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The weather may have taken a turn for the worse recently, but Lead, Test Drive and Sales activity remains buoyant. Following a strong May, June 2018 saw the number of Leads generated increase by 6.2%, Test Drives increase by 5.9% and Sales by 1.2%.  For the second consecutive month the number of leads from the ‘Web – Dealer’ source decreased – by 1.2% from May to June. As expected with Fieldays activity we experienced a 30.8% increase in the number of leads generated to dealers by their ‘Brand’. After a significant increase in leads from ‘Web Classified’ sources last month, this source again accounted for the 3rd most leads and increased by 5.7% from May to June 2018.  After the volume of Test Drives from the ‘Web – Dealer’ source decreased in May, the source rebounded to increase by 17.3% from month to month. Test Drives attributed to the ‘Direct’ source again occupied second spot and increased by 7.8% from May to June. Test Drives from ‘Brand’ generated leads did increase – by 4.9% - but perhaps less than expected from the higher volume of Fieldays leads. This potentially means that Fieldays activity has been a bit slow to translate to Test Drives, and potentially means we may see a proportionate increase in Test Drives from the ‘Brand’ source in future months.  In June 2018 there was a change in the status quo for Sales tracking. Whilst ‘Web – Dealer’ retained the top spot and increased by 8.9% from May to June 2018. However, whilst in May ‘Repeat’ and ‘Direct’ accounted for the 2nd and 3rd most Sales by source, these sources were overtaken by ‘Web Classified’ (up 27.4% from May 2018) and ‘Brand’ (up 32.9%) respectively.  Make sure to check in next month to find out the top sources of Leads, Test Drives and Sales for kiwi dealers in July. Lead Source reports are just one of the reports available to dealerships and OEM’s who use AutoPlay Sales Pipeline. To find out more about the range of reports available via AutoPlay contact us on sales@autoplay.co.nz or +64 9 361 1505.
 Events play an important role for many marketers. According to Lead Liaison (another overseas company in this space), 58% of marketers have used an event lead management solution or lead capture tool at a live event. Despite this only 34% of marketers use new referrals, quality of leads and sales closure to measure event ROI (Marketing Charts 2013).
In addition, over 80% of marketers cannot quantify the data they collect during events, yet 46% of marketers view generating leads as the main reason to attend events and trade shows. Most damningly of all, some sources suggest 75% of all leads are never followed up with after an exhibition. When you consider that some exhibitors are using paper forms to capture their potential leads at events these figures start to make sense. Inevitably it’s a lot of work to type out all the details on the form into a spreadsheet, and then distribute that spreadsheet out to their dealer network – not to mention chase up individual dealers and salespeople to see where they got to following up their leads. In the last few years AutoPlay has been working with a number of brands to improve the efficiency of their lead capture at various events, and more importantly making their follow up considerably easier. There are several approaches on how AutoPlay can be utilised at events to help capture more leads; 1. “Cold walk ins, light touch approach” WHAT? Collect leads via a very simple web form that feeds leads into your Sales Pipeline Dashboard PROS + Can design your own custom form especially for this event – making it as simple as you need it to be + Web form is a one-way push to Sales Pipeline and as such can work much better when internet is patchy + Don’t need the Sales Pipeline on-site. Can access the web form on any device that has an internet connection CONS - Doesn’t allow for any customer lookup – meaning there is no opportunity to prequalify event attendees - Cannot link a database to pre-event marketing activity 2. “Pre-qualified, integrated marketing approach” WHAT? In conjunction with marketing activity prior to the event you can pre-qualify leads that are likely to attend the event. These leads can be sent from a CRM to AutoPlay Sales Pipeline – allowing salespeople to lookup pre-qualified leads during the event. PROS + Ties in with pre-event marketing to ensure ROI tracking is linked from start to finish + Pre-qualified customers are further down the decision channel and this streamlines the experience during the event + Minimises chances of duplicate customers or duplicate leads + Enables salespeople to use built in tools such as database lookups, business card and drivers licence scanning CONS - Looking up a database of thousands of leads can require a reliable internet connection – something that is not always guaranteed at events and trade shows - More pre-event work required to pre-qualify leads - No ability to provide customers with a simplified lead capture form – leads entered manually at the event must be manually entered to the Sales Pipeline Why capture leads with AutoPlay during events? The most obvious answer is in order to track ROI of how many potential leads are generated during the event. However, it goes much further than this. By capturing leads via AutoPlay dealerships and OEM’s benefit greatly in the weeks and months following;
If you are interested in using AutoPlay for events talk to matt@autoplay.co.nz about the approach that would be suitable for your dealership/brand.  The latest version of AutoPlay is now available for download from the App Store. Make sure to grab the latest version to take advantage of all the changes listed below. Additionally, if you use the Desktop Studio make sure to log out, close the browser window and reopen the application to apply the latest update.
ROLE MANAGEMENT The In Market Leads screen is visible to any user with the ‘In Market Leads’ role. If a user is ticked as ‘Manager’ within the role the user will receive the daily In Market Leads Report email. The visibility of matches in the In Market Leads screens is linked to the Lead Manager role. If the user is a Lead Manager they can see matches against leads from users they share the Lead Manager role with. If not ticked as a Manager user sees matches against only leads they have allocated to them. IN MARKET LEADS PREFERENCES & SETTINGS The In Market Leads screen can be set up at the Dealership/Yard level or for individual users. 1. If the In Market Leads role is enabled but no Settings or Preferences are established the matching criteria will default to the below;  2. The Dealership can also choose to customise the criteria that determines the matching via SETTINGS>SALES PIPELINE SETTINGS>IN MARKET MATCHING. The settings selected here will become the default for every user within the account. Note ticking the Variant, Body Type, Transmission etc will mean that the In Market Leads will only match when there are exact matches for all of the fields ticked. If you do not want to risk missing out on matching leads it is recommended you select less rigid matching criteria. It is also possible to select a range for the Odometer, Year and Price. 3. It is also possible for individual Users to set their own preferences for In Market Matching. Users can do this via the PREFERENCES button located on the right-hand side of the IN MARKET LEADS screen. Any selections made here will become the default for the logged in user and will take priority over the dealership/yard wide settings determined in the IN MARKET MATCHING screen. NOTE – All settings screens available on Desktop Studio only. IN MARKET LEADS The In Market Leads screen is available via SALES PIPELINE>IN MARKET LEADS. In Market Leads are those that the dealership/user has determined might be potentially interested in the new listing/price change. In Market Leads appear in the screen when; a. A new listing is added and there are leads that match the criteria within In Market Matching or Preferences (new listings require a Price >$0 to match). b. An existing listing price is decreased and there are leads that match the criteria within In Market Matching or Preferences (either Price or Special Price fields).  MATCHING IN MARKET LEADS The In Market Leads screen displays the listing that has been added/price decreased and all of the different leads that have matched based on the criteria set in IN MARKET LEADS MATCHING or IN MARKET LEAD PREFERENCES.  Users can then choose to either View the Lead (via the > in Desktop or by tapping on the record in iOS). They can also opt to ignore the lead (user specific) which will remove the lead from being matched against this Listings.  If the salesperson/manager determines that the customer on the matching lead might be interested in this new vehicle they can opt to ADD AS PRIMARY LISTING or ADD AS OTHER LISTING. This will make the new listing either the primary listing, or one of the secondary listings. Any listing that was previously on the lead will be moved to the Previous Listing section. This information is tracked and will be available in a report in the future* If the lead is OPEN then the listing will be updated with the Primary Listing. If the lead is CLOSED then a new lead is created with the matched In Market listing. *Initially only available to AutoPlay but can be accessed on demand. Reporting presentation TBC NOTIFICATIONS ON MATCHING IN MARKET LEADS The system will trigger an in-app notification whenever there is a New Listing or Price Decrease that matches with the users leads based on the specified criteria. The notification is visible on the Home screen within iOS, and also on the Notifications icon on both the Desktop and iOS from the lead Dashboard. The Notification will show the user the listing that has been added/modified, as well as the number of potential matching leads. Clicking on the notification will open up the In Market Leads detail screen.  If the user is set up as a Manager in the In Market Leads role they will also receive an email every day at 8am with any matching In Market Leads. This email will show all the listings added or those that had price decreases the previous day. This can be turned off by unticking the user as a Manager in the In Market Leads role as this has no impact on visibility of matching leads. Additionally the user can untick the 'Create Listing Notifications' and 'Send Daily Notifications' options within the Preferences screen.  If you would like In Market Leads set up for your dealership contact AutoPlay Support on support@autoplay.co.nz or (0064) 9 361 1505.
Overall May 2018 was a strong month for activity at NZ Dealerships with increases across the board for all the KPI’s we measure. From April to May the number of Leads increased by 21.1%, Test Drives increased by 9.7% and Sales recorded increased by 10.4%. This represents a significant swing from April where both Leads and Test Drives dropped by over 5% each.  The usual sources were again generating the most leads with ‘Web – Dealer’, ‘Brand’ and ‘Web Classified’ occupying the top 3 spots. However, whilst leads from dealerships websites dropped for the first time in a few months (‘Web – Dealer’ down by 13.1%), leads from the ‘Brand’ (up 48.5%) and ‘Web – Classified’ (up 73.6%) both increased significantly.  In May ‘Web – Dealer’ was again the top source of Test Drives amongst AutoPlay customers, however decreased by 5.3% from April to May 2018. ‘Direct’ still accounts for the second most leads (up 4.2%) and ‘Brand’ leads generate the 3rd most Test Drives (up 14.4% from April).  In April the ‘Web – Dealer’ source was again the most common source of Sales, however after a sizeable increase from March to April, the volume decreased by 9.1% from April to May. The ‘Repeat’ source continues to proportionately account for a larger number of Sales than many other sources and increased by 6.9%. May also saw Sales from ‘Direct’ contact increase by 18.1% - displacing ‘Web – Classified’ from the podium.  With Fieldays in early June we are sure to see a surge in Leads, Test Drives and Sales from the Brand reflected in next month’s results. Make sure to read the next issue of The PlayBook to see what sources of leads were popular in June amongst kiwi dealerships.
 In 2018 dealerships have well and truly grasped the need to capture all their leads to a lead management system. At AutoPlay we've seen the volume of leads captured by dealerships via the Sales Pipeline increase consistently every year. With licence and business card scanning and integration with DMS systems it's incredibly easy to capture leads to the AutoPlay Sales Pipeline. In addition, email or other electronic leads are captured automatically either from the website or via our API's - meaning the vast majority of leads are getting captured to your dashboard. One area that AutoPlay have never been able to confidently report on is the number of 'Phone' leads received by dealerships. Capturing these details is entirely reliant on the salesperson being disciplined in their lead capture processes - something that is far easier said than done. Looking at 5 of the major multi brand distributors AutoPlay works with, we can see that on average less than 7% of all leads are recorded using the Lead Type = Phone each month. Anecdotally we've heard in Aussie that the number of phone calls can outstrip the number of walk-in/email/other leads by 20-to-1. According to ADP Digital in the U.S, call volumes outpace email leads by a more moderate 4-to-1 ratio, and approx. 19% of car buyers make first contact with dealerships via the phone (J.D Power U.S New Autoshopper Study, 2015). Autotrader/Kelley Blue Book put this figure at 25% of all leads vs 14% emails.  The discrepancy between these figures is significant - which is most likely due to one dealers definition of what constitutes a 'Phone' lead. This only serves to highlight the difficulty in accurately attributing phone leads, but the underlying fact is that the number of phone leads your dealership receives is almost definitely more than what your sales team is recording in the Sales Pipeline. AutoPlay partner with a company called Adtorque Edge - who offer call campaign tracking to AutoPlay customers. Recently Adtorque began working with a mutual customer based in Auckland. This dealer receives approx. 1200 leads each month and typically records about 7% of these as 'Phone' leads. Through working with Adtorque Edge they have begun tracking Google and facebook campaigns across all channels - including attributing the number of phone calls to the dealership to specific marketing campaigns and channels. What they discovered was that of the approx. 1200 leads, over 27% of the leads were actually phone calls - a fairly large discrepancy from the 7% that are manually being recorded within AutoPlay Sales Pipeline.  Stats available from Adtorque Edge for the Australian market highlight this same concept. Through improving the attribution of phone leads Adtorque were able to highlight the incomplete tracking that dealers were experiencing from their online marketing. The table below highlights that for this customer they believed that Keyword #1 used in Google Adwords was the least effective - with just 17 website conversions recorded and costing AUS$75.47 per acquisition. This ranked Keyword 1 as the worst ROI of all 6 keywords used at the dealership - comparing poorly with the average cost per acquisition for all marketing campaigns of AUS$59.42. However this was based purely on website conversion and did not take into account any phone calls generated from those campaigns. By setting up specific phone numbers for these campaigns Adtorque Edge was able to more accurately attribute how effective the campaign was, finding the Keyword #1 also generated 88 phone calls during the same period - taking the cost per acquisition down to $12.22 and meaning that it now ranked as the most effective keyword based on ROI.  Unfortunately at the present time AutoPlay are unable to automatically capture phone calls as leads within Sales Pipeline. However despite these technical limitations we still believe there is enormous value for kiwi dealerships in gaining more transparency over their online marketing spend. If you are interested in finding out more about call attribution from Adtorque Edge please contact sales@autoplay.co.nz and we'll organise them to contact you.
The first quarter of 2018 is officially done, April is now in the books and we are now well and truly in the grips of winter – the perfect time to review how your online lead sources are performing and compare with what is working for other dealers throughout NZ.  Whilst March saw solid increases in the volume of Leads, Test Drives and Sales from the previous month, April has seen a slight decrease in Leads (down 5.5% from March), and Test Drives (down 5.0% from March). Fortunately for dealers Sales continued to increase with a 12.5% increase in Sales from March to April.  In April we continued to see ‘Web – Dealer’ open a wider gap as the most common source of Leads with a 33.9% increase from March to April 2018. Conversely Brand decreased by 17.5% and ‘Web Classified’ decreased by 25.0% - further solidifying dealer websites as the most popular source of leads amongst kiwi dealers.  Similar to Test Drives, ‘Web – Dealer’ was the most common source generating Test Drives in April 2018. Test Drives generated via the ‘Brand’ increased by 4.6%, however dropped to third - being leapfrogged by Test Drives generated from the ‘Direct’ source (up 5.3% from March 2018)  The usual suspects occupied the top three sources of Sales in March with ‘Web – Dealer’, ‘Repeat’ and ‘Web – Classified’ occupying the top 3 spots. April saw a significant increase in the number of Sales recorded against the ‘Web – Dealer’ source – up 58.2% from March 2018. This is likely due to the significant increase in the number of leads generated from this source in March. Sales increased across the board with 5.1% more Sales from ‘Repeat’ business and 3.8% more Sales from ‘Web – Classified’ sites like Trade Me.
Make sure to read the next issue of The PlayBook to see what sources of leads were popular in May amongst kiwi dealerships.  Vehicle Appraisals are a big part of the car buying process, so it's no surprise that the Vehicle Appraisal Form is one of the more popular functions within the AutoPlay Sales Pipeline. This is particularly the case when it comes to the iPad/iPhone version of the app, which gives salespeople complete freedom to conduct Appraisals anywhere they carry their iPhone or iPad.
Free Fuel Saver Look Up There's no need to manually type in all of the details and specifications for the customers trade when using the Vehicle Appraisal Form. Just enter in the customers rego and AutoPlay will perform a free lookup to the Fuel Saver database - saving salespeople time spent scribing in vehicle specs and making sure that the minimum required info is easier to capture. Purchase Vehicle Checks If you are signed up to either Motorcentral Car Check, Carjam or MotorWeb for your vehicle checks you can run these through the Appraisal Form in the Sales Pipeline as you complete your vehicle appraisals. Your billing relationship remains unchanged and we can restrict which users are able to see this function. To set up contact Support@autoplay.co.nz Reconditioning Items When appraising vehicles it's possible to assign just a simple Trade In Offer, but it's also possible to go much more in depth with this function. Users can assign a 'Condition' (Poor, Average, Excellent etc) as well as a $ value for any reconditioning costs in the pre-set categories (Panel & Paint, Windscreen, Interior, Tyres, Mechanical, Grooming). Additionally users can get even more granular with itemised reconditioning costs for a more accurate valuation. Wholesale Quotes The Vehicle Appraisal Form allows users to email or SMS vehicle wholesalers directly from the app to request wholesale quotes. These can be stored in a Wholesale Quotes section within the Appraisal Form. Manager Approval It's also possible to set up your Appraisals so that only a designated manager can mark them as approved. This does not stop any user from creating an Appraisal Form, however if the role is set up the Appraisal Manager will be prompted by notification and email to review and approve the Appraisal - giving the dealership more transparency over the Appraisal process throughout the sales team. If you have any questions about the Vehicle Appraisal Form you can contact support@autoplay.co.nz. We can also arrange additional training for the dealership. Contact us for prices.
As we have mentioned in the PlayBook's recent issues the AutoPlay development team are busy rebuilding the Desktop Studio as a fully responsive HTML5 app - meaning users will be able to access the AutoPlay Studio via different browsers like Chrome, Firefox etc as well as via Android or Windows smartphones and tablets. We are now almost 10 weeks into our HTML5 rebuild and making decent progress. To date the focus has been building the infrastructure - things like logins and security, navigation menus and account structures. Although extremely necessary to the success of the project these are not the glamour screens we want to shout from the rooftops about. We've recently completed the listings screen - a central pillar to the whole AutoPlay Studio. The new listing screen will feature...
Check out the image gallery below to see our progress. The project is massive so at this stage we are unable to provide an ETA of when this will be released (sorry!). However, rest assured we are putting in as much resource as possible without sacrificing day-to-day business and we will keep you updated as we move closer to our goal. It costs a lot to list your vehicles online. When a new listing is received into stock by a dealership the first instinct is to get that listing online as soon as possible. For a lot of dealerships this means getting the old Lumix out and getting those photographs onto Trade Me, Driven, Autotrader and the dealership website quick smart - even if the listing has yet to add any Features and Comments. This isn't necessarily the wrong idea - the sooner the listing is online the sooner the leads can start rolling in right? However recently AutoPlay has been growing into the Australian market and have noticed a definite trend that perhaps has some learnings for the kiwi market as well. In NZ although some channels charge per lead, the majority of 3rd party sites charge a monthly subscription instead. In Australia the model is quite different with Car Sales.com.au as their main source of online leads. With Car Sales.com.au the dealerships are charged for each lead they receive. Possibly because of this they are far more conscious than kiwi dealers of working their current "in market" leads before paying to list online - and with good reason. Imagine you pay $50 per lead from an online portal. For each listing you put on line you are generating an average of 5 leads over the listings lifetime (and this is a very conservative figure in the Aus market). This will cost the dealership an average of $250 per listing that comes directly off their bottom line. Instead what Australian dealerships have been focussing on is using all of the contacts in their pre-sale database (from captured leads) and retargeting these customers BEFORE they actually list the vehicle online. If we look at the chart below we can see a lot of money spent on marketing from various sources which then ultimately converts down to about 40% of leads into Test Drives and 20% into Sales. This leaves 80% which have made themselves known to the dealership as being "In Market". A new Mazda 6 arrives in stock or is traded in? Great, just identify all the customers that came in on a Mazda 6 or similar and call them. If you make a sale you don't have to ever list the vehicle online and you've saved yourself days of waiting and at least $250. If you don't make a sale then list the car online and all you've lost is a day or two and you still have a potential customer who will appreciate that you thought of them. Easy right?  Where the breakdown sometimes occurs is that often it is difficult for the salesperson or manager to identify which potential customers might be interested in the new Mazda 6. Australian dealerships have the same challenges as NZ dealers - in the vast majority of cases the sales team is only loading to the DMS the 20% that actually make it to a sale. Although early days in the Aus market for us, with AutoPlay Sales Pipeline we are finding that because of this differing approach we are finding some positive reception to what AutoPlay are doing. Some of the Sales Pipelines main strengths are that it is incredibly easy to use, mobile friendly and digitises things like TD and Appraisal Forms - all of which contributes to more customers being captured more accurately - we have seen in kiwi dealerships where as much as 9x more emails and customer info has been captured when using AutoPlay as opposed to using the DMS alone. There are primarily 2 ways that dealerships can tap into their "in market" leads. The first is on an individual basis. The Sales Pipeline allows you to search on the Dashboard for whoever has enquired on certain models. When you have access to a similar model it's super easy to find those that enquired previously - particularly so when they are often captured automatically for 3rd party sites. Users can also canvas their "In Market" leads by accessing the Listing Summary screen from the Dashboard. Before deleting the sold listing simply find it via the Listing Summary and you will be able to see a full list of who enquired on the listing, as well as what stage they got to in the road-to-a-sale and the salesperson looking after them - making recycling these leads into another similar vehicle a doddle!
Depending on the time available a similar (if less personal) result can be achieved by utilising the built in Live Leads function available to all Sales Pipeline users. We have gone on at length about Live Leads in this PlayBook, but if you are not familiar with it you can read more here. Live Leads enables dealerships to target based on their previously captured leads any customers that enquired on a particular Make/Model (among other criteria). They can then send unique video emails to these recipients with a range of vehicle videos on them - designed to test whether the customer is still "in market". If a recipient watches a video the Sales Pipeline can be set up to trigger an automatic calendar reminder to contact this customer - thus taking out a lot of the hard work required to gauge the temperature of customers who enquired but didn't purchase.
With the Dashboard, Listing Summary and Live Leads AutoPlay makes it very easy to retarget and recycle previous leads onto similar listings. Although the main sources for electronic leads in NZ do not charge per lead there is still much that can be learnt from this process. Whilst kiwi dealers should still aim to get their new listings online as soon as possible, they should also follow the discipline of checking their potential "in market" leads simultaneously to give themselves as much opportunity as possible. |
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