Background
The Unstoppable Automotive Group is a growing family of dealerships including Mercedes-Benz of Temecula, Volvo Cars of Mission Viejo, and Audi Mission Viejo.
Amir Alahwal serves as the Director of Dealer Development and Volker Jaeckel, a 20+ automotive veteran, is the Digital Marketing Director for the Unstoppable Automotive Group.
Their dealerships had bounced around a few different trade-in tools, including all of the big name brands you’d expect. The results were lackluster, with their only consistent approach to sourcing trade-in leads being within Roadster, their digital retailing platform. They renewed their interest in TradePending after seeing our trade-in values within the Roadster application, with TradePending delivering those values via the Trade API.
“Trade-in leads had been an afterthought for us,” says Alahwal. “What appealed to us initially was the simplicity of Trade, and how effective we believed it would be at creating more trade-in leads. That has proven to be true and exceeded our expectations”.
Results
Amir and his team worked with TradePending to optimize the Trade integration across their websites. These placements, along with a seamless user experience across mobile and desktop, created instantaneous results after going live.
Prior implementing Trade, the months of January 2021 through March 2021 averaged 8 trade-in leads per month. In their first full two months utilizing Trade, they’re averaging 117 leads per month, or 1,326% increase in trade-in lead volume.
Amir continues, “We went from having very limited trade-in lead volume to significant volume for our dealerships, literally overnight”.
Return on Investment
“We distribute our leads on a rewards basis. We set standards for sales people to complete, such as videos to send, phone calls to make, emails, etc. This extra incentive helps motivate our team, and is a contributing factor in our strong conversion rates.”
The sales team converts the trade-in leads into car sales at roughly 17%, an excellent conversion rate for any channel and any dealer.
For every 100 trade-in leads, that’s 17 cars sold. If they’re grossing $1,000-$2,000 per vehicle, that’s $17-34K in new gross revenue from a solution that runs just a few hundred dollars per month, or a 30-60X return-on-investment.
Maximizing Trade to Maximize Inventory Sourcing
Trade, like any tool, is most effective when put to good use. Jaeckel, Alahwal, and their team deserve extra credit for their excellent sales processes and marketing chops.
The marketing team began running “value your trade” campaigns, pointing their call-to-action to their custom landing page. From here, consumers can get their trade-in value within seconds, while Unstoppable gets an increase in leads and the opportunity to source more inventory. These campaigns accounted for roughly 35% of their trade-in lead volume in April.
They’ve also been smart to add a “Value Your Trade” product to their Google My Business listings, which resulted in roughly 15% more trade-in leads in April.
Finally, they needed the trade-in values to be consistent across Roadster’s digital retailing solution on their website and the stand-alone valuation tools on their website. Consumers expect the trade-in values to be consistent across a dealer’s website, chat, and digital retailing tools.
Amir concludes that, “Trade has been a tremendous asset to our team. Digital retail solutions do many things well, but we trust the experts like TradePending for converting website visitors into trade-in leads and inventory sourcing opportunities.”