While most people slow down and unwind a little during the second half of December in anticipation of the upcoming holiday season, car dealers work harder than ever to close as many deals as possible before the big ball drops to ring in the new year.
So that means right about now you’re hopefully finally catching your breath and reflecting on how your dealership dealt with the challenges that 2020 presented, and how your business can grow in 2021.
If 2020 was good for anything, it showed us that your digital platform is your most valuable asset and taught us a lot about the good digital habits that are helping dealers win in this changing landscape. If we can all take what we learned and really commit to those habits year-round, we can take dealer ROI to the next level in 2021 while future-proofing the dealership experience for years to come.
So without any further ado, here are some New Year’s Resolutions that’ll help your dealership win 2021!
1. LOSE 10 LBS. (ON YOUR WEBSITE)
In the past two decades, we’ve looked to our websites to just generate leads so your team could then reach out and set appointments after they’re gone. But with customers now expecting and sometimes needing to complete more of the car buying process remotely, 2020 proved your website needs to be so much more to make the most of every opportunity.
Your website truly needs to be a digital dealership, where shoppers can quickly find vehicles, get their questions answered, and connect with friendly experts on your team who can start guiding them down the Road To The Sale to purchase, just like in-store.
That starts with having the right messaging (with live video) and digital retailing solutions that work seamlessly with your website experience — as well as the right commitment to using those tools — but assuming you already have those, let’s resolve to making sure shoppers can easily find them.
As dealers added new solutions in 2020, websites have put on a lot of excess weight with buttons and widgets that get in the way of guiding shoppers down clear paths — wasting opportunities on shoppers who give up trying to find instant, easy answers to their questions like “can I afford it?”. This excess weight is something that happens to all of us, especially around the holiday sales events, but now is the perfect time to reevaluate your website experience to foster a healthy conversion rate in 2021.
Not all buttons have the same value for you or the customer, so funnel your traffic to the buttons that are more likely to drive sales (not just form-fills). For example, a shopper who quickly filled out an [Unlock Extra Savings] form to see how it affected the price (someone will be in touch to tell them later) is not as valuable as the shopper who clicked [Explore Payment Options] and instantly personalized their payment, valued their trade, saved an account on your website, and started to add accessories and insurance products — so send more shoppers that way.
By taking a deeper look to discover website design mistakes like too many conflicting CTAs, or disconnected shopping experiences that are causing your customers to bounce instead of convert, you can make a serious impact in your business KPIs without spending more advertising dollars to acquire more traffic.
2. START WORKING OUT (YOUR DEALS ONLINE)
Once you have shoppers clicking the right buttons to start the buying process on your website — make sure your team is there to help them! These engaged shoppers exploring payment options online are just as valuable as the opportunities that physically walk into your store, so it’s important to staff your digital showroom and build the habits that will continue and close those deals that start online.
Instead of creating a dead-end to their online experience and forcing them to come in for an appointment to learn more, you have the tools to keep up the momentum and guide them closer (or all the way) to purchase online. Of course many customers will still want to visit the dealership before signing, but the further you can get them into the process online, the more likely they are to follow through and stick with your dealership. They may have submitted leads with other websites, but you’re clearly positioned to win if they’re actively working a personalized deal with you.
Whether they’re on your website in the moment or just left, watch how easily (and instantly) you can pull online shoppers back into the buying process by simply texting the kind of personalized question or recommendation you would offer in the showroom.
No matter what digital retailing solution you have, it needs to be backed up by your dealership’s people and processes, so now is the perfect time to re-acquaint your salespeople and BDC agents with your tech stack to ensure they understand how they can quickly close more deals like these, more efficiently.
The days of “just get ’em in” are officially over. In 2021, resolve to stop saying “just get ’em in” and instead say “let’s go Online to the Sale!“. You’ll have happier customers, and a happier team.
3. BE SMARTER WITH YOUR (ADVERTISING) MONEY
By the end of 2020, something else that became clear was that targeting audiences in your Digital Advertising campaigns was about to get a tad trickier than before.
With Google updating their Personal Advertising Policies restricting your ability to target specific zip codes, combined with the impact of COVID-19 on your business — it’s critical that you reevaluate not just how you’re spending your budget — but on what platforms, and which geographical areas you’re targeting.
The first thing you can do is reassess which areas your dealership did the most business in last year, so you can ensure you have optimal coverage with your paid search campaigns. You don’t want to start the new year by overspending in geographical areas that are no longer providing a sales ROI due to shifts in consumer behavior, and underspending in areas that have historically proven to lead to sales.
The easiest way to do this is to use your CRM or DMS customer data to plot your sales on a map to visually highlight your highest converting areas. You can then use that visualization to work with your Dig Ad provider to adjust your targeting as needed to maximize your spend.
Another recommendation is to use that data from your CRM or DMS to add a customer match layer to your audience targeting on your Google and Facebook ads that’ll help ensure you’re staying in front of all your sales and service customers when searching or surfing. Keeping your dealer’s brand top of mind is going to be more critical than ever in 2021.
You’ll also want to consider how to maximize the reach in your defined geo-targets by diversifying the platforms that you’re advertising on besides Google. For example dealers who have been advertising on Microsoft Bing have seen a 36% higher Impression Share and a 77% higher Click-Thru Rate compared to their same ad campaigns on Google.
Lastly, 2021 will officially usher in the era of true in-market audience targeting with highly valuable first party data. It’s critical that you understand what audience data you’re using to power your advertising, because it can be the difference between guessing and knowing that you’re targeting people who actually want to buy a car.
For example, powered by Cars.com’s 25 million monthly active shoppers, FUEL: In-Market Video has a 100% pure in-market audience, so you know every penny spent is getting in front of local shoppers who are looking for a new vehicle in the short term. Watch the difference that made for Julie Chisum’s advertising ROI at Toyota of Cedar Park!
As we start the new year, it’s a perfect time to rethink and refine where your dollars are going — and resolving to continuously optimize through the year.
4. BE MORE PRESENT (FOR SERVICE KEYWORDS)
COVID-19 brought many challenges, but in a weird silver-lining kind of way, it also helped reveal some opportunities that you have to improve the overall operations of your dealership.
If your dealership had to shut-down the sales side of your biz because of the pandemic and you were only able to operate your service business for a period of time — you probably focused on your Fixed Ops marketing in a way you haven’t in years. And as a result, there’s a good chance you had your eye on the local big box and independent service centers that are aggressively marketing to steal your market share.
Make this the year that you finally fix that leaky fixed ops marketing and resolve to build up your service department’s digital marketing to the same level as your sales department, so you can fend off these competitors and win back customers.
The first step is making sure you’re set-up to capture the local high-intent searchers who are looking for service providers like you. By having the right paid, organic, and local search strategies in place for your service department, you can show up first three times in front of these valuable customers.
Considering upwards of 70% of searchers are on mobile, that top placement is critical for capturing those valuable customers — since only the very top placements are visible without scrolling down.
To take your strategy to the next level on the SERP and beyond, check out our Fixed Ops Marketing Strategy Webinar so you can get the tips, tricks, and info you need to get up and running with a comprehensive cross-channel digital marketing strategy. This year you can optimize your dealership’s service presence to not just fend-off, but overtake, the competition (and without breaking the bank to do it).
5. SPEND MORE QUALITY TIME (WITH YOUR HAPPY CUSTOMERS)
A decade ago, review generation was all the rage because we recognized just what powerful (and free!) positive reviews could and would do for our business. However, it’s possible that over the past couple of years you may have lost sight of keeping your reviews fresh because you felt that your dealership had “enough”.
It’s understandable if your focus shifted from generating new reviews to other matters you felt were more pressing, but you really can’t ignore the fact that 97% of shoppers use reviews to choose their dealership, and 86% of shoppers don’t consider reviews over 3 months old helpful (BrightLocal Local Consumer Review Survey Dec. 2019).
Those two stats should tell you that you need to constantly be driving new, positive reviews each and every week. But it’s 2021, so don’t think you can rely on the same tactics you did a decade ago to drive new reviews, because this year it’s not just the review that will matter — it’s the actual words in the review that will give your dealership the boost it needs.
Oh good, you’re still reading! Remember way back at the beginning of this blog post when I said that your digital platform was your most valuable asset? Well, I should probably amend that statement to say it’s your digital platform AND your people that are the two most valuable assets your dealership has.
When it comes down to it, consumers often see dealerships as all being the same because many dealers tend to look the same, and say the same things. For example, I personally worked for three different dealerships that each claimed they had the largest inventory in the state — and I can assure you, for two out of those three dealers, that wasn’t the case.
If you virtually attended REFUEL 2020 then you had the opportunity to see famed entrepreneur, Jesse Itzler, tell the story of how a college marketing professor changed the trajectory of his young life by asking him one simple question during his final presentation — “what makes your brownie different from all the other brownies on the market?”.
The point Jesse goes on to make is that no matter what you do, there are thousands of other entities doing the exact same thing. So how are you going to do to stand out? How will people know that your dealership is different that all the rest?
To answer that question, we say that in 2021 you should embrace (and market) the people and processes — the customer experience — that truly make your dealership different. Don’t settle for the same old USPs that you’ve been relying on for years. Develop your your real “Why Buy” message and tell the world what it is that you and your people do and offer that no one else does, and why should that matter to car shoppers in your market.
That unique ingredient will make all your marketing efforts perform better, all year.
LET’S MAKE 2021 THE BEST YEAR EVER, TOGETHER
Everyone here at Dealer Inspire knows just how challenging 2020 was for our car dealer partners. The pandemic still isn’t over, and new challenges are going to be thrown at us along the way, but together we have everything we need to win this year.
If you would like to talk about your dealership’s overall marketing strategy for 2021, just drop us a line and we’ll schedule some quality time to talk things over.
Wishing you and your team nothing but the best in 2021 and beyond!
Dear Car Dealer Friends: it’s time to take your chat back.
For over a decade, the vast majority of car dealers have relied on an outside team to handle all the inbound chats initiated on their website. While that approach was good for lead generation, consumer behavior has evolved to the point where car shoppers are now looking to have deeper conversations with you online. If you’re not willing to engage those chats the same way you pick-up incoming phone calls, you’re missing significant sales and service opportunities.
Join us for a brief demo that shows you how to use chat, text, and video with Dealer Inspire’s Conversations™ messaging platform to digitally connect with more customers, more efficiently.
This is important to understand because it just so happens that your team has the expertise and knowledge that a consumer is searching for, so why not give them the responsibility to handle chat opportunities directly just like they would phone calls and internet leads?
Now before you tell me that your team doesn’t have the time, or “chat” is just a newfangled technology, or you can’t invest in training your team to chat, or it would be just one more thing to worry about — indulge me for a moment and allow me to take you on a quick little trip back through time…
A BRIEF (AND INCOMPLETE) HISTORY OF ONLINE CHAT
The first online “chat” took place in 1961 at MIT and while we didn’t recognize it at the time, the future of communication was laid out before us.
Today, we don’t even think twice about messaging and there’s no shortage of platforms that support it — SMS Text, iMessage, Facebook Messenger, DMs on Instagram & Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok, WhatsApp — it has become just as natural to us as talking.
So I don’t think it’s radical to suggest that dealer marketing and operations need to start treating chat/messaging at work like we all do in our normal lives. It’s a primary form of communication that can carry out entire conversations — it’s not just meant to set-up phone calls and future appointments.
And if you’re still not convinced, throw in the fact that a whopping 80% of consumers would now rather message a business than engage them with an email or phone call*.
CHAT LEADS ARE GOOD. CHAT SALES ARE BETTER.
Now to be clear, I’m not saying there isn’t essential value to having Managed Chat, because there certainly is. In an extremely busy, 24/7 landscape you need someone to have your back when you can’t answer chats — or else you’re leaving leads on the table. Having Managed Chat is like having a great 24/7 admin that’s alway there with a warm greeting, readily available information, and a notepad to take down the customer’s information so you can give them a call back later if needed.
The Managed Chat team is the Chewie to your Han; the Bucky to your Cap; the Doc to your McFly. Each sidekick is heroic and skilled in their own right and totally indispensable to their respective partners. You can count on them to have your back and help you generate chat leads. But you know what’s even better than chat leads? Chat Sales.
Managed Chat has your back when you’re too busy, sleeping, or frozen in carbonite.
During business hours when you are able to answer chats, there is a huge advantage to doing so — because no matter how great of sidekicks your Managed Chat agents are, at some point in the conversation they’re going to run into a question or decision that they won’t be able to answer immediately. While they’ll happily take the customer’s info so you can reach back out to them from the dealership, the communication chain is broken and there’s no guarantee that you’ll be able to re-establish contact with that customer again.
I wanted to show you a real example of what I’m talking about. Here we have a customer interested in a pre-owned vehicle that just arrived on the lot. Because there’s no pictures or price updated on the website yet, the customer clicked the Get E-Price CTA on the VDP which opened not a form, but Conversations™, let’s see how it played out….
SCENARIO 1: MANAGED CHAT
So in this brief chat it’s plain to see that the managed chat agent did her job. She was nice, cordial, and was doing her best to create a lead for the dealership so they could follow up with Adam — but of course she’s not empowered to make pricing decisions, so the forward momentum stalls.
If you were handling this chat, would you have done something different? I’m guessing that if you saw the words “I’m working with another dealership…”, that would trigger a certain sense of urgency with you to keep the customer on the line, get him the pricing details he needs, and discuss next steps like a test drive, right?
So now let’s take that same chat and imagine it was answered by YOU or someone else on your team. Think the outcome will be different? Annnnnd action!
SCENARIO 2: SELF-MANAGED CHAT
And THAT is why you need to be handling chats in your showroom. As good as Managed Chat agents are at generating leads, with the technology that comes with Conversations™ you can literally take your entire in-store sales process online.
But don’t take our word for it, here’s what James Kurtenbach of Schomp Automotive had to say about how his team discovered the power of answering their own chats when their phones unexpectedly went down one day…
TEST THE CHAT WATERS WITH A HYBRID STRATEGY
If you’re still reading, then I’m guessing you’re giving some serious thought to embracing the idea of handling your chat in house. What’s great is that instead of going 0 to 100, you can start off by taking a hybrid approach to managing chat.
Select specific people on your team as chat agents that you want to get first crack at all incoming chats, but set rules within Conversations™ for when chats should be routed to your Managed Chat sidekicks so you never miss a customer. For example, you can tell Conversations™ that if your team doesn’t accept a chat within 15 seconds, the customer should instantly be routed to Managed Chat. And of course, whenever your team is off the clock (unique hours can be set for each employee) all chats will automatically route to Managed Chat.
This hybrid approach ensures that you make the most of every opportunity you possibly can, without leaving any on the table.
ASSEMBLE YOUR CHAT TEAM
This is the step where some dealers find a blocker to moving forward. While you may inherently understand the importance of answering your own chats just like you’d answer your own phones, you might be left scratching your head wondering just who on your team is going to get the job done and done right?
First I think it’s helpful to understand what kind of chat volume to expect. When you look at the chart above, you can clearly see that once COVID-19 hit, chat engagement increased over 70%, and the number of daily chats has not fallen off since.
In June 2020, Conversations™ clients received on average 10 inbound chats per day. So depending on your combined business hours for sales and service, that’s pretty much around 1 chat per hour. Not too overwhelming when you think about it like that though, is it? You don’t need to add staff to your team just to handle chat.
When it comes to deciding who to have handle your chats, I’d simply ask you: who do you currently trust on your team to take sales and service phone calls? Who do you trust on your team to respond to Internet leads via email and text? If you can trust those people to do those things, then you can trust them to do chat as well.
“Remember, a customer isn’t going to ask you any question via chat that you aren’t already answering every day over the phone, via email, or when working with a customer on your showroom floor.”
Depending on how your dealership is set up, your BDC could take all the incoming chats. If you don’t have a BDC but have Internet Salespeople, then that’s an option as well. Or maybe it’s a mix of both.
Regardless of your dealership’s organizational structure, you’ll want to have multiple people set up as agents for Sales and Service, that way your team has the best chance to quickly answer the chat and work towards turning it into an appointment.
Include your managers in the chat teams so they can be there when needed. Some of the best features of Conversations™ are built with your team in mind, like:
Internal Chat: Allows you and your teammates to direct message each other.
Chat Transfer: Allows one chat agent to transfer a chat to another chat agent or team (think sales to service transfer).
Department Teams: Groups of staff that don’t answer incoming chats, but are available to take chat transfers from other agents.
Boss Mode: Allows managers to view all ongoing chats in real time and take over the chat if needed.
And remember, the members of your chat team don’t have to be tied to their desk every minute of the day. With the Conversations™ mobile app available for iOS and Android, your agents can be on the move throughout the dealership and still be able to chat when called upon right from their phone.
Also don’t forget that your trusty sidekick will be ready to spring into action if your team can’t get to a chat in time or if biz is done for the day. The Managed Chat agents will still be there quickly answering those chats on your behalf, and generating leads for you to follow up with as soon as possible.
CHAT IN 52 DIFFERENT LANGUAGES
If you’re a dealer who does business in a multilingual region, Conversations™ has you covered. With support for 52 different languages, your team can translate incoming and outgoing messages in real-time giving you the ability to communicate with your shoppers in their native language.
The in-chat translation functionality is seamless. When Conversations™ detects that an incoming message is in a language different than the person on your team handling the chat (based on their user profile setting) they can simply click a button to translate that message to the appropriate language.
They can then respond to the incoming message in their own language, and when they send their reply, Conversations™ automatically translates that message to the language of the user. All further messages are translated as they’re sent and received with no additional action required — giving you the power to have clear and productive conversations with your shoppers regardless of what language they speak.
FUTURE-PROOF YOUR BUSINESS WITH CHAT
One thing we can’t deny about COVID-19 is that it accelerated the use of technology by consumers and dealers alike. I’ve always been a believer that dealerships that triple down on customer service and embrace communicating the way that consumers want to be communicated with are the ones who are going to grow their business for the long term.
Chat can help you do just that, and by taking on chat inside your dealership you’ll only be giving yourself more immediate chances to convert users from chatters to buyers.
Want to learn more about how Conversations™ can help future-proof your dealership? Just drop us a line, and we’ll chat 😎
Your team is already capable of creating new relationships and long-term loyalty with your customers — they just need to the right tools to make a connection. If you’re ready to see why Conversations is the auto industry’s most advanced dealer messaging solution, we’d love to chat.
Now more than ever, we need to make every dollar count and acquire more customers online, for less budget. Each opportunity in the current climate is that much more valuable, so together we need to up your digital game to get more of the shoppers who discover your dealership all the way to buying from your dealership.
That’s the game — carefully bridging the shopper through each phase of journey with you, avoiding all the pitfalls, gotchas, and other nasty surprises that can cause your online customer to have an unpleasant experience that’ll send them searching for somewhere else to shop.
If you’ve played this game in real life or in the classic 8-bit video game Super Kart Buyer 2 that we just made up — then you know it’s not easy. But with a little guidance, skill, and a connected platform of solutions, you can create a seamless shopping experience that will take more shoppers all the way from search to signature.
In order to win the online game of car shopping, you have to seamlessly connect the four phases, or levels, of the customer journey:
Advertising: where in-market shoppers first become aware of your dealership.
Website: where you engage and convert your shopper into a lead.
Follow-up: where you connect shoppers with a salesperson to guide them to purchase.
Dealership: where you meet the customer — at your place or theirs.
So how do you master these four levels of the game? Simple! All you have to do is tune into this webinar and we’ll share all the tips, tricks and cheat codes you need to succeed.
…But to give you an idea of what you’ll need to do, let’s break down the four levels of the customer journey you’ll need to navigate to lead to a sale.
LEVEL 1: ADVERTISING WORLD
Car dealers are no strangers to digital advertising. From paid search to paid social and everywhere in between, most dealers dedicate a significant portion of their overall advertising budget to digital channels.
But did you know that 10% of digital ads lead to a disconnected experience? That’s what our team found when performing an audit of over 1,000 ads from other DigAd providers. That means 10% of the time, when a user clicks or taps an ad, they’re being taken to a webpage that’s not related to the ad copy.
When you consider that the automotive industry spends about $12 billion annually on advertising, that means there’s at least one billion (BILLION!) dollars of spend being wasted on disconnected experiences.
And that doesn’t even take into account the times when an ad and its resulting landing page are aligned, but the actual website experience is so poor it causes the user to bounce off the website before taking a single action.
Usually the first level of a game is relatively easy compared to later levels, but for this game it can be super challenging if you don’t have the right skills to get through it.
In order to escape the Advertising World, all you have to do is change the way you think about customer acquisition in order to make sure you’re not wasting a significant portion of your digital advertising budget.
The issue is that most car dealers are marketing backwards. You shovel a bunch of cash into the ol’ advertising machine to “drive traffic”. The resulting traffic is sent somewhere(?) on your website and then 30 days later (maybe) the results are looked at but all you see are the final performance metrics and you don’t have a real understanding as to why things turned out the way they did.
In order to fix this, you have to reverse your actions so you can make the most out of every single dollar in your budget. We call this new approach D-M-A, and this is how it works:
Destination: Before you spend a single dollar on advertising, you start by building the perfect destinations (aka your website and resulting landing pages) for your customers to land on from your ads.
Measurement: Next, you need to make sure your analytics are set-up so you can monitor and measure the success of your campaigns.
Advertising: Once you’ve set all that up, that’s when you launch your engaging, relevant and targeted ad campaigns..
And look, we get it. Getting all this set up and working properly can be challenging. Thankfully there’s a cheat code that will help you ace the Advertising World each and every time.
CHEAT CODE — HIGHLIGHT TO REVEAL
DigAd + SEO + Managed Services + Website = INVINCIBILITY!
When you have all of these services under one roof — when you can just call up your Performance Manager and have them connect all of your campaigns across channels and all linking to the right experience on your website (whether that’s on desktop or mobile) — you are basically invincible from ever having a disconnected campaign.
So I know it sounds weird for an advertising agency to tell you not to spend money until you’ve embraced the D-M-A mindset, but it’s truly the best thing you can do to set your dealership up for success. Because if you don’t, you’re going to really struggle getting through the next level of the game — Website World!
LEVEL 2: WEBSITE WORLD
We just touched on this above, and now let’s take a deeper look as to why it’s so important to have a great website experience. First up, there’s the simple fact that 79% of shoppers will leave and never return if they have a bad experience.
So it doesn’t matter if they found your website from a Google search, a Facebook ad or YouTube video — if that person visits your website and has a bad experience, not only are you losing that customer in the moment, but you could be losing them for good.
I think we can all agree that’s not a situation you want happening on your website, so how do you make sure you’re not serving up a poor website experience? Well, there’s a lot of factors involved — from technical aspects like pagespeed to design elements and accessibility. But to truly master this level, the one thing you really need to address is, how well does your website answer questions?
You see, every visitor is coming to your website to find something out. Do you have the content and tools to answer them?
For example, one of the most important questions that almost every car shopper has is, “Can I afford it?”. What we have found is that 75% of shoppers won’t even consider visiting your dealership if your website doesn’t answer this basic question in a transparent and meaningful way.
And make no mistake, answering this question with an MSRP or “Internet Price” won’t cut it. Shoppers are looking for real payments based on their personal preferences, terms, and credit.
How you deliver the answer to the “Can I afford It?” question is equally important. For decades now, car dealerships have relied on Get E-Price type CTAs to capture leads by withholding the pricing answer from potential customers — the only problem is people expect instant answers to their questions.
Think about it. A shopper visits your website, does a bunch of shopping, fills out a form but they don’t get the answer to their question. So now what, they have to wait? For who? For how long? Why don’t you know? And why do you not want to tell me right now? Is this what it’s going to be like when I go into the dealership? This isn’t fun!
And look, I’ve done enough mystery shopping in my life to know that even after a shopper clicks the Get E-Price button and fills out a form, a lot of dealers still won’t even respond with a meaningful quote. This is one of those frustrating experiences that will make a shopper take you off their list and move on to the next dealer.
Online Shopper™, our end-to-end digital retailing solution, is designed to solve the question problem along with many others: when you remove extraneous CTAs and focus on driving your shoppers to explore their payment options with Online Shopper™, not only are you giving your visitor everything they need to make a thoughtful and educated decision, at the same time everything they do will be delivered to you within the lead that’s created so you can have more productive follow-up.
And speaking of follow-up…
LEVEL 3: FOLLOW-UP WORLD
A lot of dealers mistakenly think they’ve won the game once the lead is received. And I get it because I know that seeing your advertising entice folks to visit your website and then seeing those visitors have a great experience that also results in a lead for your dealership can be highly satisfying. But the game’s not over yet, not by a long shot.
This next level of the game is so important because it’s all about having helpful follow-ups with those customers who’ve engaged with the technology you put on your website specifically to answer all their questions.
Just like shoppers are expecting instant answers to their questions on your site (well, everywhere really), they’re also expecting dealers to change the way they communicate. While an endless stream of emails and phone calls was once the standard for dealership follow up, today it’s just not effective enough.
Using the same out-dated tactics you’ve always used to follow-up with your leads isn’t going to work here for a variety of reasons.
The first reason is very practical. When asked how they’d like to receive their digital garage key to access Online Shopper™ from any device, 66% select text, and only 33% select email. So right off the bat, you CRM’s email-heavy follow-up process is rendered useless to a majority of Online Shopper™ users.
No email you say? Well great, I’ll just pick up the phone and call…
Not so fast my friend!
Before you start smilin’ and dialin’, make note that 76% of people won’t answer a phone call if it comes from a number they don’t recognize. Then to make it even more challenging, Apple recently added a feature in iOS 13 that allows a person to automatically silence any incoming phone call originating from a number that’s not already in their contacts.
I’m not trying to make you feel bad here, I’m just laying out the facts so you can see that the absolute best way to follow up with a lead is with a text message.
But what if there was a better way? What if there was a way to treat an online customer who’s on your website right now the same if they were standing in front of you on the showroom floor?
Well it just so happens there’s a cheat code for that!
CHEAT CODE — HIGHLIGHT TO REVEAL
Website + Live Messaging + Digital Retailing = A SALE!
The Dealer Inspire connected platform allows you to create an experience that treats every website visitor like a walk-in by giving you the tools to interact with guests in the moment to close the deal. Remember, you don’t have to follow-up with a guest if they never left 😎
For those customers who you do need to follow up with, I’d remind you that an Online Shopper™ lead is even better than a walk-in because of all the information you have up front before you make contact with the customer. You get their contact info, vehicles of interest, their preferred finance scenarios, credit rating, trade-in info and personalized monthly payments. So your job is easy, make a connection and guide them through the rest of the process leading to the sale. Piece of cake!
LEVEL 4: DEALERSHIP WORLD
Ok, here we are: the final level of the game.
Like the levels before, if you’re not prepared this can get really tricky and ultimately cost your dealership real money.
The reality is people are going to visit your website, use the tools you provide to customize their perfect deal and then one day they’ll magically appear on your showroom floor without you ever having made contact with them prior to their visit.
If your entire team isn’t prepared to handle the online to offline transition, the results won’t be pretty.
Think about it…a shopper knows exactly what she wants. She’s got her exact model and trim picked out, calculated her monthly payment, has 3K down, and even has her trade-in evaluated. At this point she’s done all the work on your website, and just needs someone to help her take the vehicle for a spin and then sign.
If your salesperson greets this customer and doesn’t know what they’re talking about, or does but doesn’t have the tools to actually continue the progress the shopper has made, that’s it.
Game over.
If you have a digital retailing tool, you need to set-up your dealership to greet shoppers and allow them to seamlessly continue their experience. With Online Shopper™ all you need is your website up on any device that’s connected to the internet, and that’s it.
Your salesperson can greet the shopper, ask if they started creating a deal on your website, and if the answer is “Yes”, then they just need to enter the customer’s phone number or email on whatever device is handy and all the work they did online will be available for both to review.
You don’t need a big fancy kiosk for this either (although they are pretty cool if you have one). The customer can literally just bring it up on their phone.
Again, this should be easy. At this point your salesperson’s job is to pick up where the customer left off, assist them in getting any last answers to their questions, going for a test drive, and then signing them up.
HOW WILL YOU PLAY THE END-TO-END GAME?
So there ya go, that’s the game and we at Dealer Inspire can help you play it at the highest level possible. Our company was literally built as an advertising agency first and then step by step we built the technology to bring that traffic all the way to signature.
Whether you’re an existing client using some or all of our solutions, or you’re brand new to us and are looking for help — It’s our job to help you use our connected platform to its full capabilities so you can grow your business efficiently and continue to adapt, especially during these uncertain times.
If you’d like to learn more about anything we talked about here, or just want some more tips and tricks for playing the end-to-end game, just drop us a line. We’d love to hear from you!
For many of us, the last few months have already changed the way we work forever. For dealers, it’s become clear just how essential digital retailing tools are for adapting to this new, digital-first normal. But tools don’t just do the job by themselves — someone needs to hold the nail and swing the hammer.
Adding the right solution to your website is a great first step, but to truly adapt your business to maximize revenue and scale efficiently you have to fully connect the tool with your marketing and sales strategy.
As so many dealers across the country unwrap their first digital retailing tools and give this online car buying thing a shot, we wanted to put together a starter guide to help you check the most important boxes for maximizing the ROI of yours. Let’s break it down.
ABOUT DEALER INSPIRE (THAT’S US!)
While all of the following tips should apply to any digital retailing solution, I can’t not point out that Dealer Inspire is best equipped to execute on these best practices by being the only website, digital retailing, messaging, connected marketing, and reporting provider — partnering with you to create one seamless online to in-store experience.
Step 1: Clear The Path To Purchase
If you don’t clear the way for the customer journey on your website, the new tool you’re paying for can get lost in the weeds of too many other CTAs — wasting countless opportunities on shoppers who give up trying to find the answers and experience they’re looking for.
Not all buttons have the same value for you or the customer, so funnel your traffic to the buttons that drive the best outcomes. An easy way to start this spring cleaning is by identifying the buttons that are redundant or create dead-ends for the user, including links off-site and lead forms that ask for information but give no immediate answers in return.
A lead from a shopper who quickly filled out an [Unlock Extra Savings] form to see how it affected the price (someone will be in touch to tell them later) is not as valuable as the shopper who clicked [Explore Payment Options] and instantly personalized their payment, valued their trade, saved an account on your website, and started to add accessories and insurance products — so send more shoppers that way.
It’s (understandably) tempting to want to add more paths to generate more leads, and removing buttons can feel like you’re removing opportunities — but the opposite is true. Our dealers who see the most dramatic increases in the volume and quality of their leads are the ones that commit to providing the best shopping experience and then focus their traffic to it.
Having your website and digital retailing provider be one in the same is key so they can seamlessly sync the experience from one tool to the other, and optimize your UX based on performance without any restrictions of you needing to coordinate between vendors.
Step 2: Treat Every Lead Like A Walk-In
This is the biggest step, because leads don’t keep the lights on. For dealers to grow sales (at lower labor and advertising costs) we need to fundamentally shift our thinking around leads as an industry. Now more than ever, we need to view websites as your digital storefront (even your primary storefront), and take the same level of customer service you expect in-store, online.
So, imagine if a customer walked into your physical store interested to browse your inventory and discuss financing — and you gave them a clipboard with a form, asked them to fill it out, and then told them you’d be in touch sometime soon to answer their questions. Letting that shopper walk out of your physical store without trying to help them in the moment would be crazy, and yet hundreds of shoppers are likely having that same exact experience on your website every single day.
Bob in your digital showroom is just as real as he would be in your physical showroom, so you need to engage him just like you would there. That’s why it’s critical to seamlessly pair your digital retailing tool with an advanced messaging platformlike Conversations™ that can simulate your helpful customer service with instant answers, helpful materials (vehicle details, brochures, videos), and live video chat to talk face-to-face and show the customer around the vehicle. Just like you would in-store, you need to be able to sit down with him and talk through the specific financing options he’s looking at and collaborate to close the deal. Basically, you just need the tools to be available to help customers online, the same way you wouldn’t leave your physical dealership completely unstaffed during business hours.
If you don’t catch the online shopper in the moment, you should still treat them like a walk-in. That means not using the old lead form follow-up process. These shoppers have saved and customized specific vehicles and explored payment options, so your follow-up needs to acknowledge that specific progress they made and seamlessly pick-up where they left off — just like they had an appointment with you yesterday and are now back in your showroom. Automated emails and uninformed phone calls will cause a total disconnect in their customer experience — making them feel like they need to start over — so it’s critical for you to treat them like walk-ins you already know.
While it’s worth a whole other blog to talk about, texting is the best way to follow-up with these customers for a personalized experience that actually starts a conversation, because 76% of follow-up phone calls will go unanswered (likely far more now that iPhones block unknown numbers). Your paired messaging platform can make this follow-up process seamless so your team isn’t texting from their personal numbers.
Step 3: Plug In Your Showroom
Now that you’ve set-up the ideal online car buying experience, you need to make sure it doesn’t break when a customer actually walks into your physical store. Just like follow-ups, you need to make sure your dealership and team are greeting these customers as previous walk-ins who have already worked with you.
Like everything else, there’s a technology and a people aspect to perfecting this — but they can both be powerfully simple.
From the people side: all you should need to do is make sure your sales team is familiar with the tool on your website. If a customer walks in and says they’ve nailed down their perfect deal based on their credit, trade, and preferences — and your team doesn’t know they could do that on your website — then you’re setting up some awkward conversations unlikely to sell cars. As long as they know about the tool and can pull up that customer’s progress with it, your team should be in position to have a good day.
From the technology side: you should set-up devices with welcome screens (or even just print signage) that immediately validates to your walk-ins that the progress they made online allows them to ”skip the line”, like a Disney FastPass+. Instead of feeling like they need to re-introduce themselves and start over, they can instantly jump ahead to buying time. This is the kind of experience that customers will write home about, building your review reputation while increasing your close rate.
With our solution, for example, you can accomplish this by simply pulling up your website on any internet-connected device — customers just need to type in their phone number or email address to instantly pull up their personalized Online Shopper™ “Garage” and seamlessly continue their deal. Check it out.
Step 4: Connect Your Marketing
Ok, now that you’ve created an amazing experience for customers online and offline, you need to make sure they know about it. By incorporating “online car buying” throughout you website and marketing messaging you can expect to increase the high-intent traffic you’re driving to your platform.
Landing Page. Every campaign needs to start with a good destination. Add a landing page to show website visitors that your dealership offers online car buying, how they can get started, and most importantly why it makes their shopping experience better.
Website Creative. From homepage sliders and personalizers to VRP banners, make sure your visitors know from the moment they hit your website that they can go the distance online. It could make all the difference between a bounce and a buyer.
Search Advertising. Digital Retailing functions as both a strong USP and a fresh CTA, meaning your PPC strategy can get a boost as well. Update your ad copy to highlight your online experience, add “Buy Online” as a sitelink extension, and create campaigns related keywords.
Email Marketing. Being able to shop online is also a great message to re-engage your existing customers nearing their next vehicle. Once you’ve got your platform rocking, set-up a drip email campaign to drive your customers directly into your buying experience.
Display Advertising. The ability to complete the whole process in your pajamas is going to turn heads today, especially for consumers actively in the process of shopping. Using Cars.com Display gets you in front of local car shoppers as they’re shopping, putting your brand in front of the best audience, at the best time, with the most powerful message.
Video Advertising. With people stuck at home streaming twice as much video*, and you set-up to offer the ideal home car buying experience, it’s the perfect time to capitalize on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and OTT advertising to drive more shoppers to your website and digital retailing tool.
By having all of your technology and marketing managed by one provider you can keep your entire digital presence in sync to maximize conversions and ROI. If one piece is updated before the other, or your website doesn’t fulfill your marketing message, you can create disconnects in the customer journey that will cause them to bounce along the way, which would be a bummer.
Step 5: Grow Your Reputation
Updating your marketing messaging for online car buying will make a big difference, but that message is no longer quite as unique as it was even a few months ago. Every competitor can say they offer online car buying — because they have to right now — even if they just have a lead form button that says [Buy Now]. You need to back up your claims with the experience and your most important proof point: your happy customers.
97% of shoppers use reviews to choose the right local dealership*, and now more than ever, reviews that mention online car buying, home delivery, and general convenience and speed are going to make all the difference. Make sure you’re soliciting feedback on your great customer experience across platforms to grow your most powerful differentiator in the market: your reputation.
*BrightLocal 2019 Local Consumer Review Survey, December 2019
#ProTip DealerRater®’s ReviewBuilder™solution can automatically solicit these reviews from your sold customers and post them across all the platforms that matter.
Step 6: Connect Your DMS
If you follow each of these steps so far, should you expect to see significant results that impact your bottom line? Yeah, I definitely think so — but the only way to know is to actually look at your bottom line. Connect your sales data into your reporting platform to see the sales generated specifically from your digital retailing solution. If you’re not driving real sales from it then there’s something wrong with your tool or your process and you need that reporting to make informed decisions for your business.
Recap: Have A Platform Partner
Bottom line, you can’t add a widget to your website and expect your business to adapt. You need your team using a tool to build a seamless end-to-end experience that drives sales, and the only way to do that is to have a partner that can connect every part of it for you. We built our company and our platform to do exactly that, and we’re here to help. Put us to work.
