AutoPlay is incredibly feature rich and when used right AutoPlay will help minimise lost leads, as well as helping improve transparency, accuracy and efficiency.  In 2019 we put together a case study detailing how AutoPlay has helped one dealer group improve their conversion from 21% to 31% (named here as 'Excellent Motor Group' for privacy reasons).

So how was this improvement in lead conversion from 21% to 30% achieved?  Firstly, the industry benchmark for online lead handling is to reply within less than 10 minutes.  Most dealers fall quite short of this and although performing solidly - Excellent Motors likewise had room for improvement.  

Through working with AutoPlayAuto.com Excellent Motor Group were able to gain transparency over how long their sales teams were taking to reply to leads.  Through these insights they were able to focus on improving this KPI by 58% - resulting in more customers engaged with before they have a chance to turn elsewhere.

As well as being first to respond its also important to make sure you continue to follow up.  On average it takes 5 customer touchpoints to make a sale.  At AutoPlay we also see sales being logged after contacting the customer 10 or more times.

They say success leaves clues.  When looking at how Excellent Motors compare against another similarly sized dealer group we see that Excellent Motor Group made more than 340 sales after contacting customers more than 5 times - compared to only 190 for the similarly sized group.

This level of contact can only be sustained with effective lead Management processes and toold designed to show you what you need to do, when you need to do it.

As well as contacting customers first, and contacting customers the most, you also want to make sure you are retargeting customers who have not bought from you.  Lost leads is something AutoPlay often preach about as we believe lost leads are the single biggest opportunity to improve lead management and sales performance.

With Excellent Motor Group AutoPlay saw that they only were making on average 2.3 contacts on leads that were ultimately closed as lost.  AutoPlayAuto.com helped them re-market to every single lead closed as lost across their entire dealer network.  This method of proactively reintroducing their customers to the sale pipeline resulted in an incremental increase of 22 sales in just 12 months - with no increase in lead volumes.

AutoPlay now can offer Dealer Performance Coaching to our customer network.  Dealer Performance Coaching focuses on identifying the weak areas in your lead management processes and comes up with a tailored plan to help coach your dealership or dealer group to improved lead management standards.  Contact us on support@autoplay.co.nz and reference "Dealer Performance Coaching" to find out more.

After a quiet December 2019, January saw a return to normalcy with Leads increasing by 17.6% and Test Drives increasing by 15.9% from December 2019 to January 2020 as dealers returned to work and the focus on generating leads was renewed.  Despite these notable increases, January 2020 was still a quiet month for Sales with only a small 0.2% increase from month-to-month.  With such increases in Leads and Test Drives it is highly likely that next month we will see a flow on effect to Sales despite the short calendar month in February.

A large reason for the jump in Leads from December to January was that ‘Web – Dealer’ leads increased massively by 41% - making leads from the dealer’s own website once again the most common source of leads.  Leads from 3rd party sites also increased with ‘Web – Dealer’ leads increasing by 11% from December.  ‘Brand’ leads remain the third most common source of leads for NZ franchise dealers and after decreasing by 26.4% in December, rebounded to increase by 24.7% in January.

With Test Drives increasing by 15.9% in January we saw increases across the board in Test Drive sources in January.  In particular the ‘Direct’ source saw a significant increase of 23.4% - making it the most common source of Test Drives in January (up from 3rd in December).  This seems to indicate that customers visited dealerships more often in January as ‘Web – Classifed’ (up 9.6%) and ‘Web – Dealer’ (up 16.5%) both increased by smaller margins. 

​Sales only increased by 0.2% in January, and this was mirrored by the top source of sales – ‘Web – Classified’ which also marginally increased (up 0.3%).  Despite sales increasing overall from December, sales attributed to ‘Web – Dealer’ and ‘Repeat’ sources decreased significantly by 13.2% and 10.3% respectively.  It will be interesting to watch this space in February to see if sales from this source rebound – something likely for ‘Web -Dealer’ leads which are now the most common source of leads in NZ.

Make sure to check back next month to see the top sources of leads, test drives and sales in February 2020