One size doesn’t fit all when it comes to the vehicles people drive so why should your dealership website experience be that way?
We’re in the age of the consumer; today’s shoppers expect more from their website experience than ever before. They don’t just want to see the same rotating promotional slides, or new vehicles on your lot; they want to see what you can offer them as individuals. Essentially, they demand a personalized experience. All of today’s leading consumer sites leverage this powerful technology, and it’s time for the auto industry to catch up.
A Personalized Car Shopping Experience at Play
So how does this apply to vehicle shopping? Let’s say you have a shopper, Caroline, on your website who looked at a Nissan Altima one morning. She continues her research on Kelley Blue Book, and while there, ends up reading reviews and views recent awards bestowed upon the Nissan Rogue. Caroline puts down her phone and heads out to lunch or her next meeting. Later in the evening, she picks up her search again by returning to your dealership website on her laptop. This is the moment when you should deliver a personalized shopping experience, one that remembers where Caroline left off, and displays relevant inventory and incentives information to her.
There are three ways you could be tailoring your website experience for shoppers like Caroline:
1. Recommend relevant vehicles in your inventory based on what shoppers were interested in. Let technology ensure you match the right car to the right person, rather than leaving it all to chance.
2. Use technology to automatically render personalized promotional assets. Shoppers only look at the first few slides on your website, or may deep link to a filtered listing page. Ensure you are showing specials that are highly tailored to their interests, like, for example, a lease incentive on that Rogue. Get the right deals in front of the right shoppers to increase the likelihood of purchase.
3. Recommend next steps or varying calls to action based on what we know about shoppers. For example, did they look at a lease incentive before? On the vehicle details page, prompt them to calculate a lease payment. Or, have shoppers already calculated payments and a trade-in? Suggest they fill out a finance application. Take the guess work out of the process and help guide your shoppers towards the sale.
Personalizing your consumers’ digital experience does more than just steer buyers to the vehicles and content in which they are most interested; it produces big results. Experience Optimization generally results in click through rates two to two and a half times higher on personalized content than on non-personalized content.1
It’s time to make your website a customized virtual showroom to provide an individually-tailored experience to every one of your shoppers. It’s time to make digital car shopping personal.
Katie Wilkins is the director of product management at Dealer.com
1 Dealer.com Homepage Personalization Test, August 2017