Rick Case Auto Group chose to pay for a product over their incumbent conversion solution… which was offered to them for free by their vendor. This case study is about why and how it worked out for the Rick Case Auto Group to choose paying for a product over a free one.
This case study features the entire Rick Case Auto Group, which is one of the largest privately owned dealer groups in the US. They’re well known for their strong customer first focus by its owners Rick and Rita Case. If you’ve been in the industry certainly you’ve heard about and hopefully read and learned from Rick Cases’ seminal book “Customers for Life.”
The entire Rick Case Auto Group has strong commitments to excellent customer service, talented people, consistent and measurable processes, and a persistent focus on dealership growth and profitability. They excel at putting the right people, processes and tools in place. Which is why the team at Pureinfluencer, LLC was excited and up for the challenge to help the Rick Case Auto Group grow more sales profitably by helping their dealers increase their website visitor-to-lead conversion rates.
In early January, Travis La Kam the groups’ Marketing Director was hesitant to make changes with their digital marketing and website tools with good reason. According to their analytics, as well as reporting from their existing conversion platform tool, they were doing a better than average job converting leads and sales from their website traffic.
Then came the “side-by-side” comparison test.
Travis and his management team decided to give the myOffer Conversion platform 30 days in each of their 15 stores beginning February 1st, to compare side by side with their incumbent conversion platform vendor; this is a case study of the results of that side-by-side comparison in February, and the performance of the subsequent 3 months.
In February, each store had customized offers in the myOffer platform along with unique “engagement variables” specific to that stores’ website visitor behavior designed to identify and convert highly engaged website visitors that had not yet converted into leads. These were website visitors that according to Google, Cars.Com, and Autotrader and other online auto buyer shopper studies, were most likely visiting and considering other same brand dealership websites in their respective markets. The myOffer conversion platform identified those highly engaged visitors and converted them into leads with high lead-to-sales ratios… leads that also had above average lead-to-sales rates and ultimately bought cars from the dealerships in the group.
The Result.
* Incumbents results includes both offer and chat leads.
A few days before the end of the side-by-side test period, Travis La Kam emailed Pureinfluencer to ask for contracts and expressed that they were very impressed and pleased with the results from the myOffer Conversion platform. They cancelled the free platform and continued with the myOffer Conversion platform exclusively, at a cost significantly above free.
Here’s some detail around the sales lift and return on investment during that first side-by-side 30-day comparison period:
The incumbent “offer platform” which included leads from its chat tool component drove 57 sales for the entire group, which was an average of 31 leads per store for an average lead-to-sales rate of 12%.
The myOffer Conversion platform – with no chat tool component – drove 116 sales for the entire group, which was an average of 53 leads per store for an average lead-to-sales rate of 14%.
In other words, the incumbent platform was allowing 30+ sales per month to take place at the respective competitor dealerships. The Rick Case Auto group found immediately that they could grow their monthly sales numbers by focusing on converting more of their website traffic.
The following 3 months – March through May 2018 proved to be even more effective for the group, and the myOffer conversion platform continued to produce strong sales and lead-to-sales rates for their stores.
Cumulatively during the next 90-day period the group enjoyed:
… a total sales lift from the myOffer Conversion platform of 479 sales, an average of 14.2 sales per dealership. From an investment perspective their average monthly return on investment is 3,321%.
The stores – and the group – found that converting their website traffic intelligently was an excellent way to capitalize on their marketing investments. With a strong conversion platform in place, the group now focuses their attention on more effective marketing tactics and sales processes. They’ve got their sights on bigger goals… and with the methods they used to evaluate their conversion strategies it’s clear that they’ll achieve those goals.