Almost every dealership website today features specials and promotions on its homepage, specials pages, or dedicated landing pages. This is a great idea: every deal your customers can get at your dealership, whether through a manufacturer offer, or a special or event at your dealership, is a great opportunity to draw customers in and encourage them to choose your dealership.  

But what if those sales and deals could get an actual buying conversation going with more of your online shoppers? Dealership websites still typically convert at low rates, often lower than 2%. Transforming the deals you are already offering into overlays that populate your site with dynamic targeting provides customers with more opportunities to convert, and can increase sales at your dealership.  

Across industries, using overlay forms instead of static pages increases conversions and dramatically boosts sales. When it comes to the average online auto shopper, bringing the deal directly to the customer at a time when interest is high makes sense: customers on your website may not notice, or engage with, or remember the offers available on your website landing pages, and they may lack the time or motivation to look for them. But sales that come to them, at moments of high interest, have the power to move the buying process forward by encouraging engagement and conversion. They can actually work like a skilled salesperson at your dealership, listening to customers’ interests and letting them know which sales and specials are relevant to them.

Let’s break down a number of tangible benefits that you and your customers will experience with this shift:

Convenience

Say your customer has been browsing your dealership website for a few moments and would now be interested in finding deals. How do they find them? Do they open another window and go to your homepage, or look for your incentives page? Do they call you? Engage a chat tool? A highly motivated customer might do any or all of these things. But most customers, especially in the early stages of research, are not that highly motivated. They will not think of opening another tab on their browser, or will not want to take that extra step, or they might not realize that you have offers at all. They might be a mobile customer and have limited screen space or time to pursue the offers somewhere else on your site. Removing all these obstacles and bringing the offer to the shopper when they are interested allows your customers to access real value– and encourages them to engage with your inventory and move forward.

Personalization

Shoppers today appreciate seeing content that is specifically relevant to them. If your website is equipped to respond to customers’ needs in real time with relevant offers, visitors to your site will understand that your dealership has their personal interests in mind. Even better, optimizing your overlays and popups to appear at times when customers have demonstrated interest, rather than staying where they are and waiting to be found, creates the feeling of a salesperson responding to questions. Car shopping can be overwhelming, and the dealership that understands customers’ needs online helps smooth the process. Personalization is great for the customer experience– which in turn is great for brand loyalty.

Smart, dynamic targeting increases conversions

The key to using your deals as popups and overlays that appear to the right customers at the right time is to equip your website with smart targeting capability– the ability to track customer behavior and select the best offer to show at the most optimized time. For example, someone who is still browsing can be shown a general store-wide offer or holiday promotion, while the shoppers looking at a specific VDP can see an offer on that particular vehicle. With simple, straightforward fields added to these forms to ask for a name, number, and email address, your sales or BDC team can follow up on the interest the customer has already demonstrated on your site.  

Every kind of sale, special, and incentive at your dealership can be turned into a conversion form to engage with each customer at the right time–  on a one-to-one level. Doing this transforms your site into a virtual salesperson that personalizes the online shopping experience at huge benefit to your customer– and to your bottom line.

Get started with dynamic overlays that will transform your dealership website and increase your lead capture by up to 30%! Call us today 216-242-1320