Competitive dealerships sell and market at millennial speed
By Clayton Stanfield, senior manager, eBay Motors
With every generation of consumers comes a new generation of sales and marketing channels for businesses to master or die trying. First print, then radio and television, then the Internet took lead as the “ultimate” means to communicating with potential purchasers in any given era’s most covetable demographic group. Many dealerships assume that today’s ideal shopper hails from Generation X and is ultimately engaged with a glossy website and perhaps a Facebook page. But with millennials – the tech-savvy, empowered generation of consumers born between 1983 and 2004 – dealers must fast forward a mobile channel strategy, as well, to stay in front of and ahead of the shoppers who will be buying from them for decades to come.
If millennials aren’t top-of-mind for dealerships, they should be, with estimated generational purchasing power in the hundreds of billions of dollars. But reaching this prized segment isn’t a straightforward, one-time or static effort. For instance, millennial consumers are increasingly integrating the mobile phone – this generation’s virtual fifth appendage – into their shopping processes.
This trend translates to automotive shopping, as well, with millennials using their smart phones to research, shop for, and even purchase vehicles in much larger numbers than people of older generations. Recent eBay Motors research explored new vehicle shopping preferences and behaviors in today’s increasingly online and mobile commerce environment, and found that for millennial consumers the approach to car shopping revolves increasingly around using their mobile devices to complement the shopping experiences. Consider what the survey revealed:
· More than one-third of millennials use a mobile device to research information while shopping for a vehicle, versus 19 percent of the non-millennials surveyed.
· 44 percent of millennials are likely to use mobile devices to compare prices or get information while they are at a dealership, compared with 27 percent of the non-millennials surveyed.
· One-in-five millennials indicated they would consider purchasing a vehicle using a mobile device. In fact, only 13 percent of millennials reported that visiting a brick-and-mortar dealership is their most preferred method of shopping for or researching a vehicle, compared to 25 percent of non-millennial consumers.
When you combine the buying power of millennials with their mobile preferences, dealerships with no mobile footprint risk losing a significant new stream of revenue, or worse yet, never being in the running for it. For millennials, who are confronted with, literally, countless marketing and advertising messages in a 24-hour period, turning the vehicle shopping experience into one that is familiar and resonates with their lifestyle through the use of mobile is critical to dealerships capturing their already-fragmented attention.
However, “going mobile” is unlike deciding to enter into any sales and marketing strategy. It is arguably the most volatile and rapidly evolving sales and marketing channel in the history of contemporary retail, yet it also exponentially broadens a dealership’s audience reach and deepens the impact of its message and value proposition for the shopper. Dealerships have an opportunity through mobile to not simply reach millennials, but to connect with them on a more personal level through content that’s dynamic, customized and outright fun. Businesses are surprising and delighting us every day with exciting and meaningful mobile marketing approaches, but dealerships taking their first steps into the mobile arena need not put undue creative pressure on themselves. They just need to get going, and here are only a few of the ways to do that:
· Optimize your site. If a dealership’s website doesn’t render correctly on a smartphone or other mobile device, nothing else matters. Recent research draws a connection between a brand’s mobile savvy and consumer perception: 63 percent of consumer respondents said they would make a purchase from an email received on a mobile device, but 80 percent said they would delete an email that doesn’t look good on their mobile device. At a minimum in a mobile commerce environment, dealerships should make sure that all their online properties are optimized for mobile browsers.
· Leverage mobile app technology. While it is unlikely that a consumer will download a dedicated application for every dealership they are considering purchasing from during their shopping process, it is becoming increasingly possible that they will turn to other, broader applications during this process to gather research on the vehicles they are considering. To ensure that their vehicles are a part of this consideration set, dealers should make sure to leverage existing platforms or apps that already reach a large audience of mobile shoppers, listing their inventory through these services.
· Enhance show floor interactions. A showroom shopper with a smartphone is an opportunity for engagement. Dealerships should consider offering free Wi-Fi in-store to enable millennials (and, honestly, all those millions of others carrying smartphones today) to comparison shop, online. It may seem counter-productive, but the dealership advantage is that salespeople are on hand to hold real-time discussions with shoppers about their online research results and, even, save a would-be lost sale. And more shoppers are walking into dealerships with the body of their vehicle research accessible already on their smartphones, something that dealership sales teams should recognize as a prime opportunity to learn more about the shopper’s needs and serve as a true partner to them by answering their pre-purchase questions.
I encourage dealerships that have yet to recognize that mobile is a critical channel in today’s marketplace to examine their growth objectives and where that growth is going to come from. Millennials are not only buying vehicles today, but they also have more vehicle-purchasing years ahead of them than most other consumer generations, so identifying how and where to pique their interest and meet their needs is central to long-term dealership success. And the “how” and “where” are mobile.
