Ilana Zur
If you do digital marketing in the auto industry (DealerTrend, FlexDealer, Auto Ad Agency to name a few), you’ve got unique challenges. Car dealerships are not just any ecommerce site. The leads are more valuable, and not every digital marketing technique will serve your goals.
But one thing’s for sure – you need to optimize your site for conversions, and optimize wisely. Paid ad campaigns and SEO are great – but if they’re leading visitors to your site who don’t end up converting, then you’re only getting a fraction of the value you’re paying for. And when each of your online leads is worth hundreds of dollars in ad money, you don’t want to let them get away.
Whether you are using a marketing suite service or a do-it-yourself automation tool, here are 3 must-have features that will up your conversion game.
Insights
If you don’t have any idea who your visitors are, your targeting strategy is likely based on a hunch, which is more or less as good as any gamble.
And with the current competitive market, there’s no time for a bad poker face.
Look for conversion tools that run deep intelligent learning tests on your website, which collect information about your visitors from their browsers. While Google Analytics will give you percentages of your traffic and how they behave, you need a software that will hone in on each of your visitors and tell you which segments of traffic are being overlooked.
Such tools can give you the x-ray vision you need into your visitors. Once you understand what kind of visitor is coming to the site, make the right offer. Estimate income of over $500,000/yr? Offer a luxury car. Estimate income below $100,000/yr? Make a nice, discounted offer that you can’t turn down.
Insights will turn your visitors into sales leads. It’s like having a savvy digital salesman with great social skills on your team– it’s worth the investment of keeping him around.
Geo-targeting
Targeting visitors based on their location lets you concentrate your efforts on visitors who are most likely to show up at your dealership.
You can customize your offers based on what you know of your local clientele. Rural Connecticut soccer mom? You know she’s going for the mini-van. On the other hand. the business man coming in from a big city is probably looking for something a little smaller and slicker.
It’s not just about the content of your offer. Customize your presentation based on what you know about where your visitors came from. If you know that a large portion of your visitors come from a state where Spanish is widely spoken, create a campaign with a message in Spanish – it’ll make your customers feel special.
Design
Pimp My Ride was a guilty pleasure in the early 2000s.
Why? Because everyone likes an aesthetic car. If you’re trying to sell cars online, make the offers pretty, too.
There is a psychological study proving that we respond more positively to pretty. So, if I’m seeing an ugly pop-up with tacky colors, I’m not buying it.
There are a couple of ways to approach this. You can pay thousands of dollars for conversion tools that pride themselves on their design.
Or, you can search for the more DIY tools. The tools that will give you the insights and the targeting that you need, with the ability to use your in-house designer to pimp your offer.
Find the right mix- there are tons of tools out there, but you want the ability to upload your own design so that you don’t lose your branding along the ride.
For the auto industry, engage smartly. You don’t want a valuable lead to run away with your high value sale in their hand. Make the offer an extension, rather than an unpleasant interruption, to the website experience. Make the offer personal and relatable. Make the offer intelligent.
If you have any questions about how AutoLeadStar can drive sales on your auto site, feel free to reach out to us, support@autoleadstar.com or tweet @autoleadstar.