Image Source: Amazon
Amazon Vehicles, the online retailer’s new car research portal, took many by surprise upon its launch in late August. On the surface, the portal’s comprehensive vehicle detail pages and user reviews don’t look especially different from those you’d find on Cars.com and Autotrader – the main difference being that Amazon Vehicles does not yet support vehicle transactions.
However, there’s good reason for your dealership to take note of Amazon’s latest venture. Here are some of the unique takeaways we’ve identified in Amazon Vehicles’ first month.
The value of trust
Since launching as an online bookstore in 1995, Amazon has become one of the most-visited websites in the world with roughly 300 million active users. Along the way, the retailer has built up a sizeable following on social media with over 26 million Facebook fans and 2.4 million Twitter followers, giving it the opportunity to define its brand voice and values on a global scale.
The value of that brand is clear: at least 44 percent of U.S. consumers go to Amazon first for product searches according to a 2015 Survata study, surpassing top search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo!. If even a percentage of those consumers crosses over to Amazon Vehicles for their automotive research needs, it will be a sizeable audience – and that means maximizing your dealership’s brand recognition through social media, reputation management, and valuable, informative content will be more important than ever.
Every detail matters
Amazon’s comprehensive product details pages have undoubtedly played a role in its success, and Amazon Vehicles’ model-specific research pages share several similarities with those seen on the retailers’ ecommerce site. Consumers can filter thousands of vehicles by year, body style, mpg, towing capacity, and other key specifications, then learn more about specific vehicles by browsing illustrated landing pages.
With the vehicle research process increasingly moving online, Amazon Vehicles represents yet another tool for customers to narrow down potential purchases without ever setting foot on a dealership lot. While fighting this trend is foolhardy, you can capitalize on this consumer behavior by offering similar content (such as the fully compliant Model-Specific Landing Pages available as part of our Sales Accelerator) on your own website. By keeping leads within an online ecosystem that you manage completely, you can both eliminate the risk of potentially competitive content and reduce the friction that blocks conversion with our integration of a transparent trade-in evaluation tool into our messaging and website platform.
Personalization is expected
As with Amazon’s other products pages, Amazon Vehicles gives customers the opportunity to leave reviews and ask questions about specific vehicles. But this user-generated content is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the portal’s personalized experience. With the “Your Garage” app, users can save vehicles to their personalized page, find parts and accessories, and more – with more functionality likely to come.
For ages, dealers have attempted to communicate effectively with customers based on demographics or time and mileage intervals – both strategies marred by glaring gaps when it comes to individual consumers. The impressive functionality of the Amazon Vehicles portal helps illustrate that today, a personalized experience is no longer nice to have – it’s the norm. 3 Birds’ Smart Messaging Streams utilize an array of data sources, most notably consumer interaction points, and our own proprietary predictive models for personalized messaging that fits every customer.
Honda Accord Model-Specific Landing Page available as part of the Sales Accelerator
What’s to come
Analysts at Morgan Stanley recently issued a note predicting that a new and pre-owned vehicles section may soon appear on Amazon Vehicles. While such a move would seem to make sense for Amazon, the portal already offers important lessons for your dealership. To discuss incorporating these takeaways into your digital marketing strategy, contact us today.