How To Attract & Sell More Trade-In Leads (PART 3)

 

How To Attract & Sell More Trade-In Leads (PART 3)

TRANSCRIPT: We know we love Kelley Blue Book’s Instant Cash Offer, and I’m recommending that car dealers do this, but I am recommending that you keep it off of your website.

Let’s talk about your website for just a moment. There’s a reason that these are the best overall trade leads for you for a few reasons. One, they’re exclusive. I just said it. These are first-party leads, and they can close at 20% or better if you do the right thing. Another reason why I like trade leads from your websites so much is because they already know you. The customer who went to Kelley Blue Book or Autotrader, whichever place they got the Instant Cash Offer, and they complete that, that’s a great lead, but they don’t know you yet.

The person came to your website, maybe they were there for service, they completed it, they know you, they’re more likely to connect on the phone if we say the right things. They are generally, generally speaking, lower funnel leads. You need to design your website to be a spider web for these leads.

Let’s understand your website’s goals. We’ve said it once already, but I want to make sure that you understand this. Maybe there’s some motorcycle or RV dealers on here who haven’t heard me say this before in my training. If you are a for-profit business, and if you’re a dealer, you’re for-profit, your website has only 2 essential goals, only 2. One is to attract visitors, and 2 is to convert those visitors into customers. That’s it. Those are your website’s only 2 goals.

Now, you might say, “Well, wait, Steve. My website’s goal is to showcase our great Harley inventory.” My question to you is, “To what end? To what end are you showcasing your inventory?” To sell a bike, right? To convert the visitor into a customer. Attract and convert. “But wait, Steve. My website’s goal is to sell my brand.” To what end? To what end are you trying to sell your brand? To convert the visitor into a customer. That’s it. There are only 2 goals on your website. Don’t overthink your website. Attract visitors, convert visitors. That’s it. There’s no argument to that.

Where should my website focus be on? Let’s take a look at where you really should be focusing your website when it comes to trying to generate trade leads. Now, we’re going to take a look at all of these as we go through, but you really should be focused on the navigation bar or the menu. You want to focus on the vehicle detail pages, that’s VDPs, for those of you not in the autos business, and SRPs, search results pages. You want to be focused on those. You want to focus on the various messaging, and the buttons that you use, the verbiage that you use. You’re going to focus on mobile, and you want to focus on something called instant retargeting, and I’m going to take you through all of that. All of these areas can generate more leads for you from your existing website visitors.

Let’s talk about your navigation bar for a second. This is really critical. I want you to understand how important your navigation bar. If you’re a typical dealer, 95% of your homepage clicks are on your Navigation Menu, 95%. That’s 19 out of 20. You want to have some conversion message that links to your trade form on virtually every single drop down. Now, vary the verbiage like I did. We’ll go through these in a second.

You absolutely want to have the call to action in your Service Menu. You want to absolutely have the call to action in your Finance Menu. You want to absolutely have the call to action to generate a trade lead in your About Us Menu. Like I have here for new vehicles, value your trade, right? Used vehicles, check trade-in. The About Us, sell us your car. Schedule service, what’s my car worth? Finance application, get your book value. Vehicle research, find trade values. These are 6 different ways of saying the exact same thing, but the reason we say it differently in each drop down is because consumers really become blind to value trade-in, value trade-in, value trade-in, value trade-in, if that’s all you say on every menu item throughout your entire website.

Each menu item, each drop down should have one link, one good call to action to your trade-in form, but each one should be different because if I didn’t attract them with value your trade on new vehicles, maybe sell us your car will be attractive to them under About Us.

Now, you might have the question, “Where do these 6 links link to?” They all link to the same page. It doesn’t matter. They can all link to the exact same page, the exact same trade form. The point is we’re going to take advantage of all of the opportunities that we have available to us in the navigation bar. All right.

Let’s look at your VDPs and your SRP opportunities. That’s Vehicle Detail Pages, and Search Results Pages. For those of you who don’t know, vehicle detail page, that’s the page that has the actual vehicle on it, and nothing else. It’s got the vehicle, it’s got details about that vehicle. If you’re a motorcycle dealer, that’s the page that’s got that one bike that’s used, that you’ve got, and you’ve got all the details about it. That’s your vehicle detail page.

Your search results page, that’s that page that has 25 different Honda Civics or whatever, 25 used cars. That the search results page. Now, you want to make sure that you’re using an on-page trade form at the top and bottom of your search results pages like I have here. I’m using TradePending. You can see on the top. That’s TradePending, and that’s what we call an on-page trade form. The reason you’re going to do this is you want to avoid banner blindness. You don’t want … Let me explain banner blindness.

Banner blindness happens to all of us when we’re looking at websites like Yahoo or a new site. We all develop banner blindness. See, we know where the banners are, and we avoid them with our eyes as we’re reading. On a dealer site, if you’ve got banners that look like sales banners that look like the same kind of advertising, display advertising that I might see on yahoo.com, people’s eyes will avoid it. They’ll get banner blindness. You want to watch out for that. You want to have a good call to action at the top and bottom of your search results pages that generates trade leads.

Then on your vehicle detail pages, you want to have that same call to action very near the price on the VDP, on the vehicle detail page. Now, definitely by the way, you should use 3 buttons. Now, if you watched our first Undeniable Advantage webcast, Turn Web Visitors Into Buyers, you’ve seen these 3 buttons before: the confirm availability, get our best price, value your trade. Those 3 buttons are on the vehicle detail page of a very progressive dealer who gets it, who understands what their goals are. I want a 3-button strategy. Again, you’ll have to go back and watch that webcast again to understand why we have a 3-button strategy, but make sure that when you have a 3-button strategy, that value your trade is one of the 3 buttons.