How to Use Personalization and Big Data to Convert More of Your Website Traffic
Every dealer knows how fierce competition is for customers and mindshare. That’s true of any market. But if you think about it, the internet is absolutely the most competitive marketplace that exists, and dealerships are no exception. With the click of a mouse, or swipe of a finger, a potential buyer can wipe you out of their mind.
But the challenge is multi-layered. Most of your website traffic does not turn into leads. If you’re like most dealerships, you’re only converting 0.5%-2.5% of your traffic into actual qualified leads. This is particularly troubling: Why is it that once someone finally arrives at your website—after great expense and effort–you can’t even get them to leave their name and phone number? Think of it this way: what if 99% of ups walked in and walked out of your showroom without shaking a hand or leaving a number? That’s alarming, and it should concern us here as well.
When looking at your dealership’s digital strategy, the moment when a hard-won visitor meets your website is probably where you can make the most immediate impact with the greatest financial gain. It’s also probably one of the more neglected investments you’re making. Each conversion or lead capture of an anonymous visitor can make every advertising dollar worth more. In other words, if your conversion rate goes up 30%, the dollar you just spent to bring a click is worth $1.30, making it all worth it to you.
This is why conversion optimization—the process of focusing your website on conversion of anonymous website visitors into leads—becomes so critical.
Today’s robust, intelligent tools allow digital marketers to hone in on the buyer persona of an anonymous visitor. Why is this important? Let’s go back to the real world again. What do you look for in a floor salesperson? Tenacity, social tact, ability to establish a relationship and communicate value. These human qualities make the difference between a guest having a great experience or an awful one, because they can read and react to a guest’s interests and personality.
Unfortunately, this is the missing piece when we engage anonymous website visitors. Your website can’t engage its visitors with human charisma while your sales team is distant. So how can you best connect to your visitors online without having that savvy salesman? How do you personalize the experience beyond superficial experiences?
It starts with building insight: when someone is anonymously browsing your website, a modern conversion optimization strategy must be able to analyze and answer key questions: Does this person care more about safety or features? Does this person have interest in a competitive vehicle? Is this an impatient person? From the answers to these questions flow the types of engagement you should do on-page to best emulate the human interaction on your sales floor, and these can then raise your conversion rates by numbers that can dramatically impact your sales numbers.
Next month this is exactly what we’ll look at Digital Dealer: How can we improve our website’s conversion rate without investing in projects like switching website vendors or replacing all our images? What are the latest concepts and techniques, and what can be implemented in a pragmatically reasonable amount of time?