SELL TO CARVANA

Business challenge: Launch a new vehicle acquisition program, a critical tool to supporting inventory size and diversity goals.

Marketing challenge: Drive the demand and building awareness around this innovative new option for customers looking to sell a car.

Brand challenge: Align the Sell to Carvana with in-market retail-focused content, leveraging learnings to drive performance in this new work.

Solution: Clear, product-focused creative, highlighting the most impactful value props and legitimizing brand assets.

Results: 350% growth in total units acquired from 2018 to 2020.

To maintain the aggressive growth of the business, a key strategy was offering our customers an ever-expanding inventory of vehicles to purchase. As we grew and diversified our inventory, we saw clear improvements in lower-funnel conversion metrics. While purchasing cars at auction provided the bulk of our inventory, the vehicles available were often fairly homogeneous. However, purchasing cars from customers/the public unlocked a much more diverse and desirable assortment of vehicles that we could retail, often at better margins than the cars we’d buy at auction.

While vehicle acquisition had been an existing feature on the website, in fall of 2018 I partnered with the business lead to launch “Sell to Carvana” (STC) nationally. Utilizing learnings from our in-market retail creative, we understood that when we had a clear benefit differentiating ourselves from the existing process for selling a car, that message should be the story.

STC was a revolution in the way people could sell their car and we saw that in a 95+ NPS score. Using our powerful tech, Carvana could provide customers with an offer for their car in seconds and, if they accepted, Carvana would come to the customer, pick-up the car, and give them a check for it on the spot. Featuring our key brand assets and on-screen text, we built our :30 and supplementing social/digital assets to launch STC.

The results were nearly instantaneous. Customers were intrigued by the value prop of getting an offer on their car and flooded to the site. The response-rate for this work was higher than anything we’d run before. However, the real benefit was on the retail side, where our STC message drove so much qualified traffic that we saw a lift in retail sales from this work, in addition to a lift in vehicle acquisitions.

Over the years, new STC work has been developed and launched, both in TV and bespoke digital content. However, in 2021, this creative remains one of Carvana’s highest-performing spots and maintains a significant allocation of impressions across media.

Through my tenure at Carvana, the STC business scaled considerably, achieving 350% growth in total units acquired from 2018 to 2020.