Transforming browsers into buyers: how we used experimentation to help Inchcape generate thousands of additional leads each year

Inchcape are one of the world’s leading automotive distributors, with operations in 36 national markets. When they came to us, they had an interesting challenge:

The main focus of each of their websites was to generate qualified leads that they could then nurture into sales. However, their websites were often treated and thought of as brochures where users could browse without taking further action. This meant that far fewer of their users were being converted into leads than they would have liked.

As a result, Inchcape were looking to develop and test new lead generation approaches, but without any in-house experimentation capability, they needed external support.

We were initially hired by Inchcape to increase the number of leads generated by their Toyota website in the Hong Kong market. Bigger picture, though, we were challenged to demonstrate the value of experimentation to the entire worldwide Inchcape team.

The first of these two experiments – implementing the softer call-to-action on the ‘our vehicles’ pages – increased the number of leads by 46%. The second – implementing the lead-capture form on the finance calculator – increased lead numbers by 95%.

Importantly, while the changes introduced in these experiments generated a huge uplift in lead numbers, neither experiment resulted in a statistically significant decline in the number of test drive bookings. In other words, these changes – both yielding huge positive results – had no adverse impact on any other important KPI’s.

In addition to these quantitative results, both of these experiments also yielded a number of interesting insights that we were able to take forward and apply to other experiments. For example, hard CTA’s like ‘book a test drive’ are ineffective when users are at an early stage of the buyer’s journey. Were there other places on the website where this mismatch was happening?

All in all, the team at Inchcape have been deeply impressed by our work and by the power of experimentation more broadly. As a result, they’ve since expanded the scope of their program, and we’re now working with them to optimize a number of their other websites, including Toyota in the Romanian market and Land Rover in the Polish market.

46%

Increase in leads from the ‘Our Vehicles’ pages

95%

Increase in leads from finance calculators