Pub. 4 2014 Issue 3

14 AUTOMOBILE DEALER NEWS ILLINOIS www.illinoisdealers.com BY HOWARD POLIRER , DIRECTOR OF INDUSTRY EDUCATION, AUTOTRADER.COM T here’s been a lot written recently on automotive marketing blogs about sourcing customers . Indeed, this discussion merits serious consideration because sourcing provides invaluable information that your salespeople can use as a framework for their conversation with a customer. And since it’s easier to sell a car in person versus over the phone or email, knowing what influenced a customer to walk in gives you an even greater advantage. More importantly, though, sourcing is a bottom line issue: When you know what part of your market- ing and advertising (newspaper, direct mail, radio, your website, third-party sites) is driving customers to your dealership, you can make better decisions about your marketing spend. The 2014 Polk Automotive Buyer Influence Study provided compelling evidence about the profoundly important role the Internet now plays in the car-shopping process. For example, the study revealed that 79% of car buyers used the Internet while shopping for a car and the majority spent their shopping time online. Furthermore, the study found that 51% of new car buyers cited the Internet as the most influential source that led them to the dealer, making it a key driver of walk-in traffic and trackable prospects. The same study also found that 6 out of 10 car buyers who walk through a dealership’s door do not establish contract prior to their initial visit. To put this into perspective, of the 18 mil- lion people a month that visit AutoTrader.com 1 , only 43% call, email, text or chat before walking into a dealership. The other 57% — or 10.2 million — simply walk in unannounced. So, us- ing Polk’s “influential source leading to the dealer” numbers, you could reasonably deduce that at least half of those walk-ins – around 5 million – walked into a car dealership because they were influenced by the Internet. Yet, there’s still a big disconnect many dealers have in ac- knowledging the role the Internet plays in driving customers to their store. This is especially apparent in advertising expen- ditures, where Internet spending accounts for just 33% of most dealers’ budgets 2 and they’re still having trouble getting away from direct-attribution ROI. Much of this can be traced back to inaccurate or insufficient sourcing information that’s being entered into a CRM tool. Sourcing Uncovers Customer Types, Reveals Marketing Success Sourcing means engaging customers in a conversation while they’re shopping in your store. Even though there’s no guaran- tee they’ll actually buy a car that day, accurately capturing that information into your CRM tool reveals a reliable narrative for further engagement down the road. It also helps paint a clearer picture of what influenced them to come see you — radio, TV, billboard or the Internet — so you know what’s working and not working with your marketing efforts. The keyword here is accuracy. In a comparison of CRM data from AutoTrader.com select partners with post-purchase survey research of 4,700 car buyers and 42 dealerships 3 , huge inconsisten- cies were discovered between the two, most of which were attrib- uted to insufficient or inaccurate information being recorded into the CRM tool. One of the most startling revelations was that car Source Your Walk-Ins, Start a Successful Conversation