Are Your CTA Messages Mapped in Your CRM?

The past six-months have been a wonderful time in my career as dealers continue to encourage my work to redefine the metrics they use to inspect their digital marketing investments. To date, I have publically documented six new metrics: CPE, EPS, ZEP, BCR, FCR, and more recently PER. As part of my work to perfect Form Completion Rate (FCR), I realized that many dealers were never properly advised on how to set up lead source naming in their CRM.

This article is for dealers who want to measure which Call-to-Action (CTA) buttons and third-party forms on their website are working best to convert anonymous shoppers to leads in their CRM.

Start with The Basics

First let me define the opportunity. Dealers place CTA buttons and banners on their Search Results Pages and Vehicle Detail Pages (VDP) as shown below:

If dealers are going to place CTA messages on their websites, they should measure which messages and forms are working the best to convert an online shopper into an identifiable lead. In the example above, which has eight unique CTA messages, the dealer has many design elements to measure and test.

First, there is KBB Instant Cash Offer, presented as a banner, at the top of the page. There is also a PureCars Trade-In tool mapped to the "Value Your Trade" button. This gives the dealer a unique opportunity to compare the FCR for two trade-in tools on the same website!

The buttons labeled "Get Our Best Price Now" and "Make Us An Offer" are website forms provided by fusionZONE Automotive. The "Get Pre-Approved" button is mapped to a financial application powered by Dealerwing.

The phone number 352-0325-4660 is likely a Dynamic Number (DNI) used to track phone conversions to a referral source; I hope. Under the main vehicle data block, a PureCars price alert tool is placed, which consumers can engage to be notified if the price of the car changes.

Is Your CRM Lead Mapping Accurate?

I used this dealer example to demonstrate the importance of inspecting your CRM to see if your website lead mapping is accurate. If a dealer wants to see how many times a consumer clicked on the "Value Your Trade" button and how many consumers actually completed the process to generate a lead in their CRM, to calculate the FCR, the PureCars trade-in leads must be separated from the PureCars price alert leads.

Please read the last sentence again so it is clear.

If the CRM is labeling all incoming PureCars leads as "PureCars" then the dealer loses the ability to inspect the FCR for PureCars!

In the same manner, if the fusionZONE Automotive forms for the "Get Our Best Price Now" and "Make Us An Offer" buttons are coming into the CRM as "Website Leads" the dealer loses valuable information.

What about the KBB trade-in tool? Dealers can receive leads from KBB.com as well as KBB form leads from their own website, like shown above. Does your CRM differentiate these two sources properly as "KBB fusionZONE Trade-In Leads" and "KBB Third-Party Leads?"

Update Your CRM Lead Mapping Rules

Please invest time today to inspect if your CRM lead sources clearly match your website CTA designs. Once you clean-up your CRM, you can finally determine which forms and third-party tools have the best Form Completion Rates (FCR).

How is this FCR data helpful? Let me give you an example:

In a dealer group, there are 15 stores. 10 stores have KBB Instant Cash Offer, 2 stores have PureCars, 2 stores have TradePending, and one store has eAutoAppraise. After cleaning up your CRM lead mapping, and installing the PCG Engagement Scripts, the marketing manager looks in VistaDash to find that one of the trade-in tools has double the FCR of the other tools. The data looks like this:

• Top Performer: Every 100 clicks yields 20 completed trade-in forms (FCR 20%)
• Other Forms: Every 100 clicks yields 10 completed trade-in forms (FCR 10%)

Since trade-in leads close at 40-60%, which trade-in tool would you standardize on your group websites?

The FCR data may not be the sole reason to switch but it will tell dealers which forms work best on desktop/mobile devices and which tools give consumers the confidence to complete the requested information. FCR applies to finance forms as well as internal website lead forms. If your FCR is low, you may want to DECREASE the amount of data you are requiring from consumers.

Summary

If CRM lead mapping is not accurate, dealers lose the ability to improve engagement on their website. They lose the ability to improve visitor to lead conversion rates. Sloppy CRM mapping is a costly mistake. The good news is that with the six new marketing metrics introduced to the automotive industry by PCG, dealers finally have actionable data to sell more cars in a digital age using VistaDash.

Join Me On The Tour

Dealers who want to learn more about the engagement metrics defined by PCG and incorporated into VistaDash should join me on the Automotive Engagement Conference (AEC) Tour. We are currently visiting seven U.S. cities, and more locations may be added. To see the full list, visit this page: https://goo.gl/xcKWCw