Creating an Appointment Culture – Part 4

Creating an Appointment Culture – Part 4

TRANSCRIPT: How do we get appointments? Let’s start with the internet side of our business. Internet appointments all begin with leads. In fact, when you fail to get the lead, you are lucky to get a sale. I will give you an example. The typical visitor to your website doesn’t give you their information. In fact, eighty-five percent of typical website visitors don’t give you any information at all. Only about fifteen percent actually submit a lead via your email forms, by calling you on the phone, or by using your chat feature on your website. What we like to say is there are fifteen percent leads and eighty-five percent leaks.

One of the things we want to do as car dealers is to make sure that our websites are optimized for conversion. That means including everything we can on that website that is going to drive conversions for us so that we can get more of that eighty-five percent to tell us who they are. Some of these things include: pop-ups, pop-unders, online chat, trade appraisal forms, credit applications, coupons, or anything that will drive leads.

It doesn’t get any better when we look at the total market out there. In fact a study that, I believe was done by Autotrader.com, showed that for sixty-nine percent of people who buy a car, their very first contact with you is walking into your dealership. Ninety-four percent of people are online. This means that ninety-four percent of consumers are looking at cars online before they buy. Yet, only thirty-one percent make any contact with you prior to that purchase.

When you look across at all of the digital marketing you are doing, you really have to have a focus on lead generation. Something to remember is that if you can’t calculate an ROI from your digital spend, then it is just branding… not unlike that billboard across the street. Branding isn’t a bad thing; it’s just not the same as lead generation. Impressions and engagement are great, but you don’t sell these. You sell cars, and you can’t sell cars unless you get a lead. If you don’t get a lead, and they just walk into the dealership, you are only going to close the sale nine to twenty percent of the time. If they will give you their information in order for you to set an appointment, you are going to close them eighty percent of the time if you are using A Perfect Appointment at your dealership. That has got to be your goal around everything you do online.