Chery Motors Brand & Digital Ecosystem Development
I worked with Chery Motors from just after they launched into the Australian market. They were a new brand to market, with very little brand awareness and big growth ambitions. I led the team that worked with them to establish a high performing digital ecosystem, which built brand position while delivering a high volume of leads.
Overview
Chery had just relaunched in the Australian market after a 10-year absence. They were relatively unknown within the local market, and initially launched with a tagline of ‘tomorrow’s technology today’ which provided no differentiation in the market. It was like working with a start-up that had 25-years of R&D behind them - they had good quality products but zero consideration.
Prior to my team working with Chery, they had been generating c.300-400 leads per month. My job was to enable them to scale quickly, in order to achieve their aggressive sales ambitions.
Performance Marketing - Lead Gen
The first thing I did with Chery was to overhaul their performance marketing activity. Their existing activity was only delivering small lead numbers, and was not structured to succeed.
I developed a full funnel performance marketing strategy, which defined the target audience, provided a clear role for each channel, made budget allocations clear, matched content to context, and used highly-targeted activity to nurture prospects through the funnel.
In the first full month of activity, we increased the number of leads generated from performance marketing from <400 to 3,000. We achieved this using the same monthly budget they had previously, and at a CPL well below industry average.
Using continual testing & optimisation, we were delivered c.3,000 leads per month throughout the first year of activity, achieving a CPL of $75 (vs. industry benchmark of $100), as well as driving 390,000 brochure downloads and over 1 million website visits.
I led the client relationship and all activity, delivering the performance marketing strategy, and leading my team to do the implementation.
Improving Website Conversion
At the same time as we were executing the new performance marketing campaign, we overhauled the Book a Test Drive form to improve conversion.
As we were spending money driving prospects to the website, it was important to convert as many of these people as possible into leads. The Book a Test Drive form was a barrier, and to improve it’s effectiveness my team:
Improved the usefulness of the form by letting people select the time & date of their test drive.
Enabled customers to self-select their preferred dealer, which provided better a customer experience, and solved a problem where some leads were getting ‘stuck’ in the CRM system because they they lived in an area that didn’t yet have a dealer close by.
Make the form more visually appealing and simpler to follow, by using best practice form design processes.
Designed & build the form mobile first, as the majority of customers used mobile.
These changes resulted in the form conversion rate increasing from 2.4% to 23.7%, and generating thousands more leads.
I led the project, with my team delivering the new designs and I project managed the development of the new form and its integration into the website.
Building Brand Desirability
When we commenced working with Chery, they had minimal brand guidelines and no design system, resulting in the brand being delivered inconsistently. Upon taking over responsibility for managing the website, my team created a design system and used it to upgrade the website and digital marketing assets.
Chery didn’t have a budget to do brand advertising, preferring to put all of their media budget into driving leads. Therefore we needed to use the website and digital campaign assets to build brand desirability.
We started by redesigning the model page, which was expanded to include a lot more of the information a prospective car buyer would need, as well as giving the brand a distinctive style. We launched an MVP version of this page early on, and then used Hotjar and Google Analytics to inform iterations.
We gradually rolled the design system out to the rest of the website pages and digital ecosystem as we needed to make changes or create new pages and assets (e.g. eDM templates, campaign assets, etc.). This also provided a framework for launching new models, so as the model line up grew, marketing of these new models was able to be rolled out seamlessly.
The design system played a big role in improving brand desirability, as it gave the brand a clear and consistent identity.
Chery model page scroll through
Improving the Customer Experience
In addition to building brand desirability, it was important to improve the customer experience and make it easy for potential buyers to find the information they needed quickly.
We implemented a series of CX improvements, including:
Adding an ‘all model's’ page with key information including the car size (e.g. medium SUV), price range/any current offer and an image of each car.
Simplifying the home page to focus on the most important information and removing content that wasn’t being engaged with by users.
Redesigning a number of pages throughout the site (e.g. finance, offers, about us, etc.) based around user needs, desired user flows and utilising the design system for consistency of experience.
Implementing tagging and updating content to improve SEO.
Improving the performance of the website through optimising asset file sizes, tidying up the code and changing the hosting & security platforms.
My team managed this work through a backlog that was groomed & prioritised monthly. The majority of the items were proactive recommendations from my team to Chery.
Building a Nurture Program
As Chery was a new brand to market with aggressive growth ambitions, it was important to maximise lead conversion. This involved nurturing prospects through the funnel, which we did using both performance marketing and CRM.
I proactively recommended building a series of automated CRM journeys, such as a test drive journey, a new model launch journey, an onboarding journey, etc.
We approached the journeys one at a time, starting with mapping out the journey, then defining the content & personalisation rules for each individual email within the journey, before building the email templates and liaising with the Chery IT team to integrate the templates and rules into the CRM system (Zoho).
Impact
My work transformed the Chery digital experience, and created a holistic ecosystem that worked seamlessly to drive sales. It contributed to Chery going from zero to 4.5% market share in the Small SUV segment, as well as entering additional market segments.
Some highlights included:
Generated almost 30,000 test drive leads in 10 months at a CPL of $75 (significantly below the industry average).
Increased website conversion by 9.9x through upgrading the book a test drive form & improving the information architecture, usability, website performance and page layouts.
Launched the email-based nurture program to help dealers to convert interest into action and operationalising it across the dealer network.
Made significant improvements in website performance, with >10% increase in time to first bite (faster load times), improved security and an automated deployment & testing process.
Improved brand desirability through new model page designs and improving consistency across digital assets.
At the end of the first year working together, Martin Min, Digital Marketing Manager at Chery said of my team: “I want to take a moment to express our heartfelt gratitude for the incredible work we have accomplished together over the past year. Our collaboration has sparked numerous innovative ideas and successful project rollouts, each of which has significantly contributed to our goals. Your team’s dedication, creativity, and expertise have been truly invaluable to us.”