Industry Feature: Automotive Dealerships
Note: This is the first release from a series of research projects on lead response times across multiple industries. Our team has been collecting data on thousands of online leads to benchmark how businesses respond to online leads, and we will release the data as the reports are finalised. Our first release: Lead response times for the Automotive Industry.
The Direct Connect Lead Response Audit was initially conducted to help validate the need for Direct Connect within the automotive market.
As the results began to come in, we realised that the lead response times were not as fast or as consistent as we had expected. So, we made the decision to invest heavily in expanding the mystery shop project to over 2000 leads so that we could put together a lead response whitepaper to release to market.
The lead response statistics serve as an education piece to help automotive dealerships to identify the opportunities they have to improve how online leads and enquiries are handled, and to promote awareness of the importance of tracking speed to lead response times.
There’s no doubt that Direct Connect provides a simple and immediate solution to the problem. Our lead response software allows Dealerships to respond to online leads within 60 seconds, as well as provide optional call recordings to help identify coaching opportunities.
Direct Connect is just one tool that’s available to assist dealerships with their lead response times. Our hope in releasing the study is that the market will seize the opportunity to improve the return on investment that they are already spending for lead generation.
Improving the “Speed to Lead” response times is a crucial part of improving lead conversion rates, and our lead response time audit helps establish the current industry benchmarks.
How the survey was conducted:
The data was gathered in a comprehensive study of lead response times for automotive dealerships across Australia and New Zealand. The study involved submitting over 2000 leads to dealerships and measuring the response rate and response time to leads submitted online.
More than 600 dealerships were included, representing 42 car brands.
Direct Connect submitted three online leads per dealership, this included one lead in the morning (during business hours), another lead in the afternoon (during business hours), and one lead sent after hours.
Leads were submitted on high-value contact forms such as “book a test drive” pages, specific vehicle enquiry pages, as well as through the market-leading automotive live chat provider, Drive Chat.
In addition, online leads were also submitted through several third party aggregate websites to measure how lead handling differs when leads are received from other sources.
What was measured:
The lead response time audit tracked phone calls, emails, and SMS responses.
Our primary interest was in meaning the lead response times by phone call, because it’s well known that actually speaking to potential customers is critical in building a relationship that leads to booking a test-drive, and ultimately making a sale.
The results of our study were released to market, and were featured by Facebook in their keynote at the AADA Dealer Convention, as well as published in GoAuto and AutoTalk.
Click the button below to read more about our automotive lead response time audit.
Interested in having your lead response time measured? Contact us and ask for a free mystery shop! We’ll send you a free report on how you compare to other dealerships.