The Ultimate Car Dealer Website: Part II
Excerpt from "Mastering the Art of Selling Cars Online"
By: Eddie Coleman
The purpose I am speaking of involves the concept of wrapping every aspect of e-dealer web design around the goal of understanding the mind of the people who will visit a dealer's website. The passion then is to build a website that will turn the maximum amount of visitors into sales leads, period. Everything else is secondary to that purpose. If we find an easier way to build a vehicle database that makes managing multiple dealerships inventory easier but subsequently lessens the visitor to lead ratio, we scrap the project, end of story.
When embarking on a new web design project, the first thing we do is discover what is needed in order to increase sales leads based on existing traffic and then we build literally everything else around that purpose. Everything from corporate structure, design principles, training methods, technical pay plans, office hours, and even dress codes become secondary endeavors to the primary mission.
The purpose is first and foremost: creating websites that convert the greatest possible number of people into dealership contacts. Once this objective is set, you assemble all the rest of the necessary ingredients to fit around it. Going about web development in this way will force you to stay the course, while issues such as streamlining, product pricing and architecture, fall into place accordingly.
In 1999, our company made a number of strategic maneuvers to ensure that we would be able to turn out products that would be priced competitively in the custom web design arena, while creating phenomenal returns on investment. We could have easily accomplished these objectives by taking short cuts on design, etc. but by staying true to our mission we were able to develop creative solutions that otherwise would not be in existence today.
With the focus being placed strictly on creating websites that cause customer interaction, we find that advancements are made based on a psychological understanding of the public we intend to capture. Advancements in technology then become psychology (for the lack of a better word) motivated rather than technology motivated.
Those who convert win
I have been preaching the importance of “conversion rate” relentlessly since 1998. Since then we have turned the theory of conversion rate into factual results and performance levels that I have yet to see challenged in even the slightest degree. When we look at bringing on a new dealership as a client, one of the first things we do is called an “e-dealer profit projection”.
The first step of this process involves looking at the dealership's current website statistics to calculate what percentage of people that visit the site eventually submit a sales lead. I have found the average dealership's website in the United States to have a conversion rate of 2.3%. This means that out of every 100 unique people that visit a given dealership's website during the course of a month that approximately 2.3 will submit a sales lead. The highest percentage our company has seen from a website outside of our client group in the past four years is 4.2%. I can't begin to tell you how much money I've won from people who we're willing to bet me that their dealership's website converts 10% or more.
Once we pull the log files from the server and analyze them using an industry standard statistics program such as Webtrends or Media House, we usually find that the national average or worse is the case. The scenario I often use to demonstrate the power of conversion rate goes something like this:
Let's suppose for just a moment we have two dealerships, and these dealerships are located adjacent to one another. One dealerships sits on one side of the road, and the other dealerships sits on the other side of the road. Both dealerships consist of identical franchises, have identical buying power, advertising budgets, staffing resources, and identical inventories. In other words these dealerships are essentially clones of one another. While this is obviously impossible, if it were actually the case, both dealerships would sell approximately the same number of vehicles.
Now let's throw in one difference between the two stores. Let's suppose that one dealership has a website that has an average conversion rate of 2.3% and the other dealership has a conversion rate of, say, 14%. Now let's also suppose that each dealership's website receives the same number of unique visitors every month. Along with that, each store's sales people close the exact same percentage of sales from the leads they receive, and both stores have the exact same average gross profit per deal.
OK, now let's say each of our dealer's websites receives 5000 unique user sessions per month. Based on our conversion rates we would be able to tell not only the number of sales leads that came in to the dealership but also the number of sales made based on each dealership's average closing rate. In this example, if dealer “A” 's website converts 2.3% of its unique visitors into sales leads we could derive that dealership “A” would receive 115 sales leads out of 5000 unique user sessions. With a closing ratio of 15%, dealer “A” would realize 17 car deals associated with their website for this particular month.
Dealer “B” in this example has a conversion rate of 14% percent. This means that dealer “B” would receive 700 sales leads out of 5000 unique user sessions. With a closing rate of 15%, dealer “B” would realize 105 sales from their website.
I want you to keep in mind as you read this that the example we have just discussed is in no way a pie-in-the-sky fantasy. It is simply the difference between a dealership website that converts an average number of visitors into sales leads and one that converts an exceptional number of visitors into sales leads.
In our example, dealer “B” managed to close 88 additional car deals over dealer “A”. The reason I like to use this example is that I often find that dealerships with particular franchises are competing with other area dealerships that sell approximately the same number of vehicles per month. In that circumstance, having a website that converts can make the difference in everything from next year's allocation to the level of participation a dealer receives from a factory incentive plan. In other words, having a website that converts can mean everything to a dealer that only needs an extra 20 or 30 deals per month to be in the driver's seat over their local competition.
Continue to Part Three Eddie Coleman ,C.E.O. Hyperdrive Technologies Inc.
Park Plaza Tower 715 SW Morrison Ave Portland, OR. 97205
503.227.3515 ext107 503.227.6437 fax
eddie@hyperdrivetech.com
www.MasteringTheArt.com
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