The impact of lockdowns, store closures and digital disruptors

Having focused on maintaining brand awareness during lockdowns, it was crucial that Mazda’s dealer websites offered a natural continuation of quality and brand identity that was easily identifiable for customers moving further down their purchase journey. However, 81 separate websites presented a variety of challenges, from inconsistent experience and complicated customer journeys to reduced brand identity and lack of central management.

The inconsistency across the dealership websites meant customers were experiencing a varied quality of service and interaction depending on which local site they were visiting. Mazda engaged Candyspace to improve the consistency and optimise the experience of the dealer websites for their customers, while improving internal operational efficiencies by reducing the cost and time it takes to update individual sites.

In Spring 2021, the Candyspace team consulted a large range of stakeholders, including the team at Mazda, selected dealers, and website users, to understand what different expectations they had of their experience with the sites.

This initial research stage highlighted three key issues:

• A lack of consistency across websites, resulting in complex and disjointed customer experience.

• Poor visibility of the ROI of each individual site due to numerous different dealership sites, all at different levels of functionality.

• No centralisation of experience, meaning there were few opportunities for personalisation or optimisation of lead conversion

With the fragmentation of customer experience and purchasing pathing, Candyspace took a customer-centric and UX-focused approach to designing, developing and optimising the new suite of websites on Optimizely’s digital experience platform (DXP).

Delivering personalised and data-driven experience at scale

Candyspace’s proposed solution was a single, centralised system for communicating with customers on a dealership level. By streamlining these services, Candyspace were able to put Mazda back in the driving seat with data driven decision making and empower their digital teams to have greater control over their digital brand and messaging.

This not only provided Mazda a centralised point of management, but also helped customers enjoy frictionless user journeys across the ecosystem. Personalised experiences showcased the range of new and used models at their local dealerships and the latest finance offers, helping customers with a clear path to purchase and helping Mazda optimise lead conversion.

Driving conversions for dealers

In October 2021, Candyspace successfully launched 81 sites within Mazda.co.uk on time, on budget and without technical issues.

With a fresh, centralised site, Mazda were now able to provide streamlined user journeys with clear call-to-actions throughout the purchasing process, with better reporting and tracking.
Since launch, the new dealership websites achieved:

• 31% increase in sessions
• 21% increase in goal conversion rate
• 20% increase in visitors to the finance calculator
• 7% reduction in bounce rate
• 4% increase in average pages per session

With vastly improved data and analytics, Mazda is now better able to drive leads and optimise conversions and journeys across the digital platform. Candyspace’s solution, enhanced by the capabilities of the Optimizely platform, is a flexible one, designed to evolve in line with the rapid changes in the automotive sector.