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.
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.
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.
Digital marketing is always changing, and it can be challenging to know which trends might impact your business and which ones are passing fads. In conversations with marketing specialists, industry experts, and dealers, we’ve identified top trends expected to make an impact to automotive retail in 2022.
Keep an eye out for this new technology as you start planning your digital marketing in 2022, and check out many of them for yourself at NADA Show 2022 in Las Vegas in March.
Personalization
This isn’t exactly a new trend, but personalization continues to be the name of the game in digital marketing for car dealers. Today’s successful dealers are connecting with in-market shoppers by giving them a highly personalized experience throughout their buying and ownership journeys.
With the right data and the right technology, dealerships can deliver individualized digital marketing campaigns and website experiences, targeted at specific subsets of customers. By using first-party consumer intelligence, dealerships can speak directly to each shopper—appealing to their interests, incentivizing them to buy, and keeping them progressing down the path to purchase.
This focused auto advertisingstrategy is far more personal for consumers and far more effective for dealerships than one-size-fits-all mass advertising efforts. In fact, shoppers who saw personalized website content had a 216% higher form submission rate and a 175% increase in VDP views, and were four times more likely to pencil a deal.*
Digital-First Shopping Experiences
Providing flexible shopping experiences for consumers has been a priority in auto retail for the last few years, and that trend will continue into 2022. Expect to see even more digital-first shopping experiences that give shoppers the flexibility and convenience of choosing which parts of the car-buying process they prefer to complete online.
The technology helps dealerships drive automobile leads and give consumers more of what they want—a digital, convenient, streamlined, transparent car-buying experience. For example, Accelerate My Deal, Dealer.com’s guided online shopping experience, helps shoppers structure deals with real monthly payments, explore and select F&I products, schedule a test drive, complete online credit applications, and reserve a vehicle—all online.
Advanced Data Connectivity
Most dealers today know the power of data, but expect to see new ways to harness data—especially first-party data—across departments. Advanced data and workflow integrations across technology platforms will help dealerships bring in customers, increase profits, and promote dealership growth.
Modern technologies that combine workflows across sales, service, marketing, and operations bring the entire dealership in harmony. Working together, these technologies boost efficiency, elevate the consumer experience, and give dealers more opportunity to increase profits.
Cox Automotive brands Dealer.com, VinSolutions, Xtime, and Dealertrack DMS, for example, offer solutions that bring marketing, sales, service, and operations in sync. By leveraging first-party transactional data from trusted consumer sites Autotrader and Kelley Blue Book, Cox Automotive technologies work together to give dealers a complete view of each customer. This unmatched proprietary data and connected suite facilitates workflows across departments and enables dealers to deliver the right message, to the right consumer, at the right time.
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.
When it comes to automotive internet marketingand digital retailing, your homepage does a lot of the heavy lifting. With more than half of your website visitors entering through the homepage—and even more (66%)1 eventually navigating there—your homepage plays a big role in the car buying process for many of your customers. And that means user experience matters.
Here are a few tips to give your customers a great homepage user experience that will guide them down the path to purchase through Accelerate My Deal—Dealer.com’s flexible buying experiences solution.
1. Make a Good First Impression
First impressions matter. Your customers form immediate opinions about your dealership and your digital retailing experience, just by viewing your homepage. So you don’t have long to make a good first impression. According to our research, the median time customers spend on the homepage is only about 18 seconds per website visit.2
Make the most of this time by giving your customers a homepage that has a professional look and feel, complete with high-resolution images, or even video. Make sure to highlight your digital retailing experience to car buyers prominently via your slideshow and in your “why buy messaging.”
The more you do to wow your visitors and highlight your enhanced buying process, the better chance you have to engage them with Accelerate My Deal, right as they begin the car buying journey. Why is this important? Customers who interact with Accelerate My Deal are five times more likely to submit a lead.3
2. Make it Easy to Find and Navigate to Accelerate My Deal
One of the main purposes of your homepage is to get visitors where they want to go, quickly and easily. You want to make sure it is abundantly clear that you have Accelerate My Deal. Accelerate My Deal gives your customers a guided, intuitive experience that leads them through the purchase process, beginning with your homepage. If they can’t find where they’re going, or get lost among multiple calls to action, excessive photos, too much text, and the general noise of a busy website, it defeats the entire purpose.
In fact, according to our research, these types of overly busy homepages decrease engagement (<10%) with page content.4Keep your site organized by removing unnecessary clutter on your homepage, consolidating information and navigation sections, and featuring your new online sales process utilizing Accelerate My Deal prominently.
3. Give Users a Consistent Experience
Accelerate My Deal gives car sales leads a personalized, guided online shopping experience that’s consistent across your website, Autotrader listings, and on Kelley Blue Book. The look and feel of your digital storefront experience should stay on-brand throughout your customers’ interactions, starting with your homepage. Multiple fonts, text sizes, colors, and inconsistent spacing come off as unprofessional and distract from the overall buying experience.
Thankfully, Dealer.com’s web platform makes it easy to ensure a consistent brand experience for your entire website. You can highlight Accelerate my Deal on multiple pages throughout your site including your homepage, search results page, vehicle details page, and even your finance page. Accelerate My Deal lets you improve efficiency on the backend too, by making the deal managing process easier than ever with its exclusive Deal View and VinSolutions integrations.
You and your customers deserve a better solution for facilitating flexible buying experiences. Accelerate My Deal, combined with a great homepage user experience, makes it easier for your customers to engage with your dealership and confidently begin the car buying process from anywhere. To learn more about how other dealers are using guided retail experiences to drive more qualified, higher converting leads, check out this case study.
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1Dealer.com Web Platform Google Analytics Data.
2Dealer.com Web Platform Google Analytics Data as reported in “Time Spent on Homepage – Device Comparison.”
3Comparison of visits with vs. without Accelerate My Deal activities, Dealer.com hosted websites. Sessions with Accelerate My Deal activity, on average, visit 1.5 more VDP, 5.5 more pages, and are 5 times more likely to submit a form than sessions that view a VDP but do not have any Accelerate My Deal activity. Data from Jun–Dec 31, 2020
4Dealer.com Web Platform Google Analytics Data as reported in “DDC Homepage Engagement Study.”
Are the close rates for your automobile leads failing to outperform other generic lead sources? Join Amanda Hilerio, Dealer.com eCommerce Performance Manager and Bill Cress Dealer.com enterprise Performance Manager, as they discuss how your dealership can make changes to treat digital leads differently and meet shoppers at the proper stage.
The look and feel of your dealership’s website matter to your customers. In fact, more than 3 out of every 4 people say that the look and credibility of a website are among the top factors in deciding to make a purchase. And, nearly one out of every two people say that a website’s design is the number one criterion for discerning a business’ credibility.
As more people shop for cars online, your website will speak volumes about your business. What do you want it to say?
Update and Optimize Website Content
If your website appears outdated, or it doesn’t optimize to give each user a great experience across all devices — tablet, phone, computer, etc.— then you may be losing shoppers to your competition. Even if your digital marketing strategy is on point, and you’re driving lots of traffic to your website, the buying journey will be forced to detour if they don’t like what they see when they get there.
Have you ever clicked on an Ad and struggled to find more information on the next page? It is a common experience, and one you want to avoid happening to your shoppers. Few things are more frustrating than finding discrepancies between what brought customers to your website and what’s actually on your site.
Here are examples to situations to avoid: differences in actual inventory and online inventory, differences in sales personnel information, incorrect contact information, and differences between digital marketing specials and offers and what’s actually stated on your website.
Partner with a Trusted Provider
So, how do you update and optimize your site? The good news is you don’t have to be a professional designer or an expert web developer.
You can give your customers a consistent, optimized shopping experience by partnering with a trusted website management provider that knows the automotive sales industry and understands how to align your website content with your overall digital marketing and sales strategy.
Together, you can keep your content consistent with how you’re attracting your target audience through social and marketing channels. And, you can keep your site up-to-date and relevant with image postings, business hour changes, navigation updates, featured vehicle configurations, incentives, and more.
Take the Next Steps
Your website speaks volumes about your business, so you need to ensure it says all the right things that will bring in new shoppers, and keep your customers progressing down the buying path.
As the industry changes to cater to customer preferences for online car shopping, implementing a digital retailing strategy has been on the mind of many dealers. Bob George, Head of Products at Dealer.com, and Brett Pomerantz, Senior Director of Product and Retail Experience at Cox Automotive, caught up with Cole Frankman, COO at Frankman Motor Company in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to chat about the role people, processes, and technology play in creating a cohesive digital strategy. Here are some highlights from the discussion.
Brett Pomerantz: What are some of the best practices you’ve implemented at Frankman Motor Company that have really helped your team learn and embrace change?
Cole Frankman: We don’t sell cars; we help people buy cars. Today’s consumer is smart. They do all their research. For the most part, they know what they want and they know what they’re going to get. … We just help people buy the car they want. It’s all about service. You can buy anything online, and cars are getting that way too. Probably about half of our sales are online only, over the phone, site unseen. … Customer service plays a big role.
BP: In what way would you say that digital retailing and the sales experience in general have evolved from the early days of digital retailing, and where do you see it going from here?
CF: In the early days, a digital retailing tool was essentially a payment calculator. A lot of websites had just the simple interest rate and what your payment was going to be. The tools got better from there and started using live bank rates. Now, we’re at the point where you can do pretty much every part of the purchase, if you want to, right in the tool.
BP: How has your website played a role in the customer experience? How have you leveraged your car dealer website to publicly communicate the new ways you’re doing business, as well as to promote your digital tools and processes available to consumers?
CF: There are a multitude of ways to have leads sent in from your website. When I first started at the dealership, there were like seven or eight different call-to-action buttons you could use to send in a lead on our website. Now, digital retailing is the only way to interact with us. As soon as I made that change, more and more people started to use the digital retailing tool. More and more interactions started happening. Now I constantly see traffic growing and more people using that versus calling or showing up. Conversions keep going up.
BP: There are different interpretations of digital retailing. How does your dealership define digital retailing, and what parts of your business are involved?
CF: We have found that Dealer.com Digital Retailing is the most complete solution. You don’t have to have five or six different software solutions to get one thing done. You need to be fluid through the whole process, otherwise you’re doing the same stuff twice. Using the tools and processes that are smoothest for the car deal is my philosophy, not necessarily just the customers, just the employee, or just us. It has to flow. Dealer.com Digital Retailing really helps with that because everything is really integrated and plays nice together.
This interview originally appeared on CBT News Dealer Forward. Watch the full video interview here.
Learn more about how Dealer.com Digital Retailing can help you simplify sales, save time, and drive more automobile leads.
Well before 2020, and the disruptions that occurred during this tumultuous year, dealers have known that automotive retail is destined to increasingly take place online.
There has been a dramatic digital shift in the automotive retail marketplace in recent months. As a result, digital retailing is more important than ever before. The existing automotive digital retailing transition has been unexpectedly accelerated. Dealers need to consider the implications of this trend, and how the resulting challenges and opportunities may require them to take action.
In this post, we share insights into the state of digital retailing and how these tools are both evolving to meet consumer needs and generate automobile leads.
Digital Retailing helps dealers meet consumers where they want to shop.
Consumer preferences for how to shop for and purchase vehicles changed in 2020. From learning about new models and exploring dealership inventory to penciling a deal and obtaining a trade-in vehicle valuation, there was suddenly a strong desire to accomplish each of these steps with minimal physical interaction with dealership staff.
What better way to do this, than to stay home and work through a dealership’s website? These circumstances made digital retailing a valuable component for automotive retail operations, and they forced dealers to reset and engage differently.
For many dealers, this change could not be accommodated overnight. There was an urgent need to make sure they were up to speed and had the right tools to let consumers shop how and where they wanted. To fulfill this, adjustments to processes and technology investments might have been required in order to optimize the online experience and continue functioning.
Ultimately, technology is the vehicle for the transaction, and not the endgame. The focus is on building a connection with the shopper.
Digital Retailing won’t replace dealership staff.
There is no question that automotive digital retailing now plays a key and expanding role in the initiation and execution of leads and deals, among its other contributions. As a result, a common question within dealer circles is how far will the technology and consumer preferences evolve? Will digital retailing take the place of shopping in the showroom?
Tools and technologies will continue to expand the capabilities of digital retailing, giving the consumer a tailored experience when buying a new vehicle. However, it is not expected to become the complete picture for the future of car-buying.
Digital Retailing is an invaluable tool for in-market shoppers, but it does not check every box. Instead, the future of automotive retail points to assisted shopping experiences.
Digital Retailing supportsa hybrid shopping experience.
Thanks to the increase in adoption across many products and services, digital retailing is fast becoming the standard practice for doing business. Consumers are increasingly feeling comfortable and empowered doing business online, so long as they are equipped with the necessary tools to complete the process.
To understand the desire for an assisted experience, step into the shoes of the average consumer who is serious about purchasing a new vehicle in the near future. There are generally 3 shopping styles:
Assistance is needed or wanted from the very beginning
No assistance is needed or wanted start to finish, or it is self-service
A hybrid approach, where assistance is required to answer questions about the inventory, offers, or the retail process
Purchasing a new vehicle is one of the largest financial moves most consumers will make, so It is comforting and confidence-building to have an expert available to provide guidance or assistance.
These days, an increasing share of car shopping is happening through automotive websites before consumers enter a dealership. Through industry-leading technology and expertise, Dealer.com is the digital marketing partner a dealer needs to master consumer experiences.
