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Where expectations are exceeded and waste is a dirty word.Where expectations are exceeded and waste is a dirty word.

We’ve all been there. When the anticipation is better than the event; the hype greater than the happening. As human beings we are naturally frustrated when things just don’t quite meet our expectations.

The same is true of someone looking to buy a car online. Think about it. If you type a vehicle search into Google, then click on what looks like the most relevant result but the car and its associated content does not engage you, you will leave unsatisfied. Worse than that, you’ll probably end up at a competitor. As we become more demanding of our online experiences, we want more information, more tools, more interactivity and more informed opinions.

When you’ve got a potential car buyer on your website, you have won part of the battle. However, the next part is potentially even harder to win. You want that visitor to convert into a prospect, lead or sale. This means you have to trigger a lot of positive thoughts within the visitor and reassure them that you are the right choice.

There are many tools and techniques that can help dealerships create a positive experience for a web visitor and reinforce buying messages. Techniques range from keeping people on your site longer, to enhancing the quality of information available or even reducing the psychological barriers of the sales process.

By keeping a person on your site for longer you are increasing their awareness of your business, its products and its services and gaining a psychological investment from them in terms of their brain’s processing time. Additionally, there is a strong argument that people invest an infinite amount of time in making buying decisions so the longer they are with you the lower the likelihood they will go elsewhere. Through the use of video, the abundance of quality imagery, and the creation of blogs and forums, a person is more likely to follow you on a journey.

The enhancement of information often means you are removing the need for a consumer to leave your website. Integrating content from leading automotive brands such as WhatCar? can help create a halo effect of trust in your own brand and the inclusion of feeds from companies like CAP and Codeweavers provide professional grade data in consumer-friendly formats. These enhancements can also include user-created content which merge the discipline with social media. The distinction between your content or a third-parties content is unimportant; all that matters to the consumer is relevance.

 

Perhaps the most important element of Web Management technique is to do with conversion - making the most of what you have. That means you convert as many of your website visitors into prospects, leads or sales as possible and entails creating what is referred to as a ‘call to action’. A call to action can be an email, a web enquiry, a live chat or even a phone call. By effectively tuning your conversion techniques you can get more sales from the same amount of visitors which makes your dealership more efficient and more profitable. Well designed websites will display prominent contact points reducing the barriers to action a consumer experiences when they visit a website. However, there are many more advanced features that appeal to the internet aware car buyer such as live chat and video test drives that soften the sales process in an industry where over 28%* of consumers would rather not set foot in a dealership. *Car Research Internet Programme (CRIP) & Capgemini