Automotive Marketing UI/UX Design
These websites were designed and developed during my time as Senior Graphic Designer at J&L Marketing. I was the sole UX Designer on these projects, working with a development team in an agile environment.
Easy Car Buy Website
The Easy Car Buy website was developed as a B2C product for dealerships. The concept was to design a white labeled marketplace website for a dealership’s inventory. The challenge which many dealerships face is a change in shopping habits by car buyers. Most buyers will shop and make a decision on a vehicle before ever stepping foot into a dealership. This is a dramatic change from the 3-5 dealerships visits customers used to make before deciding on a vehicle to purchase. We used familiar navigation and search tools which customers have come to expect when shopping online, but many dealership websites lack. The site kept the user corralled to the specific dealers inventory and allowed the dealership to assign specific, time limited incentives driving a sense of urgency, all while keeping the familiar feel of the aggregate sites such as cars.com, truecar.com, cargurus.com, autotrader.com, etc. Users are also able to enter and adjust their financing options, trade-in, credit score, etc. to update financing in real time on the site.
In addition to the front end experience, on the back end, all users were tracked for insight into their shopping interests, financing situations and readiness to buy. Sales teams were then able to support the sales to those customers more efficiently. This data also assisted in the marketing teams efforts to serve remarketing ads and VIN specific ads across the web. This also allowed dealerships to track when an online interaction lead to a walk-in sale by a customer.
Overall, Easy Car Buy became a successful product sold to many dealerships which helped drive sales when the dealers needed it most.
J&L Marketing Reporting Dashboard
The J&L Marketing Reporting Dashboard is a B2B reporting dashboard on all aspects of the marketing services provided to automotive dealerships by J&L Marketing. The challenge that J&L Marketing faced was the growing pains of being a traditional direct mail company evolving into the new era by adding many digital products in to their line up. As well as auto dealerships skepticism that the marketing efforts were actually moving the needle on their sales. This led to a disconnect in tracking and reporting results across these many products and services and confusion on the part of the customers (dealerships). The solution our team built was a reporting dashboard that combined reporting on all J&L’s products. This incorporated direct mail, email, digital marketing, virtual sales events (the Easy Car Buy website seen above) and in store sales events.
From this dashboard, dealers are able to see in great detail, all aspects of the marketing plans. Who and when customers were targeted. Exactly how they interacted with each marketing touchpoint and what ultimately drove them to buy. The insights from this reporting was invaluable. Not are dealerships able to hone their marketing efforts to be as efficient as possible, J&L had concrete proof that the marketing efforts were working. This level of transparency strengthened the relationship and retention of the dealerships with J&L Marketing.
Mopar Mid-Atlantic Coupon Campaign
Auto Dealerships most valuable portion of the business is the service center. It has the highest return on investment, as many dealerships actually lose money on auto sales. The problem that many dealerships face is the assumption that dealerships are more expensive and inconvenient than their local mechanic or oil change spot. To counter that narrative the Chrslyer, Dodge, Jeep, RAM corporate office contracted J&L Marketing to build a website that would connect car owners to a specific dealership and deliver discounts on services if they came to that dealer within a limited amount of time. Dealers were then able to drive more service business while focusing the efforts on typical service downtimes.
Hyundai Canada Coupon Campaign
Much like the above Mopar Coupon campaign, the Hyuandai Canada Coupon campaign was built to drive service business to Hyundai dealerships.
Auto Dealerships most valuable portion of the business is the service center. It has the highest return on investment, as many dealerships actually lose money on auto sales. The problem that many dealerships face is the assumption that dealerships are more expensive and inconvenient than their local mechanic or oil change spot. To counter that narrative, the Hyundai Canada corporate office contracted J&L Marketing to build a website that would connect car owners to a specific dealership and deliver discounts on services if they came to that dealer within a limited amount of time. Dealers were then able to drive more service business while focusing the efforts on typical service downtimes.
Additional challenges on this project included Canada’s stricter privacy rules and the incorporation of a language toggle from English to French.