New carwow campaign created to support retailers’ September plate-change push

23 August 2023, London: carwow, the UK’s online car buying and selling marketplace, is launching a new campaign to boost retailers’ new car sales efforts via its platform during the crucial September plate-change month.

The campaign, which runs for the whole of September, will ensure retailers’ new car offers are served to carwow users across its site via display advertising, dedicated campaign pages and tailored callouts. Offers will be promoted via carwow’s homepage and ‘online showroom’ takeovers, through customer emails to carwow’s database of 2.5 million in-market prospective buyers, and on carwow’s Instagram channel, which has 1.3 million followers.

Additional platform functionality has also been developed for the campaign, allowing dealers to better showcase features and benefits beyond asking prices. Dealer-specific enhancements, such as a home charger offer with the purchase of an EV, or incentives on part-exchanges, can now be more easily communicated to buyers via bespoke banners integrated with listings.

A huge 47% of all carwow’s new-car dealer partners participated in its March* 2023 plate-change campaign, which led to one of the highest-ever peaks in demand, resulting in a 28% increase in enquiries. carwow anticipates that the September campaign will attract even higher levels of uptake from its new car dealer partners.

Sally Foote, UK MD at carwow, commented: “July’s SMMT figures show that the new car market has grown continuously for a full year, and it’s something we’re also seeing reflected in our data, with customer enquiries to dealers in July up 36%, year-on-year. That said, rising interest rates and cost-of-living challenges could lead to consumers needing extra reasons to buy. This September could be more important than ever for dealers, and we’re keen to help our partners maximise every opportunity.

“We know our partners wanted to showcase not only pricing deals, but their value-added services too, so I’m very pleased we can now promote additional benefits such as EV charger offers. With a recent carwow customer survey finding that 95% of those polled wouldn’t buy a car without coming to carwow first, our campaign uses well-proven, highly productive mechanisms to drive additional consumer interest in our partners’ cars to help them make the most of this key month.

“For September, a new consumer-focused marketing campaign called ‘Only Wow’ will drive increased awareness of carwow as a leading destination for consumers to buy and sell cars, generating additional high-intent sales leads and high-quality stock for retail partners to buy. As always, this will be backed by our attention to detail in qualification of that stock, convenience in vehicle movement and support that dealers can trust.”

* Based on carwow internal data from the March sale event active from 1 to 31 March 2023.