You’re not selling enough because you have too much traffic on your website and too many leads in your internet department.
First let’s set a few disclosures up front…
- this blog is about helping dealership spending fewer advertising dollars and still selling more cars;
- if you’re a marketing or advertising vendor you’re probably not going to appreciate this post and it’s recommended that you don’t read it;
- this blog post is also a promotion of our products to help dealers reduce advertising spend and sell more cars profitably, if blogs like this annoy you then please do not read further.
Okay, let’s get on with it shall we? Mr. Dealer / General Manager you already have much more traffic than you need to sell more cars than you did last month or during the same time period last year. Really you do and there are more than enough online automotive shopper/buyer studies as well as your own site analytics to prove it.
“The average dealership has more than enough traffic on its website to outperform month over month sales even without any PPC, ReTargeting, or “sales expectancy” Direct Mail campaigns.”
If you don’t know the real numbers for your dealership ask your Internet Director how many unique visitors you had on your website last month. Then ask the following question: of those unique visitors how many of those visitors converted to sales leads for your Internet Department to follow up on? “The average dealership has more than enough traffic on its website to outperform month over month sales even without any PPC, ReTargeting, or “sales expectancy” Direct Mail campaigns.”
The answer shouldn’t surprise you. While you’ll find the percentage of your visitors that converted to leads is very small, the actual amount of leads that your Internet Department is working with is plentiful. And that large volume of leads is a significant reason why you’re not selling more cars this month then you did last month. Your Internet Department has far too many leads. Or shall I say, far too many low performing leads.
Let’s look at an analogy. Take a productive veteran sales performer on your showroom sales team, lets say one that sells 15 plus units per month consistently. We know statistically that he’s writing up around 30 deals a month to get to those sales numbers. You also know – probably first hand from your sales floor experience – the huge amount of time that he invests in greetings, walk-arounds, demos, follow-ups, emails, texts, and write-ups to get to that number. To fully comprehend the problem of “too many leads” in action, next month have that same salesperson work an additional 30 opportunities but the difference would be working with opportunities that will kick tires and leave the dealership without buying, not return his follow-up calls, and the ones that he does get to write-up, end up buried in their trade, have no down payment to offer, no work history, and poor credit. I don’t need to carry the analogy any further do I? By now you recognize that that would be a colossal waste of time for him. All of that wasted time is essentially poor “opportunity cost,” and poor or lost “opportunity costs” will ultimately result him selling less than 15 cars that month, and even fewer the month following. (As an aside, if you don’t understand this analogy you should find a store that’ll let you hang a sales license and take ups for a couple of months before you argue with the analogy.)
Mr. Dealer the goal for your Internet Department should not be more leads as most of your lead provider and advertising vendors will tell you. The goal should be more sales. Or stated differently, your Internet Department needs to have more quality opportunities that they can invest quality time on. Ask yourself or your Internet Manager this question: would you rather work 100 leads that close at 15% or 50 leads that close at 40%? By just focusing on changing the lead mix in your Internet Department to leads that close at a much higher rate you’ll not only sell more cars but you’ll be more profitable too.
Ask yourself or your Internet Manager this question: would you rather work 100 leads that close at 15% or 50 leads that close at 40%?
Today, with how customers shop online, and the factors that determine when and whom they buy from, to compete effectively and profitably you must focus first on your opportunity costs in your Internet Department. Times are not changing, they’ve changed!
“Times are not changing, they’ve changed! Buyers were going to get to your website anyway.”
Check out the graph from a recent Cox Automotive Buyer Study above. There is such a thing as the internet. That means that people who want to buy cars today can easily use the internet to search for the cars they want to buy and they will find your dealerships’ website regardless of your PPC, Direct Mail, or “sales expectancy” marketing campaigns. If you have so much as a fair SEO strategy the buying traffic in your market will find your website whether you like it or not. Your PPC or Direct Mail vendor may tell you otherwise but there’s more empirical proof from “authorities” online than their pretty ROI reports. For example, Google recently put out an The Car Buying Process… recently that pointed out that the average car buyer has approximately 90+ (see image below) dealer engagements during their shopping to purchasing journey. Cars.com put out a study that indicated that one buyer visited 20 dealership websites in one day. (See images below).
ADD GOOGLE IMAGE
ADD CARS IMAGE
Here’s another helpful question that you can ask: call 5 of the recent customers who purchased from you and ask them if they visited other websites before visiting yours to submit their leads. According to the Google and Cars.com studies, 5 of those 5 will say yes. Translation: they would have found you even if your PPC and Direct Mail budgets were zero. (Incidentally they should be.)
Cue the advertising rep: No no, Mr. Dealer, our “sales result oriented” campaigns are pushing customers into the market. We’re creating awareness for your product. Wrong! That’s what the OEM’s marketing budget does, that’s what Tier 2’s marketing budget does (or is supposed to). People who want to buy a brand/model will search dozens of sites on their own – yours included. If your advertising rep doesn’t understand that you have the wrong rep and you should direct them to the many online shopper/buyer studies so they too can learn about how things have changed from just a couple of years ago.
Okay, so by now you understand that you have – by the fact proven nature of how buyers shop – far more traffic on your website than you need. Stop spending money for traffic. You also know that a percentage of those visitors will convert to leads … far too many of them when you consider the opportunity costs that I pointed out earlier. Here’s the rub, leads that your internet department didn’t close did in fact visit and buy from your competing dealers. Nearly 37% of them! Let me repeat that:
“leads that your internet department didn’t close did in fact visit and buy from your competing dealers. Nearly 37% of them!
Of course we can assume that product (particularly in pre-owned) and location had a lot to do with why those leads didn’t buy from your dealership, but more than anything it is the engagement or should I say the quality engagement that your Internet Department didn’t have time to extend to those buyers because they’re working with far too many leads low performing “opportunity cost” consuming leads.
Alright, if you’ve read thus far by now you’re getting the sense that to sell more cars and be more profitable you should do two things:
- provider your Internet Department with a better mix of leads that are ready to buy versus ready to shop;
- spend less money on buying traffic or leads
The second part is fairly easy it’s simply a choice. Stated differently it’s a cancellation or budget reduction letter to your PPC, Direct Mail, and Traditional Marketing vendors. The first part is a bit more tricky. You this part was coming because I told you so at the beginning of this blog. The first part is to give your internet department fewer tire kickers “shoppers” and more ready, willing, and able buyers. The good news is we – Pureinfluencer – knows exactly how to do that and we can help you to do the same.
Do you remember the third disclosure I made at the beginning of the blog? Well it was a true statement. We’d like to share our know-how and products with you specifically Mr. Dealer. Yes we believe in the old adage that a rising tide rises all boats. We believe in sharing our information with the market so that everyone can enjoy more knowledge and success. However we’re also experienced PPC, Mail, and Traditional Advertisers ourselves and we are all too familiar with the spin doctors in those organizations that have a focus toward their own bottom lines over yours and would spin our strategies in a manner that would keep them from doing business with you. Don’t get me wrong, they’re good natured people… but so is the dealer across the street from you and he’s not interested in you selling more cars and reducing your ad budget.
So, as not to waste your time we’d like to make you an offer. We want you to spend less in PPC and Direct Mail over the next few months. We’d also like to you to do so with Pureinfluencer product and services. Here’s our offer, if you employ our products and simultaneously spend fewer dollars on PPC, Direct Mail, or Traditional Marketing – we’ll reimburse you dollar for dollar for any dollar you lose in overall gross sales over the 1st 90 days.