Generating More Leads Is Easy: Just Follow Retail Sales Leaders
I've written a number of articles covering opportunities for dealers who invest in identity resolutions technology and a Customer Data Platform (CDP). CDPs can organize and activate shopper signals to create more effective marketing, increase sales, and slow defection rates. Today, I would like to highlight working examples of CDPs with popular automotive retail sales processes.
Dealers who implement an Abandon Shopping Cart philosophy will significantly increase sales and service revenue.
All readers are aware of the abandon shopping cart workflows deployed by online retailers. Go to Cigars.com and leave a box of cigars in your shopping cart. After you leave the website, you will likely get an email with a coupon discounting the items in the cart.
Items can be left in the cart because a shopper was distracted. Other times, it is because the checkout system was too difficult or broken. Sometimes it is because we want a discount and we know how to play the game. Do I have any discount gamers reading this today?
Dealers who take the time to analyze the tools on their websites know that more consumers abandon the tools than those who complete them.
Do You Know Your FCR?
Over 10 years ago, I defined an online KPI called Form Completion Rate (FCR), and it has become a popular metric to measure online sales processes. For example, if consumers click a "Check Availability" button on a Vehicle Detail Page (VDP), a form will normally pop up. FCR tells you the percentage of times consumers want to play the form game.
The math is simple. If, in one month, 500 consumers click the Check Availability button and 100 leads are generated from the process, the FCR = 100 / 500 = 20%.
For more studies in Google Analytics, here are some general FCR ranges:
If you step back and look at these ranges, you can start to understand why dealers need to adopt an abandoned shopping cart strategy. If the dealership's "Get ePrice" form is only converting at 25%, what about the 75% of the shoppers who wanted to know the price of the vehicle?
MANY sales opportunities are lost each month because we are focused on lead forms and not our sales process and the negative impact on revenue!
Designing Abandoned Shopper Workflows
In the example above, a dealer is using TradePending on their website for the three most popular questions consumers ask when shopping online, represented by the three blue buttons. How much is my payment on this vehicle? What am I qualified to buy? How much is my trade worth?
Most consumers do not want to purchase their next car online so just answer their questions!
The "10 Second Trade Value" is a popular CTA button. TradePending , on average, has the highest Form Completion Rate (FCR) for trade tools in the country, which is between 60-70%. That is an amazing number, but still 30-40% of the consumers do not complete the process.
For this dealer, their process is set to require both an email and phone number on the lead form, and it's clear that this requirement discourages some form fills.
When dealers have an identity resolution framework installed on their website which is connected to a CDP, dealers can gain value insights from shopper behavior. Dealers can also know when their customers are back on their website shopping and can identify who does not complete a trade, credit app, or payment workflow.
When you have a sales process partner like TradePending, who is transparently reporting their performance for the payment, credit, and trade tools, then dealers have the data to create better customer experiences and slow the defection rate of online shoppers. Some tools on the market still do not support the Automotive Standards Council specification for transparency, so dealers have a choice where to spend their dollars. Transparency wins.
In the diagram above, a consumer who starts a trade process is "watched" as they complete each field on the TradePending lead form. If the consumer provides a phone number but not an email, or visa versa, the CDP still captures all the data which was provided. By looking into the CDP, the dealer can see when an existing customer (or lead) is abandoning the trade process.
This can trigger a real-time alert in the dealer's CRM which assigns a task to call or email the consumer with a positive message that the dealership has a great selection of new cars in stock, and they want to purchase their existing vehicle. This signal is not a lead but is called a "data up" which is very valuable if handled properly.
Data Ups Need Specialized Workflows - Different from Form Leads
The CRM should have special workflows for data ups. Some dealers will want the data ups handled by automation and other will use a mix of live agents and automation. Dealers will have to look carefully at the compensation plans to make sure that handling data ups is not a penalty to their monthly compensation.
Right now, dealers need more sales opportunities to hit their revenue goals and reduce their floor plan interest costs.
This type of workflow is possible because TradePending supports the ASC specification for consumer event tracking on websites. The company also supports the identity resolution tags needed to make an abandon workflow possible.
This is great news for marketing agencies because all their conversions will be easily seen in GA4.
This workflow can also be easily configured for abandoned sessions from the TradePending "Calculate Your Payment" and "Get Prequalified" tools or any online process which is valuable for the dealership. That's the power of transparency and the support of online standards.
Bonus: Glenn Pasch will be offering a workshop on how to best handle data ups at the Digital Marketing Strategies Conference (DMSC) in April. Let's take a look at a multi-million dollar winner in fixed ops for larger dealer groups who want to leverage their service data ups!
Abandoned Service Scheduler Workflows
Online service schedulers have low Form Completion Rates, running 30-45%. This is a bigger problem than most people understand and that is why digital voice assistants (i.e., Brooke.ai ) and AI-based service scheduling tools are on the rise.
In the diagram above, when a consumer abandons a service scheduler, the CDP can check if the consumer is an existing customer and trigger a real-time call to that consumer. If dealers have a centralized Service BDC, this is an instant winner. Dealers can also hire a trusted contact center partner like Better Car People .
Some of you might be asking how those calls are working, and that's a great thought. Consumers are blown away (positive sentiment) that the dealer took the time to call them and offer help.
Of the consumers who answer the phone, 35% of them are booking service.
The consumers who don't pick up the phone, likely because they don't have Trusted Call Solutions, can be sent an SMS message, if they had previously opted in for text messaging. Otherwise, they can be sent an email offering a direct line for booking a service which may be handled by an automated assistant to make things even smoother.
This service workflow is possible for The Reynolds and Reynolds Company customers because they not only support the Automotive Standards Council 's event naming conventions but they also support identity resolution tags. I wish the other large service scheduler companies would follow Reynolds' lead in helping dealers secure more revenue and improve CSI scores.
Improve Your Retail Outcomes
Dealers reading this article should be thinking about the thousands of sales opportunities which they lost last year because they were only focused on leads and not adding "data ups" to their online conversion strategy.
The good news is the leading identity resolutions companies, CDP platforms, and data activation partners will be at the 2025 Digital Marketing Strategies Conference (DMSC) in Scottsdale, Arizona, April 27-29th. Dealers who want to elevate their digital marketing strategy and increase their sales conversations for variable and fixed ops are invited to reach out to me for a special code to save you money on your DMSC tickets.
Tickets can be purchased here: https://digitalmarketingstrategies.org/
The official website has the detailed agenda as well as the link to book your hotel rooms at our special negotiated rate. Don't miss the opportunity to significantly accelerate your sales this year by managing your first-party data and activating new sales workflows. Learn how to properly handle data ups to help you sell more cars and book more service in a digital age.
P.S. I will have a follow-up article on another breakthrough workflow which identifies existing customers who are back on the website but not filling out a form. This is a larger audience of data-ups which can prevent defection and increase sales.
Co-Founder & CEO at Team Velocity
2 天前I love your thinking, but does it have to be that complicated? If every lead form, like trade value , a shopping cart, or scheduling service is natively built into your website, a CDP isn’t necessary. The website company knows exactly who, and isn’t, filling out every form type and SHOULD automatically be communicating with those customers in a personalized fashion. The challenge is that dealers use so many different companies on their website that you need yet another company to organize all of the consumers that aren’t filling out forms, etc. It’s overkill, expensive, hard to manage and doesn’t solve the root problem. Which is why aren’t more consumers completing transactions online? Our theory is in an “all in one’ solution (incuding a CDP) is the most logical answer.
Business Development Center Manager at Grand Prize Auto, Nanuet, NY
2 天前Great article, Brian. Thank you for sharing’