A Challenge To Auto OEM’s: Extend the User Experience
Chris Sherman’s article on ClickZ entitled “New Research Shows How Search Drives Auto Buyers” includes some great stuff. Yahoo and Comscore did the study. My favorite highlight is a comment from David Schwartz of Yahoo, regarding observed consumer behavior which tends to favor aggregator sites over OEM sites for all but the feature research aspects of auto shopping…
“Schwartz said that rapid response to user requests, with speed and often better pricing, is the key differentiator for aggregators.”
This conclusion does not surprise me based on my personal observations, but I find it very ironic just the same. The same dealership sales people respond to leads from both aggregator and OEM sites, so there’s really no reason why speed and price should be different. The OEM’s just have a perception problem!
One way to address that is for OEM’s to rethink their websites. The OEM sites today are generally VERY well done with extensive use of no-expense-spared rich media, delivering a phenomenal user experience for users seeking feature information about a vehicle. But as good as the initial experience is, the “next step” experience is as bad (or worse). A user that finds a vehicle they like is typically left with one option – “enter your zip code to get a list of dealers”. And that’s it! Unbelievable! Why not connect the user to a dealer right then and there, while the user is pumped up and ready to engage, and before they surf on to an aggregator website (or worse, a competitive OEM site)?
By adding a web-based communications service such as ContactAtOnce! to their sites, OEM’s could extend the user experience to its logical conclusion – a live conversation with a sales person at the dealership. The web-savvy user that appreciates the phenomenal research aspects of OEM sites is the same user that will appreciate the availability of presence-aware web-based communications for contacting a dealer. We know from our experience in working with hundreds of dealers that a “live conversation” with a prospective customer is 2-3 times more likely to result in a sale versus “contact-us” type form leads. Thus, franchise dealers would love the OEM marketing teams and feel better than ever about paying the OEM fees/taxes that fund OEM marketing and websites. Moreover, the OEM marketing team could quantify the value of their site in ways never before possible.
Food for thought…
1 Comments:
Great idea, Marc. We're working with a few dealerships who are accustomed to paying $15+ for a good lead. The OEM websites could model a solution similar to Overture/AdSense and let their dealers bid for each lead. As long as they're upfront about it, they probably wouldn't even need to limit the ads to local dealerships. The OEM site could offer a list of dealerships that are available for a real-time conversation and then show a geographic-distance estimate next to each listing (based on the user's IP address).
Dealer sites are constantly struggling to provide up-to-date rich media and product information. Wouldn't it be nice if the OEM sites became the primary research tool and the dealerships could focus their time/resources on effectively capitalizing on leads?
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