When Will Testing Rule in Automotive Marketing?

Under most circumstances, testing and monitoring overrules gut instincts when it comes to digital marketing. Never before has a venue been as easy to track and improve. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case for automotive vendors servicing car dealers. Smoke and mirrors often supersedes results.

One notable exception has been CarChat24. In our travels, we started reviewing the various chat providers in the industry to help answer the question once and for all, “Who is the best chat service?”

What we’ve found is that there’s a huge gap between the two types of chat solutions: software and managed. With software solutions, the dealers are given access to an interface and they handle all of the chats themselves. With managed, the dealership lets a chat center handle the chat interactions and important questions or leads are forwarded to the dealership staff as they arise.

Between the two, we wholeheartedly believe in managed chat over dealer-operated chat, cost not withstanding. That’s a whole other issue. Let’s go back to what we found interesting about CarChat24.

First and foremost, they were very clearly “car people”. As someone who has spent a decade on the retail side of the business before coming over to the vendor side, it was refreshing to find a company that had people who knew the car business from the inside. There’s something that can be said about having the right balance (as I detailed on my post on LinkedIn the other day) of automotive people trained in marketing and marketing people trained in automotive, but seeing that those at the top had all been on the retail side at some point. This was refreshing, but then again, I’m biased based upon experience.

The other portion that was impressive was the way that they tested, and this is the heart of the issue. Testing is everything. Don’t give me your opinion about whether something works or not without some hard data to back it up. This is contrary to other components of digital marketing, but when it comes to chats and other lead-generating and customer service tools, data rules.

The way that they look at all of the data and make adjustments accordingly was extremely impressive. I’ll admit that I did not anticipate this level of data-driven decision making from “non-geeks”, but there it was. They would test images of operators and eliminate the ones that got fewer clicks. They would test the names of the operators and eliminate accordingly as well. The would test timing of the popups and prompts to see how long they needed to stay present in order to get the most engagements.

Altogether, it was an extremely impressive round of demonstrations. We will be looking at other chat providers over the next few months but our initial view of CarChat24 is going to be tough to beat.