How to Gain an Undeniable Advantage: Drive More Sales, Leads & Calls from Your Existing Website Traffic! (PART 6)

 

How to Gain an Undeniable Advantage: Drive More Sales, Leads & Calls from Your Existing Website Traffic! (PART 6)

TRANSCRIPT: Thing to understand about conversion basics is your customer is not you. Okay. You need to tell them what to do. You need to tell them why to do it that means give them a WIIFM. what’s in it for me. You need to give them lots of chances and you need to try to avoid TMI or at least balance out the information. Too much information verses not enough information. So they’re not you.

Let’s talk about that. See you’re on your site multiple times a day. I want you to understand why I’m telling you this. We judge our website based on our experience to our website and not the consumer’s experience to our website. See, the internet prospect is there for maybe a couple of visits every few years, so you need to stop assuming it’s every customer’s first time at your site.

See, most of your conversions actually come from single visit visitors. First timers convert, for our clients 56% to 61% of the leads that they receive off their websites and phone calls come from first time visitors, alright. Not from people who visited multiple times in the month. For the average dealer about half your visitors only visit you one time. This means you may just have one shot in getting them to submit a lead or converting them into a buyer, so keep this in mind whenever you consider a change to your website.

Now, again they’re not you so don’t overthink this whole, “stale thing”. I hear that so often it drives me crazy. “Our website is stale, our website’s stale.” It’s stale to you. Your website has two goals: attract and convert. If it’s their first time, does your site adequately, “onboard them”? Think about that. Can you highlight what’s important to you to a first time visitor without driving them away?

We need to tell them what to do because connected customers don’t read directions. When I got into automotive years ago and you bought software, you got this giant book whenever you bought software. That’s not the case today. Connected customers don’t read directions. There are no directions, so we need to tell them what to do, but we need to do that in very simple terms called a ‘call to action’.

Do a review of all of your calls to actions and make sure that they use simple terms like, ‘click here, enter your info, get a quick quote, call now,’ have your… Someone who doesn’t work for the dealership, have them look… like your spouse or whatever. Have them read through your calls to action and see if they understand exactly what it means in very clear terms.

Alright. Now we need to also tell them why to do it. It’s not enough to have the call to action, giving them the WHAT to do. Now we’ve got to tell them WHY to do it, the WIIFM (what’s in it for me). So it’s click here, but why to save money, to save time, to remove the hassles.

See, remember DrivingSales taught us 99% of consumers, 99% of car buyers expect to hassle when they start the car buying process. Tell them why to do it, to remove hassles, to lock in pricing, check availability, to schedule a whatever, alright.

We also need to give them lots of chances to give us leads. Now, you may not know this 95% of your homepage clicks right around there are in the navigation menu. When you look at your website and you see it as beautiful front page with all this spinning stuff and all this great… Understand most of everybody 19 out of 20 people are making their first click from your home page into the navigation menu, so do you have conversion opportunities in your navigation menu.

Let’s take a look at this. Up close what’s on the menu for this dealer? I’m at this dealer’s website and I’m looking at inventory and look at what’s in the drop down, all new inventory, new vehicle specials 2016 RAM. This is great. What’s missing? What’s missing from this dealer’s menu? Where are the conversions link? Where’s the link telling me to submit a lead?

“Oh Steve those are probably over in shopping tools.” Okay let’s click over shopping tools. Here we are at shopping tools, we’ve got finance, financing and trade-in appraisal. What’s missing from that drop down? You’re right, the trade appraisal, it has the finance application but there’s no trade appraisal link.

I don’t understand, so there is a finance application which is a, we’re going to learn later, a high commitment form. A high commitment call to action, alright but there’s no low commitment, there’s no medium commitment calls to action in here. In fact, the only other conversion link that I can find on this dealers menu is to the car finder under research which is almost never used.

What do you want? You’ve got to tell the customer what you want, what you want them to do. Tell the customer what’s most important to you in the drop down. If 95% of my home page clicks are going to be on the navigation menu then I need to tell them what I want the customer to do I that menu, and what’s most to you should be on top. And you should use proper calls to action right inside your navigation menu.

Here’s a navigation menu we built for a Toyota dealer. The three most important things for them in their fixed operations department is to get somebody to schedule service, to order parts, order accessories. So those are the first three pieces that we put in their menu.

Now, if the customer wants to check their repair status they can do it. They can easily find maintenance schedules, they can meet Toyota’s service team, they can meet the Toyota’s parts team, they can find service coupons and parts specials, but what’s most important to this dealer is to get them to take an action. To convert them from a visitor into a buyer.

Now, we also need to make sure that we give them lots of chances for this and some dealers don’t understand because we’re getting so hooked on vehicle detail page views, how important your search results page is. Your search results page, if you’re an average dealer with opportunities for connection, opportunities for conversion on your search results page and your vehicle details page you’re going to see just as many leads on your search results pages SRP’s as you do on your vehicle detail pages VDP’s.

In fact, top dealers get about a 50-50 miss about half of their vin specific leads come from the vehicle detail pages but the other half of their VIN-specific leads come from the search results pages. Now, lots of opportunities. By the way this dealer here they’re missing, they don’t have… There are no calls to action on their search results page. There’s no… The only thing I can do is click to view more information, there’s not a single call to action that leads to a conversion, all right.

Now, when I talk about lots of opportunities it’s not the same thing as having tons of pop-ups, pop unders, pops everywhere. It’s having home page lead forms, but it’s having some pop-ups, it’s having some drop-ins, it’s having some coupons.

Now I get this a lot, I get dealers saying to me, “Steve we don’t do pops-ups.” Okay really? Take a look at your site. Take a look at your site because my guess is that you do pop-ups. Do you have the visa card offer that drops in or makes its way to the front? Do you have a survey? There are some OEMs that force you to have a survey on your website. So you have a coupon slider or flashing, dancing sliders or using an exit widget. When I try to leave the site it changes the screen for me?

See, anything that interrupts the browsing session is the same as a pop-up to the consumer. So get over yourself. You do have pop-ups. You have lots of pop-ups and guess what? Those pop-ups convert. They help us hit that number two goal for our website. Once we attract somebody can we convert them.
How about chat? See chat drop-ins are also pop-ups to consumers, but again limited pop-ups are not a bad thing. A few rules. Never drop in immediately on the home page. Give me a few seconds. Give me seven seconds or whatever to take a look at your website. Assume it’s my first time here. Maybe I’m not ready to chat right away. It’s fine if I’m at your homepage ten seconds you want to drop in that’s great.

Also with chat never drop in on pages where you cannot help. If your chat is being managed in-house and it’s a group of sales BDC agents and you’ve got a chat dropping in service pages they’ve got to be ready to answer questions. They’ve got to be ready to schedule appointments and if they can schedule service appointments great.

And then also use what we call the two closes rule for chat. That means that after I’ve closed out your drop-down twice, you drop in your whatever from chat, after I close that twice, its time to move on. It’s time to just park that chat off to the side.

Now, chat’s evolved okay. I know some of you thinking,”Steve, I tried chat, it didn’t work.” I’ve had dealers tell me that. That’s like saying, “I tried having phones in the dealer ship and they didn’t work.” Okay this is not a chat processes classroom but suffice it to say that if you treat chats and your text messages today like mini phone calls and not like mini e-mails you’re going to be more successful.

Chat has completely evolved today. We’re going to look at what some people are doing with chat today that wasn’t even done just a few months ago. Chat is also not a tennis match okay. It’s not a hitting the ball on each other’s court back and forth, and it’s not just 411. Chat is not about just vomiting information on the prospect. Chat is about generating leads, but chat is also about generating sales.

Now, the most successful chat out there is outsource, that’s the biggest movement that we’ve seen. Dealers who were unsuccessful with chat in the past were probably unsuccessful because they were trying to manage it themselves. Now, for chat companies that offer dealer hosted chat, hybrid chat and outsourced chat. That hybrid means some of it is outsourced some of it is in-house in the dealership.

For chat companies there offer all for three most of their customers, sometimes over 70% of their customers use 100% outsourced chat. Now successful chats are becoming more about transactions and less about just lead generation. Lead generation is still a big focus of chats. But we’re actually seeing transactions. The transactions are happening on-line whether they are parts and service orders, deal generations. These are becoming the norm for great chat companies out there.