Background
Most sales staff at any dealership will tell you that the average customer visits a showroom between 1.2–1.5 times prior to making a purchase. In many cases the relationship between the brand website and the dealership sales team is full of distrust, which means staff treat web bookings as a disgruntled transaction. It is therefore crucial that a car brand’s website helps visitors find and select a vehicle and funnel potential
customers towards booking a test drive. The auto industry, like most industries, follows a series of seasonal sales periods. Like most brands, BMW ran its yearly End of Financial Year (EOFY) sale to encourage visitors to book a test drive with one of their dealers during this period and asked New Republique to help increase conversions and ROI from their heavy media spend period.
The test
BMW asked New Republique to optimise the landing page experience across a range of media channels to ensure the page content met specific customer types across the sales funnel.
Through qualitative and quantitative analysis the New Republique team identified a number of experiences that would help customers in their purchase journey.
Within our analysis we identified the need for:
- Greater clarity on the product range on offer
- More information on the benefits of the sales offer
- More information on dealerships
Using the principles of Choice Theory, we focused on creating a variant landing page that focused on:
- Framing the sales value to build on the fear of loss
- Scarcity bias to drive urgency of action
- Choice architecture to help reduce the cognitive load of selecting a car
- Simplifying the page structure by reducing the content being displayed
Framing allowed us to focus the customers on what they may save or lose if they did not act.
As BMW does not display sale prices, we used indicators like ‘Saving equal to the value of GST’ to give them an idea of the discount.
The results
Supporting this was the use of scarcity bias that gave the user a feeling that they may lose out if they didn’t act fast. Choice architecture is a design method that supports decision-making, assisting users to identify the product that suits them best.
1587
people to book a test drive
563
clicking Download eBrochure (2658 per month)
3956
clicking Book a Test Drive
205
clicking Enquiry Form (4,633 per month)
