Why you shouldn’t be losing customers by giving them away.
Ecommerce in the automotive industry has a history of failed and half-hearted attempts. That’s why GForces understands the hesitancy we encounter in many retailers when we start talking about online vehicle sales. But, the reasons for previous failures are also why our ecommerce offering isn’t just different, but working. And more importantly, why it’s working for dealers.
NetDirector® Auto-e is our next-generation, ecommerce capable platform. It’s been built and designed purely for automotive retailers. Our solution isn’t just part of your business, it is your business, at least from a digital perspective. Which is why it naturally occurs to us that the data and customers you acquire through the platform should also be part of your business – not somebody else’s.
That’s where we believe ecommerce has failed the automotive industry in the past. Previous efforts were dominated by OEM-led initiatives that reduced retail networks to collection points, and left dealers unengaged and wondering who owned the customer. Or, retailers were encouraged to use generic, multi-industry ecommerce websites which took a dealer’s customers offsite to a third party, and surrendered data and ownership in the process.
There are other reasons ecommerce has been something of a hot potato for the industry, almost all of which centre on the user journey. Having your customers redirected from your website isn’t just troubling for you – it causes hesitancy in consumers, and veers away from the seamless, one-stop-shop experiences they encounter outside of the industry, like Amazon. To be direct, whether it’s by giving away data, or by failing to deliver on consumer expectations, it’s loss of customers that has been ecommerce’s biggest hurdle in automotive.
We offer something that is therefore incredibly rare in the industry – a platform that belongs to you, the dealer, which ultimately means so does the data you harvest, process, and remarket through it.
Your customers are your most important asset, and in the digital era, they have more value than ever. Sharing your customers, or worse, giving them away to another provider, is something you need to safeguard against.
The opportunity to partner with a provider that wants ownership of your customer data is certainly out there. From a major portal that not only charges close to £50 per lead, but also assumes ownership of the data they process, to a finance company that hijacks customers from dealers, you have a wide choice.
But, we’re not one of them. GForces won’t sell your data, and we don’t want to take ownership of your customers. All we want is to enable you to sell cars to them online. We also want to help you do this as profitably and as efficiently as possible.
The anonymised data below is the combined average from two major retail groups GForces worked with in the 2nd quarter of 2019. We use the class-leading business intelligence our platform benefits from to generate unrivalled digital marketing support based on billions of interactions through the NetDirector® Auto-e. As the results show, a different provider uses a reputation for market prominence to justify premium pricing and data ownership transference. Our argument is simple – it isn’t cost effective or worthwhile, and your marketing budget can be better spent elsewhere.
*Based on reported cost per lead for each client respectively.
†MS budget of £3,500 and £4,800, generating 10,500 and 2,750 organic leads (including calls) for each client respectively
‡Includes cost-per-click data
Sherlock Holmes considered data the key component to building successful solutions to the problems he faced. So do we. If you don’t own your data, you don’t own your customers, it’s as simple as that. But, even more importantly, if you don’t use the data you own effectively, it will still end up costing you more than it should.
We are now in an era of ecommerce where the customer is controlling and guiding the buying journey. We also know that we need to know our customers in order to optimise sales opportunities. Again, where consumers are driving the purchase experience, it makes sense that automotive businesses should own those customers in order to best meet their evolving demands and expectations. At the same time, if automotive businesses don’t own their customer data, the ability to gain insights on that data is limited, restricting how well they can interpret their requirements (or know their customers), or as the above shows, where their money might be better spent, and with whom.
