HARDISON’S TIPS – JULY 28, 2021 – SELLING AUTOMOBILES ON LINE (PT.3)
STEP 3: PLUG IN YOUR SHOWROOM
Now that you’ve set-up the ideal online car buying experience, you need to make sure it doesn’t break when a customer actually walks into your physical store. Just like follow-ups, you need to make sure your dealership and team are greeting these customers as previous walk-ins who have already worked with you.
Like everything else, there’s a technology and a people aspect to perfecting this — but they can both be powerfully simple.
From the people side: all you should need to do is make sure your sales team is familiar with the tool on your website. If a customer walks in and says they’ve nailed down their perfect deal based on their credit, trade, and preferences — and your team doesn’t know they could do that on your website — then you’re setting up some awkward conversations unlikely to sell cars. As long as they know about the tool and can pull up that customer’s progress with it, your team should be in position to have a good day.
From the technology side: you should set-up devices with welcome screens (or even just print signage) that immediately validates to your walk-ins that the progress they made online allows them to ”skip the line”, like a Disney FastPass+. Instead of feeling like they need to re-introduce themselves and start over, they can instantly jump ahead to buying time. This is the kind of experience that customers will write home about, building your review reputation while increasing your close rate.
With our solution, for example, you can accomplish this by simply pulling up your website on any internet-connected device — customers just need to type in their phone number or email address to instantly pull up their personalized Online Shopper™ “Garage” and seamlessly continue their deal. Check it out.
STEP 4: CONNECT YOUR MARKETING
Ok, now that you’ve created an amazing experience for customers online and offline, you need to make sure they know about it. By incorporating “online car buying” throughout you website and marketing messaging you can expect to increase the high-intent traffic you’re driving to your platform.
- Landing Page. Every campaign needs to start with a good destination. Add a landing page to show website visitors that your dealership offers online car buying, how they can get started, and most importantly why it makes their shopping experience better.
- Website Creative. From homepage sliders and personalizers to VRP banners, make sure your visitors know from the moment they hit your website that they can go the distance online. It could make all the difference between a bounce and a buyer.
