Don't Just Be Accessible With Mobile...Be Effective

"The invasion of the smartphone has changed how consumers shop for everything, including high-end purchases like automobiles."

When it comes to potential car buyers it is not uncommon to see people browsing mobile sites either looking at a dealership’s inventory, comparing prices and information, or shopping their trade in.

Walk in to any coffee shop, cafe, bus stop, train station, or almost any venue really, even at your dealership and you will see the masses browsing the mobile web or tooling through an app on the newest generation of cell phones, otherwise known as smartphones, many of them researching vehicles and local dealers.

Smartphones are defined as mobile phones that operate with advanced capabilities and operating systems, similar to that of PC functionality. These phones have Internet browsers and capabilities, and increasingly people are completing their internet browsing on these phones.

The new challenge then for auto dealers is not only how to be accessible via mobile but also how to be effective with mobile.

By effective, I mean being able to convert the right people at the right time.

Converting auto shoppers in a mobile environment often results in acquiring less information about each person because there is less real estate with which to work and also because if it isn't uber-convenient then there is a high chance you will lose the visitor all together. Therefore you need simple and highly effective conversion tools that differentiate your dealership from the others.

Gift card incentives are proving to be effective for this, and dealerships across the country are benefiting from increased incremental sales with effective tools such as HookLogic'sWeb to Show and Lead to Show products.

But it's not as simple as offering someone a gift card for coming in for a test drive. To do this effectively and consistently over time your dealership will need not only the best technology but also the right partners and a good process built in to both the front-end and back-end.

Nowadays the right tools and the right technology require being effective in mobile too. This might involve a mobile web version and/or a mobile app version of your reward incentive and it might require effective SMS (or text message) marketing techniques. For HookLogic Web to Show customers, influencing shopper behavior via mobile has recently been made all the more feasible.

As stated in a recent press release by HookLogic's Chief Product Officer John Berhman,

"HookLogic‘s new Web to Show 2.0 solution for mobile coupled with our AutoHook suite of products means we are able to influence car buyers into the showroom from whatever channel they choose to shop.”

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In addition to this new mobile offering, HookLogic has also launched its mobile redemption app. With this new app, dealership personnel are now able to validate, redeem, and measure incentives directly from their mobile devices in real-time.

The dealer mobile redemption app is available in Apple iOS and Android versions and can be downloaded at the Apple App Store and the Google’s Android Market respectively. To learn more about this new app visit our recent blog post titled, Redeeming Coupons from the Palm of Your Hand.

To learn more about how HookLogic's AutoHook Suite of Products can help increase the number of incremental sales at your dealership, contact us today by visiting our website, or call 1-646-532-4707.

Redeeming Coupons from the Palm of Your Hand

Remember when customers would come in to your dealership with a print-out of a coupon code for their $25 gift card that you promised to give them for coming in to see you? Remember how you had to either write down the customers code and then later enter it into the system? Or maybe you escorted the customer back to your office right away so you could log on to the AutoHook redemption system and redeem their code on the fly?

Now with the new mobile app from HookLogic you are able to redeem coupons from the palm of your hand while standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the customer using our new Android, iPhone, and iPad apps.

That's right. Redeeming HookLogic coupons is now easier than ever.

How it Works

We took the coupon redemption and reporting capabilities that are currently present in our web-based user interface and moved them into a streamlined mobile application that allows for on-the-go productivity.  AutoHook clients are now able to validate a customer’s HookLogic walk-in incentive coupon and have the dealership's walk-in metrics at their fingertips, without being tied to their desks.

The process is the same but the convenience is greater. To redeem, users will simply launch the mobile app from their preferred device, enter the coupon code, and hit submit.  Upon doing so you will then be asked to enter the customer’s shipping address to finalize the redemption. That is all there is to it.

For reporting, users enter the desired start/end dates, the site that they wish to pull data for, and whether they want to pull data based upon coupon redemption or issued date.  Hitting “Run Report” will pull up the lead and walk-in metrics on a dealer by dealer basis.

AutoHook Mobile App Screens

Both Apple iOS and Android compatible versions have been released.  Future releases will bring additional functionality from the existing UI over to the mobile app. Choose your preferred app now by pressing one of the two graphics below.

AutoHook for iOS

AutoHook for Android OS

Is Your Customer List Safe from Employee Theft?

The notion of a dealership’s employees having ownership of the organization's customer lists or communications is a frightening one. The question of ownership of work product, email, and even actual customer lists is being called into question by to BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) policies being adopted by many businesses, including auto dealerships. A 2010 US Supreme Court ruling declared 9-0 that employees are not entitled to privacy if they use an employer’s issued device. The ruling did not, however, establish ownership or privacy rights of employee owned devices accessing corporate data or systems. The implication of this ruling could mean that employers do not have rights or ownership to company data if it was accessed and stored locally on employee computers with the company’s permission.

"Data ownership and access to sensitive customer files should be a key concern for dealerships," says Erik Nachbahr, President and Founder of the Baltimore-based Helion Technologies, a managed information technology provider for auto dealerships."Many auto dealers encourage employees to access their corporate computer systems with employee owned laptops to help control costs.

While expense control is always important, this practice leaves dealerships vulnerable to unauthorized access or theft of customer lists or even financial data," says Nachbahr.

Given the murky nature of data ownership issues, dealerships should evaluate and clarify their BYOD device policies, recommends Nachbahr.

About the Author: Erik Nachbahr
 (LinkedIn), President, Helion Technologies www.heliontechnologies.com Visit Helion at Digital Dealer 12, Booth # 330

Polk to Discuss Passive Lead Scoring in March Webinar

Last month we wrote about passive vs. active lead scoring here on our blog. In this post David Metter explained how the practice of lead scoring was co-created with Polk and that while somewhat controversial, the practice of scoring leads is ultimately a smart choice for most dealerships. The part that is controversial is more about the idea of assigning a score to a lead for your sales reps to size up potential customers, and not so much about the importance of knowing the real potential of each lead coming in to your CRM. We agree that it does not behoove the dealership to know the score that each person has been assigned, after all, the score is only temporary. We do believe however that it is important to know each person's real potential to become a customer. Thus the practice of passive lead scoring was born.

To score leads, people coming in to your CRM are evaluated based on certain criteria using an algorithm that helps identify where about in the buying process a person might be. With passive lead scoring, an action is taken that is appropriate to their current situations as opposed to blanketing everyone with the same message.

This action is not a conscious or deliberate action that a sales rep takes because of the person's score, but an action that is automatic and unknown to the sales rep all together.

In our case, this action is an automated email offering the recipient an incentive for coming in for a test drive, something that a person with a low score is not likely to be interested in whereas someone with a higher score might be.

The result is that more qualified buyers appear in the showroom for your reps to work with, less time is spent courting people (or annoying people) that aren't ready for the showroom to begin with.

Lead Scoring Discussions Led by Polk

To talk about this important topic, we have invited our lead scoring partner Polk to lead discussions this month on the significance of lead scoring and the process that Polk goes through to score dealer leads. Representing Polk will be Senior Solutions Consultant Mark Pauze.

Since starting with Polk, Mark has worked closely with clients to understand their diverse business, research and analysis needs, developed solutions to meet those needs and directed teams to deliver customer solutions. He works with clients to help focus their consumer and industry intelligence efforts and develop integrated solutions that will address their needs. Mark has been focusing his efforts most recently on lead marketing at Polk and has worked with a wide range of customers on diverse lead marketing solutions.

Webinar Registration Link

A webinar will be held on Friday March 16 in our Advanced User series for auto dealers. To register, click the link below. For more information about the AutoHook Webinar Series, visit our post titled, AutoHook Webinar Training Coming in January.

Friday March 16 at 11:30am EST (For Dealers) - REGISTER HERE

Passive vs Active Lead Scoring...What’s the Difference?

Before we get into the difference of active vs. passive lead scoring, it is important to set the stage of how lead scoring was born in the retail automotive industry. Five years ago, I was fortunate to be in the right place at the right time when I participated in a RL Polk meeting with my previous dealer group. We had given a year’s worth of internet leads to them to bounce against their registration data. Our dealers knew what we had sold but now we wanted to see how many of these customers had bought from someone else. This exercise had been done before but this meeting would end with a different plan of action.

Like previous meetings, I saw that up to 40% of our total leads bought a car but in most cases, a typical dealership only sells 11-15% of them. That meant that more than double what we sold went to other dealers in our market area. This frustration got the best of me during the meeting when I blurted out “Why do we always have to look at old data to know we are failing? Why can’t we know if these customers are true buyers BEFORE they go somewhere else?”

Luckily for me, the right people from Polk were in this meeting. They shared that they were working on a lead scoring platform and were looking for a test partner. Taking hundreds of strands of data that included registration data, lifestyle info, household status, etc, Polk was betting that they could score a lead in near-real time and pass that score along to the dealers so they would react differently. It was suggested that a 10 was better than a 9 and a 9 was better than an 8 and so on. This was radical thinking at the time but it was a better idea than how salespeople had cherry-picked leads in their current process.

Sell More Cars Faster

As we started testing, the data proved that the higher scoring leads purchased more and faster than the lower scored leads. At least the registration data showed that. What we realized was if the salesperson changed his behavior for the higher scoring leads, we sold more cars. If they didn’t, the score didn't matter. We later named this active lead scoring. It took action on part of our dealership to drive a higher conversion.

As lead scoring was socialized in the automotive community, it was highly controversial. OEMs started scoring leads but chose not to pass this along to dealers for fear that they wouldn't know what to do. Dealers were afraid of scoring because it was something new and went against what every trainer had told them previously; handle all leads the same. As someone who helped co-architect and test the lead scoring platform, I found myself defending the practice ad noisome, even though the data showed it worked. Then, one day I woke up and the idea of passive lead scoring was born.

I decided to take the great data that Polk provided and create a new executable for our dealership teams. Instead of asking the internet salespeople to change their behavior, I thought it might be easier to change the behavior of the customer. We knew they were buying, they just weren't always buying from us. What if we scored the lead, didn't share it with the dealership, and created a reason for the customer to give us the opportunity over our competitors? That was the introduction of passive lead scoring.

Taking some of the great components of HookLogic‚s industry-leading Web to Show 1.0 tool and marrying it up with Polk‚s lead scoring, we created Lead to Show 2.0. When a customer submits a lead to a dealer, no matter if it comes from the website, an OEM, or a third party lead, the lead gets scored and based on the score, the customer is incented to come into your showroom instead of going to a competitor. All of this happened without changing any of the processes at the dealership level. It was like putting the chocolate in the peanut butter.

Once we turned this on behind the scenes for dealerships, we instantly saw an increase in show rate and closing ratio. Some dealerships experienced a closing ratio as high as 38% during the test. It only made sense. Drive the highest intent to buy into your showroom and your internet team will sell more cars...and your competition will have no idea what you are doing because it is behind the scenes. It quickly becomes a secret weapon.

Passive Lead Scoring is a much easier decision for a dealership to make. It allows an internet team to use great data to drive the highest quality at-bats into the showroom without changing the lead follow-up process at your dealership. Adding Lead to Show 2.0 allows you to motivate action while lead is still hot and stand out from the competition.

Why a Web Overlay is Better for SEO than Pop-Ups

Following the same protocol as who we are as an organization (We are NOT a lead provider. We’re a SHOW provider), I’m writing this post to provide clarity between a “pop-up” (which is so passé) and a “web overlay” – the new black of increasing foot traffic. Often times we hear our Web to Show product referred to as a “pop-up”. While it may appear to be a pop-up, it’s actually a web overlay. Semantics? Not really. I’ll explain.

The difference?

Pop up’s have a negative connotation as being intrusive, non-related and just plain annoying. A web overlay, on the other hand, is non-intrusive, is relevant to the visitor and is interesting.

Pop-ups create a new instance in a browser, recognized by Google as leaving the site and therefore hindering your SEO score and increasing your bounce rate.  A web overlay uses content from your site – similar to a photo - that’s brought forward via an iFrame (not a new instance of a browser). We are not popping a new window, we are simply inserting DHTML.  It just so happens to be floating, not inline, layout and doesn’t impact a user’s ability to navigate the page.  Because an overlay is embedded in your site, it supports your SEO score as it shows interaction with your website – Google likes this.

The purpose?

The purpose of our web overlay is to educate in-market shoppers and provide a reason to visit you for a test drive. They are on your website, most likely know which car they want to buy, they just need a reason to choose you. We are the ZMOT. When the notification is displayed, it serves this purpose: “Thank you for looking at our inventory and vehicles of interest. Stop in for a test drive and we’ll redeem your $25 gift card of choice. Let us know when you’ll be visiting and we’ll have your vehicle ready when you arrive.” And when minimized, it stays minimized with a tab like reminder in the bottom left corner of the screen. So when that person is ready to decide, it’s available.

The techy side ala Google: “Google’s natural search rankings DO NOT penalize ranking of a site which displays promotional (or other) content to a site visitor via an overlay. Google only penalizes search rankings for sites which try to use hidden overlays and popups which try to boost the search ranking by presenting different content to the searchbot than to the site visitor. Google defines the popup as an instance of a new window which hinders a visitor’s ability to leave the site.” Our overlay does not.

It's February 7, 2012...Now What?

It’s February 7, 2012…Now what?

Imagine it’s the day after NADA…the flurry of NADA activities, meetings, demo’s, and appreciation events are now behind you. All the planning before-hand has left you overwhelmed with action items. As you sit at your desk, you pull up your conference notes and after a quick glance say to yourself, “Where do I begin?”.

If you’re like me, the reasons you attend a conference is to learn, connect and apply. And, how do you organize all those presentation notes, business cards, marketing brochures, meeting notes and follow up action items? In follow-up to an article I read that Eric Miltsch posted on DrivingSales, I started thinking about “after” NADA. As you plan and schedule now, keep these three things in mind for AFTER:

As I sit at my desk AFTER NADA:

1) Create a summary of key learnings (all those highlights and notes you made) to forward to your leadership team (if they were there, keep it for yourself). This will serve as your working document and easy to decipher notes for use in strategy. If you had to write it now, what would you include?

2) With your goals outlined from "Before NADA" (which should align with the dealership strategy), list two action items for each of those listed in "before".

3) Expand on each with "how" each will be accomplished.

NOTE: Keep these three things in mind as you attend each event which will help organize actions into buckets along the way making the "after" easier "now".

An example check list to consider:

3 "must visit" companies:

1) Company A will help accomplish X 2) Company B will help facilitate X 3) Company C is new and I want to learn X so I can do X (personal development)

3 "must connect with" peeps and why each is important:

1) Peep #1 2) Peep #2 3) Peep #3

3 impacts I want to make in my dealership/s when I return:

1) Impact #1 (immediate application, high impact effecting goal X) 2) Impact #2 (<short term> action item, high impact effecting goal X) 3) Impact #3 (<long term> action item, high impact effecting goal X)

"Lead the Way" when you return and  have a short, concise action plan detailing 2-3 deliverables for each goal, get the right people at your dealership on board (buy-in, involved), set realistic deadlines and ensure follow-up with each new connection.

Close the loop on your conference experience.

Check out this article where Todd Smith of ActivEngage is mentioned with his 2012 marketing trends that will have the biggest impact. How do your goals relate to these top 3?

Using the Coupon Redemption Process to Build Rapport

When a prospective customer comes in to your store, you know that you have more than a 50-50 chance of penning a deal before he or she walks out, a show-to-close ratio that is almost unheard of in other businesses. Despite the already high chances of making a sale, there are always little things we can and should be doing to help increase those chances. The AutoHook coupon redemption process, as simple as it is, gives you an opportunity to increase those chances. When a customer visits your dealership website and fills out the web overlay form to receive a $25 reward card when she comes in to your dealership, this person is making a conscious decision to give you her contact information, which is something that should not be taken lightly, especially in this day in age where privacy protection and control are of increasing importance.

During the redemption process where you enter the customer's coupon code into the AutoHook redemption tool, entering the person's shipping information offers a perfect opportunity to build on your rapport with the customer who is now one step closer towards buying a vehicle from your dealership. Even though this process can be made optional by your AutoHook admin, which should only be done on rare special occasions that we can't think of good examples for, spending the 30 to 45 seconds it takes to enter the info will prove to be a far better use of everyone's time than not doing so.

Here is why...

If no address is input by your team at the time of redemption, an email is automatically sent by the AutoHook system to the customer that contains a link for him or her to click on and submit her shipping information. This is set up this way as a measure to make sure a shipping address is supplied. After all, with no shipping address, no reward card can be shipped.

The problem with this is that now you are putting responsibility back onto the customer who already a.) gave you her contact info and b.) came in to your dealership with her coupon code. If you put the responsibility back onto the customer then you run the risk of her not receiving her reward card.

Think about this from the customer's perspective. It could ruin every bit of rapport you built with that person, all because you did not want to be inconvenienced with entering a street address, city, state, and zip code. IT'S NOT WORTH IT. ENTER THE INFO.

Use the Redemption Process to Build Rapport

The redemption process truly is a terrific way for your personnel to build rapport with walk-ins. If a staff member finds this to be a nuisance, we want to encourage him to think about it differently.

You are literally giving someone a $25 reward card for coming in to meet with you. We all know what a great feeling it is to give people something like this, and sales associates can use the redemption process as an opportunity to make someone happy BEFORE going into the selling process. It takes less than a minute to do this the right way up front and it is time very well spent because it minimizes if not eliminates the potential for hassle, headache, and upset customers that do not receive their card.

Always Redeem the Coupon

On a similar note, failing to enter redemption codes is the #1 reason for your AutoHook numbers to appear lower in your reports than they actually are. We see it all the time. Sales associates find ways around redeeming peoples’ reward cards for coming in and while you might still be selling more cars as a result, the reports can show a lower lead-to-show ratio as a result, which misrepresents the true picture.

Be sure to enforce the process of redeeming all coupon codes that are brought in, and be sure your staff members are also entering the shipping information. This 30- to 45-second process will go a long way for your dealership when you are consistent with this.

Advanced Tips and Best Practices

For more tips like this and to keep abreast with our best practices, register for our Advanced AutoHook Users Webinar Series which runs on the 18th of every month at 11:30am EST.