Category: Best Practices

3 Ways to Optimize Your Website for Low Inventory Levels

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By Katie Wilkins, Dealer.com Senior Director of Product Management 

It’s a fact of dealership life today—vehicle inventory shortages will be with us for a while. As you adjust your business strategies, your shoppers are also likely adjusting their plans accordingly. According to a 2022 Cox Automotive UX research survey, 37% of consumers say they are postponing their next vehicle purchase.  

That means your website now needs to be more than just VDPs, which today may be leading shoppers to the dead end of a no results page. Your website also needs to include ways for shoppers to educate themselves about alternative vehicle and buying options. Here are a few ways we recommend updating your Dealer.com website to optimize your shoppers’ experience.  

Make the “Vehicle of Interest” form easy to find.  

We recommend you provide opportunities on the search results page to easily get to a “Vehicle of Interest” form. Adding a banner to the content area on the bottom of the search results page that links to a “Custom Build” or “Find It for Me” form is a straightforward way to accomplish this. If limited results are returned or shoppers aren’t finding what they are looking for, you are giving them an obvious path to next steps.   

We’ve seen that dealership websites that have multiple entrance points to the “Find It for Me” and “Custom Build” forms have a higher proportion of their visits reaching these forms. These forms often convert well, with 4% lead submission rates (2022 Cox Automotive UX Research Survey).  

To support shopper requests for vehicles your dealership may not have in stock, a new “Vehicle of Interest” form allows shoppers to share details on the vehicle they are looking for. This gives you an opportunity to stay connected with that consumer while you wait for the right inventory to arrive.   

Additionally, the Quick Quote tool allows your customers to select their preferred year, model, and color, and register their interest for new inventory. This is another way to generate new lead opportunities not attached to an in-stock vehicle.   You can even edit content areas on this page to add frequently asked questions or details on next steps based on your dealership’s process such as the example here.  

List vehicles before they arrive on your lot.  

Be sure to include vehicles not yet on your lot in your inventory feed, presenting them on your website with an “in-transit” badge. You can also enable the new “in-transit” facet to allow shoppers to specifically filter searches for those vehicles.   

Educate shoppers on their buying options.  

Remember, you aren’t the only one who is unsure what to do with this low inventory situation. Your shoppers are likely to need some guidance too. Make sure they are aware of all of their buying options by building a page using Page Designer that explains them, like this one. We suggest linking to these pages in the navigation, as well as from the homepage and search results pages.  

These paths-to-buy pages should include information on when to choose each path, FAQs addressing concerns (like timeline, price, and what to expect), a contact form, and a phone number. See examples here and here. If you use Dealer.com Managed Content and Creative services, talk to your Campaign Coordinator about campaigns targeted at this issue.   

We also encourage you to consider adding chat functionality to your website if you haven’t already so shoppers have another path to contact you for help finding a vehicle. Dealer.com recently announced a new partnership with ActivEngage to give you industry-leading technology, whether you want to manage chat yourself or have ActivEngage’s team of customer engagement experts handle it. Most importantly, remind shoppers your team is there to assist them in finding their perfect vehicle.  

Amplify Your Fixed Ops Merchandising to Find Hidden Profits

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With the chip shortage forecasted to continue, every dollar of revenue matters. And while you may think you’re already getting every dollar out of your dealership, you’re probably leaving money on the table in your service department 

Join Dana Ayer, Performance Management Manager at Dealer.com, you’ll learn about website marketing best practices, key Cox Automotive integrations, and other actions you can take to amplify your fixed ops messaging to find more profits. 

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Close More Deals with Your Digital Retailing Tools

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The pandemic accelerated the rate of consumer adoption for many online shopping experiences, from ordering takeout to buying groceries. Automotive retail was no exception as car buyers showed increased interest in shopping and purchasing cars online. 

In this session, we’ll discuss the new and evolving expectations of your digital retail shoppers. You’ll learn how to adjust your processes, make better customer connections, and close more deals.  

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Differentiate Your Digital Buying Experience

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The pandemic drastically changed the habits and expectations of car buyers. With shoppers spending more time online, it’s becoming harder to differentiate your business from the dealers down the street. To keep customers—and their dollars—coming your way, you’ll need to adapt and implement new digital shopping experiences that your competitors can’t match.  

During this session, we’ll share key insights and best practices for creating easy, fast and frictionless car buying processes. You’ll also learn how to market and communicate those experiences with a multi-channel digital marketing strategy. 

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Marketing in a Cookieless Future

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The “Cookiepocalypse” is coming, but is your dealership ready? The digital marketing landscape is about to turn the advertising landscape on its head—while eliminating the tools you’re using today to target customers online. Google and other web browsers have agreed to eliminate third-party cookies, or the little packets of data that websites deposit on your computer as you browse.  

Join Noah Lee to learn everything you need to know to navigate the transition away from third-party cookies while thriving in a new era of online advertising. 

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How to Retain and Resell Current Customers

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Your customers’ relationship with your dealership shouldn’t end with the handoff of the keys to their new vehicle. Successful dealerships know how much value there is in maintaining customer relationships after the deal has closed.   

With strong strategies and advanced technology, you can maintain customer relationships that last a lifetime—bringing more value and efficiency to your business. Consider these best practices for retaining and reselling your customers.  

Track Customer Activity and Mine Behavioral Data  
Today’s most successful dealerships know that the key to retaining customers is proactively connecting with them, instead of waiting for the customer to reach out for information about a new vehicle. And while happy birthday and anniversary wishes are nice, they probably won’t cut it in the fierce competition for business today.  

Your dealership probably already has the customer data you need to implement a proactive outreach strategy that provides value to your customers. Leveraging your dealership’s data and technology can help you identify in-market opportunities, including existing customers that may be ready for a vehicle upgrade.  

Look for technology tools that integrate with your dealership website to aggregate data into insights. With VinSolutions, for example, your Dealer.com website data is integrated with your CRM to identify customers who are most likely to be ready to make another purchase.  

Segment Communications and Automate Marketing  
Just as consumers expect a personalized experience when shopping for a vehicle, your customers expect a personalized experience later in their ownership experience with your dealership. But delivering the type of personalization your customers expect can be difficult without the right auto digital marketing solution.   

Consider a multi-channel automated marketing solution, such as Automotive Marketing Platform powered by VinSolutions. This marketing tool enables you to deliver personalized marketing content by leveraging specific insights from customer behavior data.  

Using existing customer data from your CRM, an automated marketing tool segments customers who are most likely to buy, including customers who may be interested in trading in for a newer vehicle. For another value-add, Automotive Marketing Platform can leverage artificial intelligence to identify vehicles of interest and automatically send personalized offers that let customers start the deal process from anywhere on any device. 

By tracking customer online activity, mining CRM data, segmenting communications, and automating your marketing, you can leverage insights to create a car buying experience that builds brand loyalty and creates lifetime customers.  

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Give More Car Buying Power to the Consumer

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Your shoppers want more control over the car buying process. They want to buy a car on their time and in their own unique way, usually through some combination of online and in-dealership shopping.  

With the right tools and processes in place, you can give your consumers the control they want while getting what your dealership wants—a streamlined the sales process and faster path to purchase.  

Let the Shopper Take the Wheel 

On the traditional road to the sale, the car buying process often bottlenecked when it came to getting the details of a deal done. Gathering signatures, filling out paperwork, and negotiating terms were all painstakingly slow and involved inputting customer information one step at a time.  

Consumers expect car buying to be similar to their other online shopping experiences. Your dealership can meet shoppers’ expectations by giving them a flexible buying experience that lets them decide which steps they want to complete online—including price negotiation, finance application, and even digital contracting and signing.  

Instead of spending hours negotiating a deal at the dealership, consumers can structure deals online and continue the deal right where they left off—whether they pick up online, in-store, or somewhere in between.  

Accelerate Your Shopper’s Path to Purchase 

These flexible buying experiences go a long way in attracting online shoppers to your dealership. When you trust consumers to structure their own deals, they often reciprocate by giving you their business.  

In fact, 58% of high-performing dealers offer convenience solutions like digital contracting, and 47% offer a hybrid customer experience, combining digital retailing with the traditional sales experience, according to Cox Automotive’s study, How to Thrive: Best Practices for an Accelerated Digital Landscape.  

When you give your customers the freedom to structure their own deals by exploring payments, browsing F&I products, completing online credit applications, and more, you reduce the amount of time a shopper must spend buying a vehicle.  

This flexibility helps speed up the path to purchase for your automobile leads. In fact, according to the 2020 Cox Automotive Digitization of End-to-End Retail Study, heavy digital buyers spend 42 minutes less time in store compared to light digital buyers. 

Giving your customers more control of a connected car buying experience is a win-win for your dealership and your shoppers. It also lets you maintain the integrity of your deals while giving your shoppers the kind of car buying experience they want and expect.  

To learn more about the benefits of a flexible car buying experience, download our free ebook, Owning Every Marketing Moment: The New Rules of Engagement. To learn more about the benefits of a flexible car buying experience, download our free ebook, Owning Every Marketing Moment: The New Rules of Engagement. 

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How the Right Partnership and Personalization Deliver a Premium Consumer Experience

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By Nuan Openshaw-Dion, vice president operations, Dealer Marketing for Dealer.com

Personalization is at the core of the way we shop and buy. Whether consumers are online shopping for groceries or for cars, they want a convenient, streamlined experience that works for them and happens on their terms.  

That means dealers must adapt and meet the customers wherever they are in their buying journey with relevance and personalization. A shopper who is exposed to personalized content during their visit views more VDPs, submits more lead forms and is more likely to start their deal online.1 

Dealers must ensure that engagement is backed by rich data and tailored insights—powered by the right partnership with the right marketing experts to attract and retain the right customer. Personalization, intuitive search, aggregated research, and buyer reviews are all part of this new wave of digital marketing for the modern dealer-buyer experience. 

Working with specialized, integrated marketing partners (especially under one roof) is a key driver to converting early-stage shoppers to loyal customers. These partners understand how to balance dealers’ needs to meet challenging, competitive sales goals with consumers’ needs for an intuitive, high-quality experience at every touchpoint. 

A strong partnership between a dealership and their automotive digital marketing partner should do three things—elevate a dealer’s performance through cohesive activity across channels, eliminate the burden of juggling multiple vendors (and a barrage of viewpoints), and maximize their time spent on targeted digital campaigns delivered to the right consumer. 

I’ve seen that the most successful dealers are choosing partners that have the right combination of people and technology across core expertise: automotive digital marketing, data analytics, and customer experience. As the only complete digital marketing provider for the automotive retail industry, Dealer.com has more than 20 years of experience understanding and shaping strategies amidst shifting market dynamics, shopping behaviors, and industry standards.  

With vast amounts of data available around car-buying trends and shopper behavior, it’s imperative to look at customers not just quantitatively but also qualitatively. In each moment there is the right next step to take, and this is where the power of Cox Automotive data comes into play. Cox Automotive’s vast data network, which touches two out of every three car buyers in the U.S.,2 provides deep insights on when to deliver the right message to the right consumer. 

Personalization is critical to the car shopping, buying, and ownership journey. That experience should be immersive, valuable, memorable, and relevant to a consumer. Working with a dedicated auto dealer marketing partner that sees and affects the total process—and that shares the goal of delivering a premium consumer experience—differentiates between dealers barely catching up to those trying to catch their breath. 

A version of this article originally appeared in CBT News.  

Sources:  

  1. Dealer.com Study January 2020 – June 30, 2020 
  1. 2020 Cox Automotive Car Buyer Journey Study 

Breaking Down the Online and In-store Divide for Shoppers

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If you had a chance to tune in for the Cox Automotive Forward Focus session Breaking Down the Online and In-store Divide, then you would have heard Wayne Pastore, General Manager of Dealer.com, and Bob George, AVP Product Management for Dealer.com, discuss the changes that this year has brought to automotive digital retailing. While some aspects of the automotive industry began to slow down in March 2020, the need to connect the in-store and online buying experience was accelerated. Read on to learn how data and insights gathered during the consumer’s path to purchase can help you guide your customers through a more personalized and meaningful online buying experience. 

Retailing Everywhere 

The automotive shopping experience is evolving. While the end goal for the consumer remains the same – to buy a car that meets their needs and budget – the process by which they reach this decision is streamlining with better data and technology. In years past and till recently, a dealership website was used more for vehicle research, while the automobile leads were generated inside the dealership’s walls. Fast forward to present day, and new digital products and processes make it easier than ever for a shopper to purchase a vehicle without stepping inside a dealership showroom.  

Considering recent digital advancements, is there a way to bridge the online and in-store experiences that would benefit both the dealer and consumer? This brings us to Retailing Everywhere, a singular, multi-channel consumer retailing experience designed to drive profitable transactions and customer loyalty. Let’s look at the key components that make up this type of experience: 

  • Automated marketing and advertising 
  • Guided 1:1 consumer experience 
  • Advanced communication 
  • Deal connectivity across CRM and web 

When a consumer encounters a seamless digital experience, they stay on the website longer and go deeper into buying process. Keep reading to learn about innovations that support the Retailing Everywhere experience. 

Automated Marketing and Advertising 

Many consumers are spending less time on the road, for both professional and personal reasons. With more people staying home, what tools and tactics should you use to reach the right audience? If there is one thing most consumers are doing these days, and possibly more than a year ago, it is watching TV.  

Consumers are increasingly “cutting the cord” to cable programming in favor of Connected TV options, such as HULU and Netflix. This trend, combined with consistently positive performance in video advertising, has led to the expansion of our video advertising services on Connected TV channels. Placement is driven by the same data that powers Dealer.com display advertising, Facebook targeting, and other services. And since traditional TV does not offer the flexibility to target specific audiences, we can spend more effectively in this space. Robust reporting is available, so you know when and where your video ad is being shown, and to whom. 

Guided 1:1 Consumer Experience 

When a shopper lands on your Digital Storefront and begins to move through the site, either to view inventory or explore fixed ops deals from your automotive service marketing, the platform responds with a highly targeted, personalized experience. Our Experience Optimization product uses data from past shopping behavior to inform and customize experiences throughout the website. This includes slides, specials, banners, content. The goal is to introduce the most relevant offers and content to consumers on the first visit. 

Once the shopper has found the perfect vehicle, they will likely explore the digital retailing tools. Modeled after tax software, our brand-new Digital Retailing experience takes a complex process and breaks it down into small and simple steps. It’s a flexible, consumer-driven process, as shoppers can jump in and out of the pieces as needed to learn more about the deal. As a bonus, we’re finding people are using more of the tools and engaging more because it’s not a one-way street.  

Advanced communication 

The goal with shopper communication is to enable 1:1 conversation and offer a guided experience, and there are several ways to do this. Two examples include video chat and co-browse in Digital Retailing. Explore these services to see which ones would be the best fit for your Digital Storefront. 

Deal connectivity across CRM and Web 

Your dealership CRM plays an important role in moving the retail experience forward to a transaction. The reason is this platform provides visibility and understanding into consumer intent, and both of these inputs may be used by sales to deliver a personalized sales experience. 

With our latest offering, a deal can cross both your CRM and website, and it can originate in either space. Choose to review a deal in your CRM, and you’ll find a clean, simple view of the customer’s online deal activity that is accessed by a link. With CRM integration, leads fed directly into your CRM under one customer record update automatically every time the shopper changes their deal structure 

Driving interactions is essential in the Retailing Everywhere model. The technology you employ should support your activity instead of just replacing it, like talking across a table inside your showroom. The easier that information passes between the shopper and your dealership team, the better the shopping experience. Let our team help you to put the right message and interaction out to the consumer, regardless of where they are in the process.  

The Download on Shifting Consumer Preferences

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Have you had a chance to watch the video recording of Dealer Forward Marketing Edition: Shifting Consumer Preferences? If not, we strongly recommend you do! And if you have watched it, you’ll know it covered highly relevant topics for dealers like you, including recent trends in automotive digital marketing and automotive service marketing, and tactics you can use to embrace shifting consumer behavior.  

Keep reading to get the highlights from this discussion between Wayne Pastore, General Manager of Dealer.com and Vice President of Operations Dealer Marketing, Cox Automotive Dealer Software Solutions, and Jeff Ramsey, eCommerce & Marketing Director at Jones Junction. Learn how Shifting Consumer Preferences influence how your dealership operates, and how to exceed customer expectations to close the deal. 

Keep communication seamless. 

Consumers today expect to have digital retailing options when they go to buy a vehicle. The enduring question here is how far each customer will want to remain online through the purchase process. For instance, some may prefer to “Get Today’s Price” online and visit the dealership to complete all other steps, while others may not want to leave the comfort of their home at all.   

The dealership sales process and staff need to be organized and equipped to handle the full range of consumer digital preferences. One essential factor is seamless communication. The better your team communicates, the greater success you will have with your automobile leads solution, resulting in the progression of more leads. Sales managers, internet managers, the service team, and others need to be comfortable with processing customer information that was shared through digital forms and using this data to inform future interactions.  

Acknowledge the shopper’s digital effort.  

Shoppers submit a wide variety of information through the forms on your Digital Storefront. Think of all the fields available for them to complete, from the Finance and Lease sections on the Vehicle Deal Page, to the details required for your automotive service appointment scheduling software. The good news is you can easily score customer service points by acknowledging all the work that they’ve done.  

Make it a habit to thank shoppers for investing time to share down payment, trade in value, and other details. Some may expect this show of appreciation from your team, which means there may be more at stake from not doing this than just hurt feelings. If you inadvertently “break” the customer experience, there is a risk you may be punished with lower gross or even a lost sale.  

Adjust your channels and messaging to stay relevant. 

Are you familiar with the term “cord cutting?” This is a topic that deserves its own article, but it refers to the trend of traditional Cable TV subscribers who are ending their contracts (i.e. “cutting the cable cord”) and moving to Connected TV offerings, such as Netflix, HULU, and more. The key here is that what consumers watch and where they watch it is dynamic, and so your advertising strategy should be too.  

Be willing to explore new online channels, including social, and update your messaging on a regular basis. For instance, do your Ads show people standing close together in a dealership and giving high-fives? This image is now outdated due to social distancing guidelines. Demonstrate through words and images to your shoppers that you are paying attention and acting accordingly.  

Above all, keep in mind that your online experience is the store experience. With all of your dealership departments becoming more reliant on digital retailing and scheduling, you need everyone bought in and taking full advantage of what these experiences have to offer. As always, Dealer.com and your performance manager are available to help you explore products and strategies to grow from shifting consumer preferences.