It’s no secret that the UK faces some uncertain times due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In past recessions, it was the businesses that could adapt quickly and optimise crucial areas of their business who survived.
The Most Overlooked Optimisation
There are many ways to optimise your business during these uncertain times, from changing stock to cutting expenses. In this article, I will focus on one of the most impactful changes you can make which is commonly overlooked.
The average dealer website has hundreds if not thousands of visitors a day, the majority of these visitors leave without ever making contact. Let’s just think about that one moment; imagine if your showroom had this number of visitors a day, you’d try everything possible to make more sales from these visitors.
We all know that getting prospects on the phone is the key step to turning them into customers. I’m going to recommend some easy changes you should make to ensure you convert more website visitors into customers.
Optimise for Mobile
Most website providers claim to provide an optimised mobile experience, make sure to test this yourself. Have you checked your website on your mobile phone recently, how easy is it to navigate and how fast does it load? We carried out an investigation to see which device was used the most on a group of dealer websites. Here are the results:
76.8% of website visitors used a mobile device and only 17.9% used a desktop device. This is the reason why it is so crucial that your website works flawlessly on mobile.
Google carried out research which indicates 53% of mobile visitors abandon sites that take over 3 seconds to load.
What we can take away from this is that your website should be easy to use and load faster than 3 seconds on mobile devices. If this isn’t the case you’ll most likely be missing out on plenty of customers.
Testimonials
Be sure to put customers minds at ease. Let’s be honest, generally, dealers get a bad reputation when it comes to trust. In fact, when I worked for Volkswagen they replaced the word “Dealer” with “Retailer” because of the negative connotations.
Boosting buyer confidence is crucial, make sure your website has plenty of testimonials and trustworthy partner logos on display.
I recommend the first thing your visitors should see when they land on your home page is a way to browse your stock and your customer review score. Here is an example of Arnold Clark’s website doing just that.
Doing this allows your visitors to browse with the confidence that they are buying from a reputable dealer.
Vehicle Information
Make sure your vehicle pages include all of the information a customer would expect to see when purchasing.
You might think that limiting information will cause the customer to pick up the phone and enquire. Sometimes this is the case, however, you need to provide enough information to make the visitor interested in the first place.
Be sure to include a detailed list of features, finance options, warranty info and make the description you have written up for the vehicle prominent on the page.
Use Dealer 9000
You’ll probably be thinking “how convenient that your own product made it into this article Nick”, let me explain. I wholeheartedly believe that Dealer 9000 is the most impactful £29/month you can spend on your dealership. It can be added to any website in minutes and has a much lower price tag compared to other services.
How is Dealer 9000 so impactful? We provide solutions which influence website visitors to take actions immediately instead of slipping away. Here are some examples of how we can help.
Online Deposits
Our Online Deposits software enables you to take deposits on vehicles 24/7 directly from your website. The on-demand economy continues to grow and many customers expect to be able to secure a vehicle instantly.
I have heard dealers say that Reserve/Buy Now functionality is a “gimmick”. It really isn’t, it allows your website visitors to strike when the iron is hot. If your website visitors can’t secure a vehicle out of hours then they’ll need to wait until you’re open for business. This causes potential customers to slip away because:
- They haven’t committed to buying your vehicle so they’ll continue to browse other vehicles.
- Heard the term “sleep on it”? How many potential customers have you missed out on because they couldn’t take action and woke up with a different mindset?
Messenger
Our Messenger software is a replacement for conventional live chat. It reaches out to visitors based on their behaviour and will try to convert as many of these visitors as possible into customers.
Here are the reasons why you should use Messenger:
- Delivers leads directly to you without any effort on your part.
- Asks visitors if they’d like to leave a deposit on vehicles and handles the payment.
- Detects when a visitor is having trouble finding a vehicle and delivers their contact information to you.
- Allows customers to perform many actions such as trading in their vehicle.
Social Proof
Our Social Proof software uses the influential power of social proof to increase leads. When visitors are browsing a vehicle, Social Proof lets them know how many times the vehicle has been viewed. This causes visitors to take action due to fear of missing out.
Conclusion
There are plenty of ways you can optimise your business for the 2020 recession. One thing you must not overlook is the impact your website has on the success of your business.
Try implementing the optimisations I have mentioned and I promise that you’ll see more leads heading your way.