. You’ve got a remodel project going on and you’re in need of a new hammer. In the hammer section, you see giant banners that say “these hammers brought to you by Home Depot”, on the hammers themselves, it says “powered by Home Depot”, on the end cap of the aisle there’s a sign that says “come see these same hammers and even more hammers at Home Depot”
In a haze of brand confusion, you end up at Home Depot shopping for hammers.
Here’s the thing: Home Depot (in this alternate reality) doesn’t actually sell hammers, they just host them for display. The upside though, is they have a LOT of options…so you pick out the best hammer you could find, and a lovely employee connects you right back to the hardware store you stumbled out of before. For a hefty price to Joe’s Hardware, of course.
In this ridiculous scenario (in which I say the word “hammers” a LOT), I have just described what 3rd party listing sites have been “helping” dealers with for 15 years. Stealing dealers traffic and selling them back to them at a profit. It’s a brilliant business model that you just don’t see anywhere else in the modern retail landscape.
Skip to the point if you don’t care to read the backstory.
I sit back, this morning, amazed at how unreliable email delivery is. It might be getting worse and worse every year. Due to abusive advertisers we all want to safeguard our inboxes from disgusting amounts of delete button presses. And so, car dealers suffer. Car dealers become email losers.
Sure, dealers’ practicing carpet bombing marketing tactics with “free” email campaigns can absolutely be given all the “I told you so’s” and “you get what you deserve’s” that we care to expound. Anyway, my point is not to get lost in a you reap what you sow scenario.
My point is to reflect on a current purchase experience I am going through for my fiancé. Her lease is up soon and we’ve been shopping. I’m obviously not your typical car shopper, and that becomes quite apparent to my salesperson when asking about cap costs, residuals, and the money factor. They get quite a bit put back when I can calculate a rough payment in my head with those numbers <Alex, stop tooting your own horn> …. But I like to digest the numbers at home and that requires an email to present the numbers lawfully.
The point
Most dealers I have worked with cannot get an email to me. They claim it has been sent, but I cannot receive their emails in my Hotmail, iCloud/Me.com, or GMail accounts. These dealers have had to forward an email to their own personal accounts and then send from there, instead of their CRM, to get something in my inbox.
Their CRM is blacklisted. And the combined forces of sales people, sales managers, and Internet managers cannot fathom why. And I’m not talking about a single CRM system here. This is across multiple dealerships in multiple states. It seems like every CRM system is plagued by this.
So, dealers, do you have a way to measure your email response rates? I believe this is a key metric that can tell you two things: 1) whether your emails are getting through and 2) how good a particular employee is at composing an engaging email.
Are you aware of how much of an email loser you are?
There is a great response to a post in the forums from MitchFlorida that basically says, ‘not all customers are the same.’
I agree with the basic premise completely, but I’ll take it a little further…
The exact quote is…
“There are two kind of car buyers: those who like to negotiate and deal, and those who don’t. The former will rarely go to a one-price store unless he can’t find a similar vehicle elsewhere, which is rare.”
I believe that there are infinitely more than two kinds of car buyers… [Read more…]
This is a rant.
It pisses me off to still see the sales floor referring to Internet customers and forms from the website as “Internet Department” things. When you still hear sales agents say “oh, that’s the Internet department” you know we have a problem.
C’mon, people aren’t searching for your store in Alta Vista using a Netscape browser – things have evolved over the last two decades! Why do we still have this wall between the Internet department and the showroom floor? You do realize you’re much more on the same team than those jerks across the other wall in the service department. Those jackasses are literally raising labor rates on you and making sure every car has a fresh set of wipers. You’d think they’d check the batteries on the front line from time to time.
Inner-departmental things haven’t evolved much over the past 20 years. It isn’t your fault. It is your vendors’ fault.
[USER=7307]@James A. Ziegler[/USER] has been making an argument that they don’t pencil for a while.
[USER=9]@kevinfrye[/USER] can probably comment on Ziegler’s statement that Wyler’s Clutch-powered vehicle subscription site has been offline since November of 2018.
On the last RefreshFriday we learned that Wyler had or was getting out of the subscription service. During that same RefreshFriday, Shaun Kniffin confirmed that Germaine is still doing it.
Is it dead? Does it have a future?
Here is Ziegler’s most recent article on the topic.
Join the discussion in the forums.
It’s a new year, and that means we’re all thinking about how to get the best marketing ROI in 2019. To start, we have to assess- what’s been working and what hasn’t? What stays for another year, and what needs to go?
It’s vital to assess the value of all your marketing efforts. But the assessment itself is difficult. Many people fall into a few different traps:
Let’s dive into each of these problems and then map out some strategies for precise marketing assessment so you can maximize your marketing spend in 2019.
Using the same metrics for every tool
When you have tools that ostensibly do the same thing, it’s tempting to measure them the same way and think of the outcome as a zero-sum game: for example, all my lead capture tools should be measured by how many leads they capture, and the one that captures the most is the winner. But if you take a closer look, you’ll find that even tools with similar goals have important differences. And that means using the same metrics to assess their value doesn’t always work. [Read more…]
Anyone love their phone company? If you are like me, there is nothing I abhor more than needing to call them. Every time I call, I have to do a bit of meditational breathing and mentally prepare myself for what will inevitably be hours of frustration. Not only will there be excessive hold times involved, but I will also be bounced from department to department, left dealing with several different people and having to repeat my issue over and over again. If I’m not disconnected along the way, it feels like victory. Sound familiar?
Now, compare this to the Apple store experience. I make an appointment online, walk into the store at my designated time and get assigned an Apple Genius who will help me every step of the way. Not only do they stay by my side, but they are empowered to answer questions and even ring me up right there on their iPhone when I am ready to transact.
And so there it is — the world we live in, shifting between these two contrasted experiences. And the more Apple-like the world gets, the more we are unwilling to deal with extended wait times and poor customer service.
What would happen if the phone company empowered their frontline employees to help with all of the situations they may be faced with? Think of the minutes a customer spends on hold before resharing the same story 2, 3, 4+ times; or the minutes employees waste transferring people around and listening to the same stories their colleagues have already heard. Would one person be more efficient? Would customers stop dreading the experience and — dare I say — even find it enjoyable?
This is happening within the automotive retail sector as we speak. Progressive dealers around the country are deploying technology and empowering their sales teams to streamline the entire process. And while many dealerships refuse to change, most sit somewhere in between — trying to enhance the experience, but without the tools or buy-in to make it stick. [Read more…]
