We recently conducted a case study with one of our customers, Planet Honda of New Jersey, one of the nation’s highest-selling automotive dealerships by internet sales, according to Ward’s Auto e-Dealer 100. They’ve seen some impressive growth over the last few years thanks to their President and Dealer Principal, Bill Feinstein’s analytical approach to running the dealership. By measuring every aspect of their business, Planet Honda knows exactly what works for them, what doesn’t and most importantly, why.
It is so important to us at Impel to make sure that our customers are happy and getting as much out of our software as possible, and we knew that Planet Honda, with their meticulous analytical approach, would be able to tell us exactly how big of an impact we are making on their business. We make some pretty serious claims about what our software can do for your business and we want to make sure that we’re living up to those standards.
We believe that we’ve found the key to increasing your dealership’s internet sales and it all comes down to engagement time and conversion rates. By increasing the conversion rates of your website, you’re convincing more of the visitors that you already have coming to your site to provide an actionable opportunity that your sales representatives can take full advantage of. Between SEM, SEO and ad spend, you paid a lot of money to get those visitors onto your site, so why not engage as many of them as possible?
The issue you’re confronted with at this point is how to get those visitors to convert; whether it’s by calling the dealership, sending an email to your sales department, or submitting a lead online. Planet Honda saw that by increasing the average time users were spending on their VDPs, they experienced some impressive results in terms of their conversion rates.
Last month we had more used car internet leads than ever before and we had more used cars sold through our business development center than ever before. I believe that SwipeToSpin was a strong factor in driving that engagement and getting customers to submit leads, make phone calls and interact with our vehicles.
Bill Feinstein
Using Impel for their used vehicle inventory has had dramatic positive effects on their business. They are seeing that “month by month the numbers are increasing, customers are inquiring further about the individual vehicles that they’ve spent time on,” according to Sue Lerch, Director of Customer Service at Planet Honda.
On top of the clear benefits of using 360 WalkArounds, our software is also easy to use. Planet Honda’s photographer told us that he ”would just take the photos, upload the photos to our stream and Impel would generate the spins for us and they would actually insert the hotspots, the engine shots, the wheels and everything and the captions automatically for me.” It didn’t take him any longer to generate these fantastic immersive spins than his original photography workflow.
Based on the success that Planet Honda has seen using Impel’s software on their site, we’re very excited to bring this tool to dealers everywhere. In addition to the increases that Impel is driving to bottom lines at dealerships, we’re also pleased to announce the rollout of new analytic functionality on the back end of the Impel software suite. With VDP Intelligence Reports dealers get a comprehensive look at the performance of their website each month, seeing the stickiness of your VDP, the average time spent on your VDPs as well as which of your VDPs were the most popular for that period. Available now, Lead Intelligence Reports provide an in-depth look at the shopping habits of each individual shopper who submits a lead. You’ll see information like the shopper’s feature interests, the time they spent on a VDP and the other VDPs they viewed. This can dramatically improve lead-to-show rates.
By: Devin Daly, CEO
