DRTs vs Trade
Solving for Different Needs
If you’ve eve
r considered letting your digital retailing solution exclusively handle your trade-in valuations, don’t do it!
What follows is a great example of one dealer who, after being advised that his digital retailing tool could handle trade-in leads, decided to test that approach. The dealer changed all of their website call-to-action buttons for trade-ins to point shoppers to the digital retailing tool or online chat.
(We’re not bashing digital retailing tools; quite the contrary. Dealers need both a DR solution for high-intent leads and a trade-in tool for website conversions, as they solve different customer needs.)
This isn’t the first time we’ve heard dealers trying this approach. What follows is how we fix it together, because it never works as anticipated. We include the supporting data which makes the business case easy to understand.
Step 1
We walk the dealer through the exact experience a user goes through to get a trade value on their own site, and how difficult it was for them to find and receive a trade value.
Our annual consumer survey shows that the #2 reason consumers visit a dealer’s website is to value their trade-in.
If that desired functionality is buried within a multi-step digital retailing or chat process or in a call-to-action that says “calculate my payment”, those users will abandon your site and head to a competitor’s, where it’s easier and faster to get a trade-in value.
Step 2
Look at the data and easily see that they were just receiving a trickle of trade-in leads from their digital retailing tool.
Step 3
Look at the data to see how many people were accessing the trade-in form in the chat and DRT and NOT converting into a trade lead. In many installations of chat and digital retailing tools, consumers get a trade-in value without exchanging any contact information, which means that chance of a lead just evaporated.
In February 2021, despite seeing hundreds of trade-in lead reports run across their online shopper and chat tools, they only netted single digit trade-in leads from those reports.
The data below shows that 343 reports were run for the online shopping experience, and 95 were run through the chat solution. Consumers bailed out of the process before supplying any contact information.
We’re able to see this data because it’s our data that’s powering the trade-in values in this DR tool via our API, prior to this dealer using Trade as a stand-alone solution on their site for generating car sales leads.
Step 4
The final step was to help him off the floor, wipe the tears away from his face from all of the missed trade in opportunities and tell him in a comforting voice, “We’re going to fix this for you.”
Results
In his first full month with Trade installed on his website, this dealer received 173 trade in leads that didn’t exist before due to his prior approach, with excellent overall conversion rates.
135 of those leads came from mobile (78%!) with an astonishing 41.41% form completion rate. TradePending is now his highest ROI lead source.
Bonus! This dealer can adjust his trade values to compete with Carmax and Carvana, who have been very aggressive with their trade-in valuations in order to source more cars.
This dealer went from the depths of despair to trade-in lead euphoria in 45 days.
This dealer has absolutely no qualms about “paying twice” for trade-in valuations in their DR tool and for a stand-alone trade-in tool built specifically to maximize website conversion.