By Noah Lee
When it comes to automotive internet marketing and digital retailing, your homepage does a lot of the heavy lifting. With more than half of your website visitors entering through the homepage—and even more (66%)1 eventually navigating there—your homepage plays a big role in the car buying process for many of your customers. And that means user experience matters.
Here are a few tips to give your customers a great homepage user experience that will guide them down the path to purchase through Accelerate My Deal—Dealer.com’s flexible buying experiences solution.
1. Make a Good First Impression
First impressions matter. Your customers form immediate opinions about your dealership and your digital retailing experience, just by viewing your homepage. So you don’t have long to make a good first impression. According to our research, the median time customers spend on the homepage is only about 18 seconds per website visit.2
Make the most of this time by giving your customers a homepage that has a professional look and feel, complete with high-resolution images, or even video. Make sure to highlight your digital retailing experience to car buyers prominently via your slideshow and in your “why buy messaging.”
The more you do to wow your visitors and highlight your enhanced buying process, the better chance you have to engage them with Accelerate My Deal, right as they begin the car buying journey. Why is this important? Customers who interact with Accelerate My Deal are five times more likely to submit a lead.3
One of the main purposes of your homepage is to get visitors where they want to go, quickly and easily. You want to make sure it is abundantly clear that you have Accelerate My Deal. Accelerate My Deal gives your customers a guided, intuitive experience that leads them through the purchase process, beginning with your homepage. If they can’t find where they’re going, or get lost among multiple calls to action, excessive photos, too much text, and the general noise of a busy website, it defeats the entire purpose.
In fact, according to our research, these types of overly busy homepages decrease engagement (<10%) with page content.4 Keep your site organized by removing unnecessary clutter on your homepage, consolidating information and navigation sections, and featuring your new online sales process utilizing Accelerate My Deal prominently.
3. Give Users a Consistent Experience
Accelerate My Deal gives car sales leads a personalized, guided online shopping experience that’s consistent across your website, Autotrader listings, and on Kelley Blue Book. The look and feel of your digital storefront experience should stay on-brand throughout your customers’ interactions, starting with your homepage. Multiple fonts, text sizes, colors, and inconsistent spacing come off as unprofessional and distract from the overall buying experience.
Thankfully, Dealer.com’s web platform makes it easy to ensure a consistent brand experience for your entire website. You can highlight Accelerate my Deal on multiple pages throughout your site including your homepage, search results page, vehicle details page, and even your finance page. Accelerate My Deal lets you improve efficiency on the backend too, by making the deal managing process easier than ever with its exclusive Deal View and VinSolutions integrations.
You and your customers deserve a better solution for facilitating flexible buying experiences. Accelerate My Deal, combined with a great homepage user experience, makes it easier for your customers to engage with your dealership and confidently begin the car buying process from anywhere. To learn more about how other dealers are using guided retail experiences to drive more qualified, higher converting leads, check out this case study.
A guide to using your Digital Storefront metrics to measure performance.
1Dealer.com Web Platform Google Analytics Data.
2Dealer.com Web Platform Google Analytics Data as reported in “Time Spent on Homepage – Device Comparison.”
3Comparison of visits with vs. without Accelerate My Deal activities, Dealer.com hosted websites. Sessions with Accelerate My Deal activity, on average, visit 1.5 more VDP, 5.5 more pages, and are 5 times more likely to submit a form than sessions that view a VDP but do not have any Accelerate My Deal activity. Data from Jun–Dec 31, 2020
4Dealer.com Web Platform Google Analytics Data as reported in “DDC Homepage Engagement Study.”