Internet Retailer: Car dealers and manufacturers risk losing online sales, Forrester says
Automakers are dropping the sales ball online, says both Forrester Research and JupiterResearch in new reports. The Forrester report reports that almost a third of car buyers are flocking to the Internet to choose a car, and even asking for dealer price quotes, but that less than ten percent of these 1.8 million monthly sales leads are closed by dealers into a sale. Forrester blames the leaky control car sites have over the user sales process, showing little integration with marketing efforts and the lead generation pipeline. Some leads are dropped, sent to bad addresses, sent to dealers who don't like online leads or otherwise unpredictably shunted away from the car brand.
Forrester said correcting these relatively simple mistakes would sell 40 percent more cars online.
Jupiter points out that, while almost every dealer has a website, a big majority of users start off first at the automaker's site. Those sites then do a poor job of sending (only 29 percent) of car choosers to a dealer site.
