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A Challenge To Auto OEM’s: Extend the User Experience

Chris Sherman’s article on ClickZ entitled “New Research Shows How Search Drives Auto Buyers” includes some great stuff. Yahoo and Comscore did the study. My favorite highlight is a comment from David Schwartz of Yahoo, regarding observed consumer behavior which tends to favor aggregator sites over OEM sites for all but the feature research aspects of auto shopping…

“Schwartz said that rapid response to user requests, with speed and often better pricing, is the key differentiator for aggregators.”

This conclusion does not surprise me based on my personal observations, but I find it very ironic just the same. The same dealership sales people respond to leads from both aggregator and OEM sites, so there’s really no reason why speed and price should be different. The OEM’s just have a perception problem!

One way to address that is for OEM’s to rethink their websites. The OEM sites today are generally VERY well done with extensive use of no-expense-spared rich media, delivering a phenomenal user experience for users seeking feature information about a vehicle. But as good as the initial experience is, the “next step” experience is as bad (or worse). A user that finds a vehicle they like is typically left with one option – “enter your zip code to get a list of dealers”. And that’s it! Unbelievable! Why not connect the user to a dealer right then and there, while the user is pumped up and ready to engage, and before they surf on to an aggregator website (or worse, a competitive OEM site)?

By adding a web-based communications service such as ContactAtOnce! to their sites, OEM’s could extend the user experience to its logical conclusion – a live conversation with a sales person at the dealership. The web-savvy user that appreciates the phenomenal research aspects of OEM sites is the same user that will appreciate the availability of presence-aware web-based communications for contacting a dealer. We know from our experience in working with hundreds of dealers that a “live conversation” with a prospective customer is 2-3 times more likely to result in a sale versus “contact-us” type form leads. Thus, franchise dealers would love the OEM marketing teams and feel better than ever about paying the OEM fees/taxes that fund OEM marketing and websites. Moreover, the OEM marketing team could quantify the value of their site in ways never before possible.

Food for thought…

The New Idea that TechCrunch Missed

In a recent post on the TechCrunch blog entitled “The Six Biggest New Ideas In Chat”, Nick Gonzalez covers some interesting and important Instant Messaging solutions and companies. His focus seems to be on the personal IM space, so it is understandable why he missed one of the biggest and most powerful new ideas – that of bringing presence and IM to online classified and local search ads in the consumer-to-business context. As readers of this blog know well, that idea is the basis for ContactAtOnce!. It is our reason for being.

Someday the web2.0 specialists at TechCrunch will take note and test drive the ContactAtOnce! service. In the mean time, one thing is for sure. IM adoption and innovation are growing exponentially and the demographics point to broader and deeper use of the technology across all domains. We’re here to help online publishers capitalize today.

Teens Use eMail Less Than Anyone Else – IM The Dominant Form of Communication

This from a news piece that appeared recently on Foxnews.com (and initially in PCMag.com). A Parks Associates study is cited. Although teenagers are not the ones out buying cars and homes today, they are the most Web-savvy demographic and represent a great proxy for the habits and preferences of Web-savvy consumers of all ages.

Question – what kind of consumer is most likely to visit an online classified or local search website? Hello! It is the Web-savvy consumer, of course.

So what can online publishers learn from this? That “contact us” forms and email are less likely to be used by the Web-savvy demographic (which roughly correlates to the younger demographic). For online publishers serious about brokering more and better leads for their advertisers – i.e. connecting ready-to-buy consumers with relevant merchant advertisers – a web-based communications service such as ContactAtOnce! should be utilized in place of (or along side of) old-school contact-us forms and email leads.

Google Click-to-Call – It’s Official

Via their blog Google officially announced today the availability of “click-to-call” for Google Maps. The official announcement has been long anticipated going back to March when the trial was announced.

Google is absorbing the cost of this feature in order to accelerate their revenue growth in the local search arena, offering it free-of-charge to their advertisers. Smart move! The feature is useful and increases the effectiveness of the ads on which it is enabled. How do I know it is effective? Well, I don’t have access to Google’s trial data, but I don’t need it because data from publishers that have deployed the ContactAtOnce! service is so conclusive. In our experience, the effectiveness of ads increases by at least 25%.

So how long until every classified publisher, internet yellow page provider, local search site, and ad network selling advertising to local businesses follows suit? We think soon! If they want to stay in business for long, that is.

And ContactAtOnce! stands ready to enable such publishers, providers, and networks. Our service will enable them to compete with Google, at least in this dimension, and it couldn’t be simpler to roll out.

eStara CEO Has It Right (Almost)

Today an article by John Federman, the CEO of click-to-call provider eStara, appeared in iMedia. It is entitled “Pay Per Call: The Answer Is Choice”. In it, Mr. Federman comments that Google and Yahoo! have brought a lot of valuable media attention to pay-per-call recently. He goes on to make the point that their C2C communications services such as GoogleTalk, YahooIM, and Skype are ill-suited for C2B applications such as pay-per-call. His logic is good and I recommend the read. He’s right, of course. But he stopped short of the “whole truth”.

The answer is indeed choice but, ironically, the very internet savvy site visitors that everyone hopes will be making the phones ring upon seeing pay-per-call ads are the least likely to pick up a phone. They want choice in communications channels and are as likely to IM the advertiser as they are to call. Moreover, the Internet-savvy demographic is time-starved. Tthis demographic responds very positively to graphical cues within ads that indicate the availability (i.e. “presence”) of the advertiser. Knowing someone is there to answer their question, site visitors are more likely to click and/or call because they rightly assume that the probability of wasting time in IVR or voice mail hell is much lower.

Do I know something that Mr. Federman doesn’t? Not likely, but Mr. Federman would be silly to talk about capabilities that his service can’t currently deliver. ContactAtOnce! can deliver more than click-to-call, and we’ve proven that our presence-based visual cues increase ad response rates by 25%, so I am happy to talk about them.