Here at Codeweavers we want to help you sell more vehicles online. To help us do this we would like to understand what you feel is most valuable to your online offering. We that in mind, from the list below, what do you believe is most important to help you increase online enquiries?

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Sometimes when you are looking for inspiration, it comes from the most unlikely sources. I have recently been reading Richard Dawkins The God Delusion, which (ironically in this case) is his thesis on why he believes that God does not exist.

Why is this relevant here? I hear you ask. Well whilst reading the bit where he is discussing morality and the atheist version of the 10 commandments, it struck me that the last five fitted perfectly with a strategy for managing a web presence. As they would say in America, ‘go figure!’

So here is the back end of his list:

6. Always seek to be learning something new. In the world of the internet the only thing that is guaranteed is change. If you’re not constantly learning you’ll fall behind your more active peers.

Whether it’s analytics, marketing, interface design, copywriting, social media or more technical disciplines, there is always plenty to learn. Pick something that interests you, that can add value and enjoy the experience.

7. Test all things; always check your ideas against the facts, and be ready to discard even a cherished belief if it does not conform to them.

Software should be tested, everyone knows that, but do you objectively test the success of changes made to your website?

Being scientific about the changes you make is important, but more important is having the self -belief to admit failure in the face of the evidence and move on. Learn from your mistakes and try something else.

8. Never seek to censor or cut yourself off from dissent; always respect the right of others to disagree with you.

The web and more specifically social media provides one of the most powerful tools for getting access to your customers’ real thoughts about your products and services.

Use real customer feedback to refine your offer, improve your customer service and to become more effective at communicating your message.

9. Form independent opinions on the basis of your own reason and experience; do not allow yourself to be led blindly by others. It’s often attractive to seize on the latest innovation or idea in the hope that it will be the silver bullet to solve all your problems. However, it’s my belief that your online presence should reflect the culture ethics and ideas of your offline business.

Use your instincts to be selective in the strategies you adopt on the web.

That doesn’t mean don’t try things but instead understand how they will complement and reflect on the rest of your business.

10. Question everything. This commandment holds true for every aspect of business. If you’re not already doing this then you should probably hang up your guide and take up gardening.

So there you have it, five commandments designed for moral guidance that may have some relevance to success on the web. Alternatively you could rely on divine intervention!

Have you ever bought a shiny new toy and felt let down at the results? I bought a rather expensive digital SLR camera and the initial results we poorer than I expected. I could at this stage have sent the camera back to the (online) shop I bought it from, complaining that this expensive bit of kit didn’t work. However I know that many people can make this camera produce stunning photos, that’s why I bought it.  I saw their results and wanted to join their club.  So I practiced, tested, read-up and generally experimented and the results gradually improved. Sure I will never be a David Bailey but through experimentation and gradual improvement the tool I had purchased demonstrated that it was more than capable of doing the job.

Finance calculators on the web are no different.  Shiny and new on your site you will have high expectations of the results, however much like my adventures with the camera quality results are by no means guaranteed out of the box.

Like all other offers on the web, the effectiveness of your finance offer is significantly linked to the quality of presentation and visibility of that offer.  You may well have the strongest finance on the web but if it’s hidden away eight clicks from the home page, deep on the site then few people will find and interact with it. When your customers eventually find the calculators if it is not obvious how to use them or if the information is unclear or poorly presented you will again alienate them and prevent interaction. Use best practice to present the finance offer.  Test the layout on real customers and use their feedback.  Increase the visibility and accessibility of your finance offers by providing explanatory content and even product videos.

Check your offer.  Try out different rates to find the best compromise between lower rates which will lead to more enquiries and higher rates which will potentially result in fewer.  Selectively display your products putting your best foot forward.  Perhaps show PCP if available, if not show Lease Purchase and fall back to Hire Purchase. Only showing one product at a time may make the information clearer to your customers and encourage interaction.  You could also experiment with the default offer (the offer your customers see before they adjust any figures).

When making changes try adjusting just a single factor at a time. Monitor the results for long enough to get data.  If you have a busy site, a change over the weekend may well provide enough time, if however your site attracts fewer visitors it may take a little longer before the effects of any changes can be accurately measured.  Remember that what works today may not work tomorrow so I suggest continually tweaking your offers.

With effort, practice and experimentation your gleaming new finance offers can drive real improvements in finance penetration and significantly increase vehicle enquiries. Remember, it’s not what you’ve got but what you do with it!

Panacea : “an answer or solution for all problems or difficulties”

Everyone has problems, if you think about it if they didn’t then most businesses would not exist.  So its pretty logical that people are constantly on the lookout for the fix-all solution or magic wand that will solve all their problems, I.E. they are looking for their panacea. Experience however has taught me that there is no such thing.  Life’s problems are very rarely solved by any single action.  Think about it for a minute.  A person who is heavily in debt may believe that winning the lottery would be their panacea but in real life many lottery winners find that the money changes their life so much that they wish their numbers had never come up.

About 18 months ago Codeweavers launched a fully interactive payment search service that enables customers visiting a dealer’s website to search the dealers stock based on their specific budgetary requirements.  So the customer could now see all the cars in that dealer’s stock that they could afford, rather than selecting a Make, Model and Derivative to find a vehicle that they had already decided on. Mix up the stock, show the customer vehicles they would never have dreamt they could afford.  We were convinced we were on to a winner (and we still are).  Over a year on and the service is now being used by a range of dealers and manufacturers and is helping their customers to really search in a new and innovative way, but it wasn’t like this at first.

We had very much seen payment search as our panacea, but it quickly became apparent it wasn’t going to be that easy.  The initial take-up was slower that we hoped, partly because we didn’t shout as loud as we should have about the new functionality, but also because we had not anticipated the fact that there would be a delay while our media partners integrated the functionality into their sites.
However just because take up of our killer feature was taking longer than we had expected, we did not give up.  We added functionality to make the service even more attractive, we made new and much easier ways to get the functionality integrated and we made the search even faster. Today payment search from Codeweavers can search a stock of 750 vehicles using real time calculations on several finance products per vehicles in under 0.2 of a second.  Thats pretty fast when you think each vehicle could have a different finance company / dealer rates or even its own specific sell-out parameters.

Payment search is now being adopted on more and more sites and making a real impact on how potential customers search for their next vehicle.  This success was not due to Codeweavers finding its panacea but because we worked hard and above all persevered to deliver the product our customers really want.

By Roland Schaack