Auto Dealer Monthly Magazine is the daily operations publication serving the retail automotive industry. This automotive publication serves dealer principals, officers and general managers with the latest best practices.
Issue link: http://autodealermonthly.epubxp.com/i/84037
industry expert / technology Here is a quick, easy-to-remember frame- work called MASTER, which is used by leading conversion experts to evaluate each page on your website from a conversion perspective: Motivation: Why would a consumer sub- mit a lead or call your dealership from this page? Are you providing a better price, a longer warranty or perhaps a gift card to come in for a test drive? Action: Is the action you want the con- sumer to take obvious and easy to find? If you want someone to click a button, use a color that's been shown to convert well, like green, and make sure it's above "the fold" of the page. Simplicity: Make your navigation and lead forms simple! Don't ask for any informa- tion you don't absolutely need in order to call or e-mail that consumer. You aren't going to sell them a car online, so get enough information to contact them and let them know why they should come visit you instead of your competition. Each ad- ditional field on a lead form will increase "The average dealer website gets roughly 4,000 unique visitors per month. If that site converts at two percent, that means it is generating only 80 leads per month." abandonment by 8 percent, so eliminate all but the necessary ones. Trust: Some consumers have negative perceptions of car dealers before coming to your site. Give consumers a reason to trust you and your site. Use testimonials all over your site wherever a consumer is making a decision about submitting a lead or calling your dealership. Any page on your site with a lead form on it should probably have testimonials too! Education: Never lose a lead because you didn't have the information necessary for a buying decision on that page. Show pricing, rebates, specs, photos, etc., in obvious placement on each relevant page. Risk Reduction: Consumers buy a new car about once a decade. It's the largest or second-largest purchase decision they will make during that period. Make sure they know about warranties, guarantees and service commitments. All of these things reduce the risk of them buying a car from your competitor. Once your dealership has set up Google Analytics to measure your site and has in- corporated the conversion best practices I've highlighted above, here are some other useful conversion tools: - Crazy Egg (www.crazyegg.com) is a company that offers very robust heat maps and scroll maps to show how much of each page your visitors are actually seeing. It is available at a very reasonable price point. - User Testing (www.usertesting.com) provides very affordable and fast usability testing on your site. You can hire a tester to quickly identify user pain points that are tripping up your visitors. If you spend $300 on 10 user tests, it will be the best $300 you spend online that month. - Visual Web Optimizer (www.visualwe- boptimizer.com) provides affordable, easy-to-implement A/B testing software that requires little to no coding. Digital marketing has evolved enormously since Auto Dealer Monthly's first issue. Dealers need to focus on website opti- mization to get the most out of their on- line budget. It's crazy to spend $20,000 a month to send traffic to a 2-percent con- version website when you could invest in website optimization and get twice the leads out of half the spend. 10