5 Things profitable dealers stopped doing in 2016….
Over the past 6 to 12 months profitable dealers have been growing even more profitable by aligning their strategies with the clear realities of how car shoppers shop and ultimately buy in today’s market. An in-arguable truth is that shoppers and buyers behave very differently today than they did in the yester-years of 2014 and beyond. One obvious piece of evidence is that Google removed its “right rail” for paid search from the worlds most dominant search engine. Make no mistake, Google is in the profitability business and they have the most information about how shoppers shop in every industry. Without question Google thought long and hard about how making that move would impact their revenue. They know every click, search term, and intent. What did they do with all of that information? They adapted to how people shop and buy, and many profitable auto dealers are doing the same.
Here are the top 5 things that profitable dealers stopped doing:
1. Profitable dealers stopped paying for leads. They know that their website and their existing customer relationships are an over abundance of opportunity and they execute better strategies to leverage those opportunities that boost their bottom line.
2. Profitable dealers stopped paying for website traffic. They recognize that their websites have more than enough opportunities and they’re using better strategies to convert those opportunities without paying a single penny in paid search advertising.
3. Profitable dealers stopped retargeting all of the visitors on their website and reduced their retargeting spend on the 25% to 30% of actual in-market interested visitors on their website.
4. Profitable dealers stopped sending direct mail to sales targets. With the exception of sending off-lease mail and email to their customers profitable dealers send only service related offers to their accurately targeted service opportunity’s, thereby increasing their service profitability and increasing the upward velocity of their overall profitability.
5. Profitable dealers stopped measuring their marketing performance with outdated 2014 key process indicators (KPI’s). They understand that “correlation is not causation” they understand that click-thru-rates, bounce rates, last click attribution are measurements that have little to do with their profitability but a lot to do with the profitability of vendors that charge expensive management fees just to report on that data.
Those are the trends that are driving even more profits to already profitable dealers, as the saying goes “the rich get richer” it’s also true with profitability focused dealers, “the profitable get even more profitable.”