Category: Customer Care

5 Ways to Build Trust with Modern Car Buyers 

Posted on
5 Ways to Build Trust with Modern Car Buyers

Written By: Chase Abbott

Half of a consumer’s decision to repurchase or recommend an automotive brand or dealer is based on trust. While dealerships and car salespeople have long suffered from a lack of consumer confidence throughout the purchase process, gaining trust most certainly is possible when dealerships act intentionally. A leading way to win over auto sales leads is through a digital buying experience—if it is done properly. 

Even with digital sales methods, dealerships need to bolster consumer relationships to meet their goals. Ensuring that the digital sales process is developed and grounded in trust ultimately benefits both the car buyer leads and the dealership. Here are five ways your dealership can build trust with modern car buyers. 

1. Understand the power of digital 

Automotive sales have been trending toward an era of online shopping for some time now. But within the past 18 to 24 months alone, the percentage of vehicles purchased digitally has skyrocketed from 2% to almost 30%—a massive and sudden shift in consumer preferences that dealerships simply can’t ignore. 

This preference to purchase vehicles online is still gaining momentum. More than three-quarters (76%) of automotive dealer leads are willing to consider a complete online purchase process. This movement toward digital or hybrid purchasing is not likely to go away anytime soon, and savvy dealerships understand that the sales process has been permanently disrupted. Having the right technology available is a necessary basis for initiating customer relationships, anticipating their needs, and building trust from the get-go. 

2. Evaluate technology to ensure you have the right solutions in place 

Whether your dealership has digital experience tools already in place or if you’re just getting started, it’s important to evaluate available technology so it is serving both your customer base and internal needs. With the right functionality, these tools can guide automotive leads through the sales funnel, close deals with more efficiency, and increase profits. 

Connecting those dots and getting the technology right ultimately impacts your bottom line. Dealerships surveyed earned 25% higher front-end gross profits and 24% higher back-end gross profits, compared to traditional dealer leads. The right technology will meet customers where they already are in the sales process, providing tailored support that demonstrates your business recognizes their unique needs. 

3. Use customer data to keep deals moving forward 

Through responsible customer data usage, dealerships can target buyers with relevant automotive digital marketing in spaces that are of most use for them, resulting in a win-win situation. Admittedly, it’s not easy to do. About half of dealerships say that it is a challenge to leverage data and systems to identify opportunities, while 86% of dealers agree that having accurate and complete customer data is a dealership priority. However, the right software and tools can assist. 

Customer data can come from a variety of sources, including the consumer sharing it directly with the dealership, the consumer sharing it with a trusted third-party partner, or outside entities collecting it. Ideally, the dealership combines its own data with that of trusted partners for the most well-rounded view. The data can help your dealership understand the customer’s vehicle type preferences, budget, stage in the sales process, communication preferences, and more. 

Your own data should provide the insights you need to offer personalized online user experiences like recommendations, specials, and fixed operations content based on their previous shopping behaviors. Customer data provides a 216% increase in lead form submission rates, based on a Dealer.com study of 524 franchise dealers who subscribed to Experience Optimization. Dealerships using Experience Optimization showed that customers were three times more likely to initiate a trade-in deal. Salespeople can use data to inform their approach to a deal and to better assure customers that they are being supported throughout their ownership journey. 

4. Give customers control of their buying experience 

Customers want to be in control of their shopping experience, so most successful dealerships offer a range of online and offline communication options to help make customers comfortable and enable open dialogue. Offering a hybrid experience that combines the functionality of brick-and-mortar operations with the convenience of shopping online is key for building strong relationship with a wide range of customers. 

With this hybrid model, customers can do as much of the shopping online as they would like, and then come to the dealership when they’re ready. This level of flexibility helps bolster confidence and trust in the process. Two-thirds of dealer leads say that they want to complete more of their next car-buying process online compared to their prior vehicle purchase. If a customer can purchase on their own terms, they’re more likely to give your dealership good reviews/referrals and remain a loyal customer. 

5. Gather and utilize feedback from recent happy buyers 

Consumers familiar with shopping online are overwhelmingly satisfied with their dealership experience, with 77% expressing this sentiment. Harness the power of your happy customers and make it easy for them to spread the word for you. Build the feedback-solicitation process into the car-buying experience. 

This is especially important because 90% of consumers read online reviews before visiting a business, and almost the same percentage trust these reviews the way they trust personal recommendations. More than half of shoppers say that the most important factor when choosing a dealership is the dealer’s reputation. 

Building trust with the modern car buyer will help enhance and solidify your reputation. You can accomplish this by understanding what car buyers want, utilizing technology to your advantage, giving customers the ability to shop online, and then seamlessly moving the process forward. To learn more about how you can build trust with modern car buyers, visit Dealer.com. 

A version of this article originally appeared in Digital Dealer. 

Make 2022 the Year of Premium Consumer Experience

Posted on

By Nuan Openshaw-Dion 

The beginning of a new year is always an inspiring time for me. While I’m always focused on continuous improvement, there’s something about flipping the calendar that makes the new possibilities and opportunities ahead more exciting than ever. It’s a great time to reflect and set an intention for the year ahead.  

I’ve been thinking about what our amazing team at Dealer.com achieved in 2021. We’ve been relentlessly working hard for our dealers, helping them market themselves more easily and effectively. That work has taken many forms, including maintaining excellence in our customer support teams, expanding our marketing channels, and updating products like Automotive Marketing Platform powered by VinSolutions and Page Designer—targeted at making our platform even better, faster, and easier to use.  

We’ve also continued to embrace the rapid evolution of car buying with investments into a more flexible, digital buying process. Dealer.com’s Accelerate My Deal is an integral part of Cox Automotive Digital Retailing, a solution for dealers who want to own every purchase path, meeting consumers based on their buying preferences.  

And yet, though we’ve made so much great progress on behalf of our dealers, there is so much left to do! I’ve been thinking a lot about to how to tackle the work ahead, and one common theme keeps rising to the top for me: premium consumer experiences.  

The Dealer.com team shares the goal of making every experience a consumer has with a dealer—whether online, in-store, or both—an outstanding one. In today’s retail environment, those standout experiences separate the winning dealerships from the stagnant ones.  

With that in mind, I’m challenging my team and my dealership partners to do everything with a singular focus: make this the year of the premium consumer experience. Here are a few key action items I’m encouraging my team and my dealer partners to take to help us all get there.  

Implement Tools and Processes that Make Your Work Easier   

I’m challenging my team to find and implement tools that help them complete critical projects faster and better, and I’m challenging our dealers to do the same. Think about the various digital marketing tools you use. When is the last time you critically evaluated your processes for using those tools? Have new enhancements been released that could make your job easier if you made small process changes?  

As I mentioned, we’ve made some meaningful enhancements to our foundational tools this year. We’ve launched a new Page Designer that makes designing your dealership website more intuitive, expanded channels in Automotive Marketing Platform to make your marketing more cohesive and effective, and aligned and integrated Accelerate My Deal and Cox Automotive Digital Retailing to make deal workflows even smoother. If you haven’t updated your processes to incorporate these new capabilities, you’re missing out on opportunities to improve—and on opportunities to deliver the best possible consumer experiences.  

Prioritize Data and Meaningful Integrations  

You probably know by now that reliable consumer data is critical to success, not only for automotive digital marketing but also for overall dealership profitability. The right data enables you to generate more automobile leads by personalizing every touchpoint a consumer has with your dealership, from a display ad to deal making. In 2022, I’m challenging everyone to keep the value of consumer data in focus.  

For us at Dealer.com, that means taking advantage of the breadth and depth of the Cox Automotive data network, which includes insights from two out of three U.S. car buyers (2020 Cox Automotive Car Buyer Journey). For your dealerships, it means making sure you’re set up to successfully act on all the data and insights in your systems.  

You must have meaningful integrations to make data actionable. And it’s not just about integrations between marketing and sales tools (though of course those are important). You have to think about the data and system integrations between all your dealership departments. When marketing, sales, service, and operations are all in sync, you win. My team at Dealer.com is continuing to stay close to our peers at VinSolutions, Xtime, and Dealertrack DMS to continue bringing your dealership departments and data closer together.  

Evaluate the Value of Your Partnerships  

There’s no way around it—the right tools and the right data are critical to providing premium consumer experiences. But there’s a third critical element: the right people. Without the right people, even the very best tools and data will fall short.  

As you launch your 2022 marketing plans, I encourage you to take note of the role your marketing partners play. Are they making your job easier and acting as a true partner in your success? Or are they little more than technical support?  

At Dealer.com, true, meaningful partnership with our dealerships is at the core of our business. Your success is our success. With the right people behind premium consumer experiences, we all win.  

I couldn’t end a post about reflection and inspiration without saying how immensely grateful we are for our dealer clients. I continue to be personally inspired by your resilience, creativity, and success, and we couldn’t be more excited to continue to drive success together in 2022.