Tag: Digital Retailing

3 Ways A Great Homepage UX Can Facilitate Accelerate My Deal

Posted on

By Noah Lee 

When it comes to automotive internet marketing and 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.4 Keep 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. 

 

[elementor-template id=”58044″]

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.”

What Does Your Dealership Website Say to Shoppers?

Posted on

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.  

To learn about the importance of optimizing your website and other smart digital marketing strategies, check out our free eBook: 4 Questions to Improve Your Dealership’s Digital Marketing. 

[elementor-template id=”61651″]

Why eContracting and Digital Retailing Go Hand-in-Hand

Posted on

More and more dealerships are seeing the value of digital retailing for bringing in customers from a variety of online sources to help counter declining retail profit margins.

Consumers are definitely shopping for vehicles online. Recent research by Google/Kantar TNS found that 92% of car buyers now research online before they buy. Today, 76% of shoppers are open to the idea of buying completely online, according to the Cox Automotive 2020 Digitization of End-to-End Retail Study.

Dealerships are utilizing a wide range of digital retailing initiatives. On one end of the spectrum, there is the all-digital deal. This is where customers complete the entire deal online – including the eContract – and receive remote delivery of their vehicle to their location.

However, most dealerships currently use digital retailing to give customers the opportunity to start their deal online and then transition smoothly to complete their deal in-store. Research shows that 83% of consumers want to do one or more steps of the purchase process online, so even when the plan is to engage customers in person at some point in the deal, it’s important to have the technology in place to continue the shopping experience they prefer.

Allowing car buyers to do their research online can also add to a dealership’s profitability, as 63% of shoppers are more likely to purchase aftermarket products if they can learn about them on their own time before finalizing their vehicle purchase.

How does eContracting fit in with digital retailing? It’s a logical step in the purchase process, extending the convenience of technology-enabled car shopping to the contract review and signing stage of the deal.

With digital retailing in place on your dealership’s website and third-party websites, here’s some of what your customer may have done online before they walk in the door:

  • Select and reserve a vehicle from your inventory
  • Figure their car payment
  • Calculate the value of their trade-in
  • Research aftermarket options and add-ons
  • Complete a credit application
  • Submit an offer on the vehicle

After the car buyer has filled out their information online and taken steps to complete their purchase, would it make sense to print out paper contracts for them to sign at the very end? Of course not!

At a time when consumers are accustomed to a high level of convenience and efficiency from online shopping, eContracting features such as mobile contract review and sign-and-tap help meet those expectations as they complete their vehicle purchase at the dealership. And for customers who wish to to do more of their purchase process online, remote contract review and eSigning provide the flexibility for them to sign from anywhere.

Click to discover how Digital Contracting with Dealertrack uniFI complements your dealership’s Digital Retailing initiatives.

3 Ways to Offer Shoppers a Differentiated Digital Experience

Posted on

Automotive digital marketing and avocados have something in common – both have fairly short “Best By” consumption timeframes, where something that recently seemed new is suddenly past its prime.  

The lesson here for dealers: don’t let your automotive web design and curated user experience gather dust. With more consumers doing more online than ever before, they have high expectations with their shopping experience.  

From browsing inventory and researching a model, to submitting a lead and reviewing your customer service, there are several points along the buying journey where you can differentiate your dealership and keep your customers coming back for more. Read on for 3 ways your dealership can differentiate the digital experience you offer shoppers, keeping them engaged while delivering more value to your business. 

  1. Support Meaningful Conversations 

Your dealership website offers a lot of information to consumers. Equally important, these pages collect highly valuable first-party data for your future use, such as targeting in-market shoppers with display ads or video ads.  

While retargeting ads have value, they offer one-way communication to consumers. In other words, they are marketing at people rather than conversing with them. As a dealer, you know how important person-to-person conversations are. So, how can you preserve shopper connections and support meaningful conversations?  

Through 3rd party integration with LivePerson, Video Chat and CoBrowse are aimed at creating a more engaging environment for online shoppers with more interactive features. As the name describes, Video Chat enables consumers to chat with dealers over video, which can be initiated from the Digital Retailing application. A handy tool for reviewing details, CoBrowse lets shoppers share their screens with dealers while shopping, allowing dealers to guide consumers as if they were side-by-side in the showroom. Ultimately, you want to replicate a good one-to-one experience, but digitally. 

  1. Provide Flexible Retailing Tools 

Automotive digital retailing is not often described as a leisure activity. Until recently, this step might have been a bit daunting to shoppers, and the turning point where they would hop in their car and pursue assistance at the dealership. This is becoming less and less the case – partly due to environmental circumstances, and also because the tools are becoming more user-friendly.  

The latest digital retailing solutions turn this challenging process into simple steps, giving the consumer a bit of validation as they move forward. They also provide flexibility with how and when the lead form is completed. For example, a consumer may be missing some information and they can skip a step and come back to it, rather than running into a dead end. 

Digital retailing of today is a self-driven and self-directed process. In other words, people want to be guided, but not forced. To keep people engaged and on the path toward submitting a deal, it is important to provide options for completing the form: pause for a break, get help, save it to edit later, etc. This flexibility translates to generating more automobile leads; a consequence of a consumer-first sales process, which is nothing new, but now it is digital-enabled. 

  1. Build Trust Through Reputation 

The saying goes that opposites attract, but not when it comes to recommendations for buying a car. When going through an important decision like this, people look for things they can relate to. More and more, consumers are looking for trust and the feeling of it within the automotive buying experience. This is where positive customer reviews can effectively tie a ribbon on your next deal.  

One of the ways you can differentiate from your competitors and answer the question “Why buy from us” is by investing in reputation management for car dealers. Your best advocate is the person who just bought from you. By soliciting their goodwill through Review Generation, and helping other consumers see the perks of this transaction, you can convince other people to do the same.  

A detailed review can be especially useful in building trust and illustrating the experience for a prospective customer. For instance, here are examples of superior customer service will score big points with consumers today: you offered to meet them wherever they were (i.e., for the test drive), made them feel safe, made the deal transparent, made things easy (deal signing, car delivery), and treated them like an individual.  

It gives shoppers confidence to learn that you are going the extra mile to transact in the way they want. There is power and opportunity in public recognition that your business cares, and you can use the tools of reputation management to broadcast this message in an authentic voice.  

From Websites and Digital Retailing, to Advertising and digital marketing services, Dealer.com solutions are built to connect consumers with dealers digitally. Let our team help you guide in-market shoppers through digital car-buying, dealership customer retention, and more. 

Breaking Down the Online and In-store Divide for Shoppers

Posted on

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.  

Make Intentional Changes to Make the Most of Digital Retailing

Posted on

Make Intentional Changes to Make the Most of Digital Retailing  

While sales and service activity are beginning to bounce back to normal rates for approximately 70% of franchise dealerships, according to the 2020 Cox Automotive COVID-19 Consumer & Dealer Impact Study, many of the changes implemented in dealerships appear to be here to stay. One of the most rapid and critical shifts in automotive digital marketing and operations is the rise of digital retailing.  

According to the same Cox Automotive study, 61% of shoppers want to do more of the purchase steps online compared to the last time they purchased a vehicle. In addition, 74% of franchise dealers have a digital retailing solution in place—a percentage that has remained steady since April.  

The ability to make virtual car sales may have once been a nice to have, but dealerships who have embraced digital retailing are proving how critical it now is to success.  

According to the latest research from Cox Automotive, dealerships whose staff have successfully embraced working in a digital environment are faring much better than others when it comes to generating automobile leads. Among dealerships who staff have not successfully adapted to a more digital environment, 60% are experiencing a sales decline and 50% are concerned about going out of business. Compare that to dealerships with a staff that has successfully adapted to a more digital environment; only 39% are experiencing a sales decline and 18% are concerned about going out of business.  

Dealers who have adapted to an online environment are experiencing higher performance. But adapting means more than buying a digital retailing solution; it requires meaningful, intentional change on dealers’ part. Here are a few key changes our team of experts recommend to make the most of digital retailing.  

Keep new customer preferences top of mind.  

“Consumers don’t want to go to a bunch of different spots online and have a disjointed experience. They want one connected experience. Today’s consumers want to feel in control of their car buying process, and they also want to know how to get help from a dealer without going into the showroom. That is a big shift in preferences.” 

-Wayne Pastore, Vice President of Operations, Dealer Marketing, Cox Automotive Dealer Software Solutions 

Market your offerings consistently.  

“Make sure you offer a consistent digital shopping experience across channels: your dealership website, third-party listings, both traditional and mobile. Allowing a customer to continue an experience, rather than start over, offers significant advantages and is a better experience overall.”  

-Mo Zahabi, Senior Director of Product Consulting, Dealer.com, Cox Automotive Digital Retailing, and VinSolutions 

Implement flexible processes.  

“As expected, consumer engagement with digital retailing has skyrocketed since March. Going forward, though, we have to realize though that there are different levels of digital retailing adoption, and today’s dealers need to be able to accommodate uber progressive customers as well as traditionalists.”  

-Chase Abbott, Senior Vice President of Sales, Dealer.com, Cox Automotive Digital Retailing, and VinSolutions  

Think about digital retailing beyond your website.  

“An interesting trend we’re seeing of late is an increased use of digital retailing tools for normal walk-in and lead traffic. As these tools become better and better and more integrated with all your dealerships sales and marketing tools, we’re seeing some dealerships use digital retailing for every deal—even if an old school customer walks in the door, the salesperson still puts that customer into the DR process themselves. Of course, you have some customers who will never go online only, but recent Cox Automotive research has shown us that a lot of more customers are considering it.” 

-Chase Abbott, Senior Vice President of Sales, Dealer.com, Cox Automotive Digital Retailing, and VinSolutions  

To learn more about how to move your dealership forward, download the Digital Marketing Playbook or contact your team of Cox Automotive Performance Managers. 

Dealer.com to discontinue support of Internet Explorer 11

Posted on

Microsoft has officially announced plans to end support for Internet Explorer 11 (IE 11) next year. Although customers that use IE 11 to access Dealer.com websites make up just 1.1% of total traffic, we will be implementing a three-phase plan to discontinue IE 11 support, while notifying these customers about the impending changes and how to access your website using a different browser.

Three Phase Plan

Effective immediately, we will no longer develop, test, or fix issues specific to IE 11 on both our ControlCenter platform and our websites. We will also begin directing customers to update their browsers to access your website in the future and provide links to download either Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, or Mozilla Firefox. 

  • Phase 1: Now through early October, shoppers may access your website via IE 11 without disruption. If your dealership is using IE11, please ask your IT department to select and install a new browser.
  • Phase 2: During the month of October, shoppers using IE 11 to access your website will receive a message asking them to update their browser before allowing them to continue on to your website.
  • Phase 3: Then, in November, shoppers attempting to use IE 11 to access your website will be asked to update their browser prior to continuing. This will prevent users from having a broken website experience.

Benefits to Your Website

Discontinuing support of IE 11 will result in faster product development, faster website performance, and enhanced security for your Dealer.com website. In addition, modern web browsers offer many benefits to the end user, resulting in a better overall shopping experience for your customers. Here are some other benefits of this move:

  • Faster Development: IE 11 is the only browser that does not meet modern web standards. For each new Dealer.com website product, feature, and enhancement, our engineering team spends extra time coding and testing specifically for IE 11. While IE 11 traffic makes up just 1.1% of total usage, it takes around 20% of our entire development time.
  • Faster Performance: The extra IE 11 code takes up valuable backend website space. Reducing the overall code size will result in performance gains.
  • New Features: Since IE 11 doesn’t follow modern web standards, we are not able to adopt the full suite of standards for other browsers. These new web standards allow for more creative design elements and backend functionality. Removing IE11 support opens up new opportunities for our engineering teams.

If you have any questions about this change, please reach out to your Performance Manager or contact a member of our support team.

Why Now is the Time for Auto Lenders to Go Digital

Posted on

Over the past several years, the paperwork and manual processes for handling auto loans have been gradually giving way to technology-based processes. But this year has changed everything. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, digital solutions have quickly moved from “nice to have” to “vital” for both dealers and lenders.

Consumers have led the charge: two-thirds of car buyers surveyed said they were more likely to purchase a vehicle 100% online1. Dealers have gotten up to speed quickly: the same study found that 81% of franchise dealers and 47% of independent dealers say they now have a digital retailing solution in place.

These technology solutions help keep consumers and dealership personnel safe while keeping the deals moving – but what role do lenders play? Digital retailing tools work similarly for lenders to initiate a contact-free browsing process that can turn casual shoppers into pre-approved, contract-ready buyers for their dealer partners.

With digital retailing technology helping dealerships work deals virtually and remotely, contracting electronically is the natural next step in the deal process. And today’s customers appreciate the contactless deal experience.

Now more than ever, dealers are relying on their lender partners to support the digital solutions that keep car sales moving. Lenders are embracing technology for driving consumer engagement and expediting the signing, submission, review and funding of dealers’ contract packages. Here are some of the drivers behind many lender modernization strategies.

Digital workflows drive efficiency for everyone — and enable lenders to appear as strong service partners

In the beginning, dealers’ eContracting adoption was driven by a desire to optimize workflow efficiency to counter margin pressure and gain cash flow fluidity. But today, a contactless contract signing process and fast funding are more important to dealers than ever — and Dealertrack data shows eContracting has lenders funding their dealers as fast as the same day. Improving on this level of service helps strengthen dealer partnerships. And strong partnerships can help drive more loan originations.

Digital contract packages are designed for completeness and accuracy, ensuring that no signatures are missed, no calculation errors have been made, and no required documents are overlooked. Dealertrack data shows that eContracting can help reduce returned contracts and lower the rate of re-contracting below 1%.2

And what about office space and paper clutter? With these paperless deals eliminating hefty paper contract packages, the documents are now stored digitally — freeing up office space and lowering storage fees, while still keeping the authoritative contract and digital data readily available in case of audit.

The way forward: matching technology to business strategy

Lenders’ unique financing models and business goals make one-size-fits-all solutions a speculative approach at best. There’s ample opportunity to implement digital strategies that align to a lender’s specific business goals and the resources they have available. The right technology partner will help lenders optimize their processes, drive the online experience consumers have come to expect, and help strengthen dealer partnerships through improved service.

Read more about lender strategies for the new digital car shopper.

.1Cox Automotive COVID-19 Digital Shopping Study, April 4-5, 2020
2Based on 2019 Dealertrack eContracting transaction data

Data, Insights and Opportunities in the Age of Social Distancing

Posted on

By Charles Miller

The US is a diverse place, and as a result, we see diversity within Dealer.com data. While we’ve generalized our findings in this post, every dealership’s story about the impact of COVID-19 will be slightly different. You can apply our findings through the lens of your business and your market to help define your digital marketing strategies moving forward. 

Impacts of COVID-19  

Vehicle sales are down in the COVID-19 timeframe. At the time of writing, Cox Automotive is estimating more than a 60% decline in US vehicle sales compared to the beginning of March. We’ve been working to understand how consumer shopping behaviors are shifting, what this means to the automotive industry and most importantly, what dealers can do about it during this disruption. The data shows there are both short- and long-term opportunities. 

Weathering the Storm 

As we analyze the impact of COVID-19 on consumer shopping behavior, it has become clear that how we measured success yesterday is not how we should measure success today. Currently, we’re seeing about a 20% decline in website lead volumes, however this isn’t nearly as steep as the forecasted decline in sales.  The takeaway here is that consumers are still interested in purchasing vehicles, and they are simply deferring the purchase until later. The April 4th Cox Automotive COVID-19 Consumer Impact Study shows that 61% of consumers are Much Less Likely or Somewhat Less Likely to visit a dealership and 34% of consumers are now delaying the purchase of a vehicle.  

The all-important Cost-Per-Lead key performance indicator (KPI) has less business value today than it did yesterday. We need to shift our evaluation of performance upstream and focus more on brand awareness measures like Impressions and Reach, showing in the form of Website Visits and Vehicle Deals Pageviews (VDP). Dealers also should focus efforts on nurturing customer relationships online until consumer confidence returns.  

Consumers Are Getting More Social Online 

Consumers are going online more during this time, whether it’s to connect with friends and family, to binge watch TV shows, or even to shop for vehicles. OpenVault, which provides industry analytics for broadband operators, is reporting a 33% increase in broadband usage from January to April 3rd.  For automotive, we need to understand what this means in the way of consumer focus. Google and Bing, the kings of low funnel, high purchase-intent activity, are reporting 12-15% declines in Automotive related search terms as of late March. Dealer.com data indicates an 18% decline in Visits from forecasted values.  Meanwhile, social channels are reporting record highs.  Facebook, as one example, has seen more than a 50% increase messaging (group calls are up 70%) and is reporting new record highs for general usage almost daily.  

With this influx of traffic and subsequent ad inventory on Facebook, Dealer.com is seeing a 46% decline in CPMs (Cost per Thousand Impressions). Facebook Cost-per-VDP is down 8%. When you’re evaluating how to best target consumers with your brand awareness and COVID-19 relating messaging, take a strong look at social. Now is likely an ideal time to invest advertising dollars into channels like Facebook and YouTube. 

Another note on social channels: we need to start playing the long game. No matter what we say in an advertisement, some consumers will delay traveling to your dealership to purchase a vehicle, even if they were on the verge of purchase prior to the pandemic. However, social communication offers dealership staff the chance to engage with consumers and foster a relationship online.  These connections are more apt to secure that individual as a customer once the pandemic passes.  

  • Be as active and relevant as you can, providing videos of inventory and informing them on the actions your taking to ensure their safety.  
  • Engage with consumers directly. Train your sales staff to operate more effectively in this area or contract social management experts.  

To date, Dealer.com Social and Reputation Management services have created almost 6,000 COVID-19-related website pages and 1,000 advertising assets to help dealers inform consumers of the services being offered during this time.

Consumers want to learn about the actions you are taking to safeguard their health as well as what services you’re offering. We’ve seen up to 12% engagement rates with these COVID-19 Advertising assets. COVID-19 website pages have been viewed 156,000 times, and this metric is growing by the day. 

Your Digital Retailing Opportunity 

How many times have your customers asked when the automotive industry will allow 100% online virtual car sales?  With stay-at-home orders in place, now would be an ideal time to offer a solution like digital retailing to the market to generate more automobile leads.  Given the fact that many consumers can’t engage directly with sales staff at your dealership, they are starting to explore Digital Retailing tools.  Dealer.com has seen Digital Retail engagement rates grow by 25% since the beginning of March.  Despite a general decline in overall website leads, by the end of March we were seeing Digital Retailing Deal and Credit Applications up 13% compared to the end of February and setting all-time highs for the Dealer.com platform. 

As you plan your advertising strategy and how to communicate COVID-19 services your dealership is offering, now is the time to inform shoppers of the ability to Finance, Trade-In and Fully purchase a vehicle online. Educate shoppers on how to use these tools while social distancing brings them into focus.  Dealers who are effective at educating both their staff and their consumers will see this time as one that accelerates them toward a future where the purchasing, trade and finance processes are handled more efficiently online. 

While the nation’s experts are working to understand how long COVID-19 will stay in the headlines, we will continue to evaluate its affects and provide recommendations as  more data becomes available. 

Reference: Open Vault