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BMW Australia

According to a Google report on “The Car-Buying Process”, 90% of car buyers go online to research vehicles prior to visiting a showroom.

INFO
Client: BMW
Category: Automotive
Services: Strategy, CRO, UI, UX

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 generated a phenomenal response to the EOFY sale. New Republique were able to identify the gaps where there was not enough information or urgency and then created a compelling page that helped push customers towards booking a test drive, which is a key part of the sales journey for us.

Daniel Tobin

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)