What is Mycardirect? 🚗
Mycardirect is a UK-based car subscription service. Unlike traditional car leasing, their subscription-based model lets you change car models, how much you drive them, and even how you long have them for.
But even though it is more flexible than buying or leasing, many drivers are not familiar with the relatively new option of car subscription. So we sat down with Ian Bristow to discuss how the Mycardirect website not only has to serve as lead and revenue driver for the business, but also as an education piece to potential customers.
Along with Sofia Dedyukhina, their Account Manager at Leadoo, we unpack exactly how Leadoo has helped Mycardirect achieve both of these goals, and delivered an impressive 6 to 1 ROI along the way.
The Need for Conversational Tech 💡
Prior to becoming a Leadoo customer, Mycardirect did not have chatbots or any interactive tech on their website for users. Their website was bringing in a lot of traffic, but not as many leads as they needed.
They also found that many users were calling them to ask FAQs about car subscription. This was taking up a lot of their sales team’s time, and implied that users weren’t being engaged or signposted well enough onsite.
As Ian explains, “we knew we needed to make our website more efficient and more interactive for users. But our budget at the time was not big, so we needed a solution that could improve UX and lead generation, while not costing loads or requiring a lot of development time.”
“Our wider marketing strategy is heavily focused on making more people aware of car subscription as an option. So any website changes also had to fulfil that key education requirement.”
Instant impact from Leadoo 📈
When Mycardirect signed as a Leadoo customer in March 2023, their Onboarding Manager Helen Azoia set about building conversational experiences, on high traffic pages, that would address that education need.
Even before these interactive journeys started yielding tangible increases in conversion rates, their effect was noticeable. As Ian explains:
“The most immediate change we saw after bringing in Leadoo was a lot fewer phone calls from people asking general FAQs, about credit checks or subscription lengths for example. The bots enabled people to answer their own questions about the details of car subscriptions from day 1. This quickly started saving our sales team a lot of time.”
But business efficiencies aside, the proof of the tech would ultimately be in its impact on lead generation. For Mycardirect this involves two distinct conversion points through their site:
- Signups: where users make a free account and register their interest in a vehicle, before Mycardirect conduct financial and credit checks
- Subscriptions: once users pass these checks and Mycardirect confirm their desired car is available, their subscriptions starts (generally 3 – 5 days after signup)
Comparing the 12 months after Leadoo was implemented (March 23 – April 24) against the previous year’s results, the improvement in performance is stark, across both conversion types.
Free signups were up 12% year-on-year, but even more impressively, subscriptions increased by over 40%.
This is all the more remarkable because overall traffic to the website actually decreased by 8% in the same period…
This is because Leadoo’s conversational tech helped activate and nurture website users early in their journeys. Guiding them through the process of car subscriptions, and making it much more likely they would reach various conversion points.
The conversion rate for traffic to become free signups rose 23% year-on-year. And then independently, the conversion rate from signups to become subscribers also increased by 25% in the same period.
All resulting in more than a 6x ROI on Leadoo spend over the last 12 months.
As Sofia, Mycardirect’s Account Manager at Leadoo explains, this phenomenon of more leads from static (or even decreasing) traffic levels is not uncommon for customers:
“In a time where marketers have to do more with less, it makes sense to invest in nurturing and converting your existing website traffic. Rather than trying to acquire more and more traffic in the hopes it will convert on its own.”
“With many customers, we see that once our tools are in place and raising conversion rates, attitudes to traffic acquisition actually shift. Especially if it’s traffic from lower quality or very expensive sources. So increasing conversion rates like Mycardirect have done is a great way to drive marketing and business efficiency.”
Automotive Customer Success 🤝
For Ian, the success of the project to date has been in no small park thanks to the level of support and optimisation he’s received from Leadoo’s Conversion Experts.
“Even a year in, most of the ideation of new bot types and pathways still comes from Sofia. Internally, we’re starting to get more and more people familiar with Leadoo, but until now, it’s been crucial to have an Account Manager leading our strategy and testing.”
“Our onboarding manager, Helen, was also amazing when we were getting set up. She made what could have been quite a complicated integration with our systems relatively painless. Both her and Sofia have really set us up for success.”
“Leadoo is a really useful and powerful tool we have within our lead generation arsenal. We also realise we haven’t even fully utilised all of the platforms features yet!”
Indeed while most of the success so far has been in a B2C context – with individual subscribers – Mycardirect are increasingly looking to make use of Leadoo’s Company Identification in a B2B context.
There are businesses for example who may prefer subscriptions for their entire company car fleet. Or may need the flexibility of a subscription to cover things like probation periods, or even for employee initiatives like the new salary sacrifice scheme.
For Sofia, this means great potential for new Leadoo use cases, such as ROI calculators and quote builders using Visual Bots. As she explains:
“Mycardirect have been great to work with during our first year together. They really understand the value of using conversational tech to help educate and nurture website visitors. And they are always open to implementing new conversion ideas and pathways.”
“They have a great marketing and growth outlook, and with new things for us to test out for their B2B audiences in the year ahead, it should be another successful year for website performance.”
