Even if you don’t consider yourself a technology buff, you’ve surely noticed: getting around is different than it used to be. It’s not just a question of whether to take the bus or buy a car. It’s a question of whether to buy, lease, rent by hour, rent by day, co-own, or maybe rideshare. It’s no longer a question of stopping in at several dealerships and choosing one– anyone with a smartphone can research to their heart’s content anywhere anytime. Even the cars themselves are different, offering features that were once the stuff of science fiction.

So how does today’s dealership keep up with automotive technology, and even use it to thrive? It’s not as hard as you think.

First, here’s a rundown of the disruptive trends your dealership should know about:

• Connectivity. Cars today have sensors and safety cameras. They have navigation systems and infotainment centers. Connectivity solutions are becoming ever-more important to car shoppers, and the demand for auto apps and software is exploding.
• Online car shopping. It is possible to buy a car online, without ever entering a dealership. It is possible to lease a car without a middleman. Though most people still like to test drive a vehicle before buying, those who don’t want to no longer have to, and solutions for home-delivery test drives are becoming more prominent.
• Ride sharing. It is no longer necessary to own a car– or take the bus– to get around. Utilizing navigation technology, smartphones, and social media, ridesharing and ridesourcing services allow today’s travelers to hail cabs from their phones, carpool with local strangers, rent out their vehicles while not using them, or even co-own a car with a group of friends.
• More options, more flexibility. With all the transportation options available at the touch of a smartphone button, people will choose different modes for different activities instead of relying primarily on their personal vehicle, predicts this McKinsey report.
• City type market segmentation. The report also posits that as transportation choices proliferate, car shopping markets will become more closely tied to location type than to geographic area. A city dweller might face congestion, parking difficulties, and traffic, while rural living comes with longer distances and less public transportation. All of which means two cities on opposite ends of the globe might be more similar in terms of car buyer behavior than a rural and urban area in the same region.

Did that sound like a lot? The truth is that these technologies and changes share a common thread: a push for an easier, more convenient, more efficient, and more personalized shopping and driving experience. Drivers seek connectivity to improve the enjoyability, safety, and productivity of transportation. They shop online to eliminate hassle, work at their own pace, and make the experience relevant to their needs. They customize their transportation choices to increase convenience and affordability.  

So while some of the changes in the auto industry reduce the necessity of personal car ownership, the heart of the technology actually speaks to a different customer need, one that dealerships are in an ideal position to provide: an improved customer experience, on and off the road. Disruptive changes present new opportunities for dealerships to create a positive and customized car buying process and edge out the competition.

Here’s how your dealership can do what it takes to keep up with customers’ needs and bring them the positive experience they want:

1. Jump on the rideshare bandwagon. Dealerships should embrace people’s interest in multiple methods of transportation. Create targeted ad campaigns that highlight the benefits of car ownership, as well as ones that appeal to more rideshare-focused shoppers. Consider facilitating co-ownership programs. Service departments should take care to understand the maintenance needs of drivers who rent their vehicles to others or co-own. Make it clear your dealership is not one size fits all.
2. Focus on your customers’ specific mobility needs. Consider your dealership’s location type. Are you located in a more urban or a more rural location? What kinds of vehicles, services, and connectivity integrations are most useful to the population you serve? Make sure everyone on your staff understands the autotech options that will benefit your customers and can easily explain them to shoppers.
3. Have a strong digital presence. Even if they prefer to test-drive a physical car in your dealership, today’s customers expect to be able to start the shopping process online. They want to do research before coming into the dealerships and look for an easy, streamlined experience. Make sure your dealership websites are providing:
   • Up-to-date reviews from happy customers
   • Real-time data to show targeted content and offers to shoppers
   • Facilitated tools to understand trade in, financing, and pricing
   • Branded, easy to navigate, and visually appealing offers
   • Relevant, helpful content 
4. Streamline the digital and in-person experience. Ensure that the connection between online research and in-store shopping is fluid. Setting up appointments should be simple and straightforward, and sales teams should be prepared when internet leads come into the showroom with any information they provided online and all resources to help move their process along. Shoppers should feel that your website is as personalized as your store, and that your store takes into account everything already completed on your website. Remember, your shoppers are looking for efficiency and productivity. Give it to them

Use these new car solutions and their takeaways to your advantage– create the ultimate shopping experience online and in the showroom.

You spend a lot of time, effort, and money on lead generation, conversion optimization, and lead capture. Ads, bids from third-party sites, and of course, targeted, engaging content and offers on your site are all part of your strategy to get more leads and, ultimately, more conversions from your website.

But what happens after those leads finally convert? Do you follow up immediately, or do you let your newly converted lead’s coveted personal information simply evaporate into the ether?

Consider the following scenario:

Monday, 11:22 AM:

Jim wants to trade in his old car for a new one.

So he does what most people would do: he goes online and spends an hour looking up car specs, reading reviews, and comparing pricing. 

Once Jim has chosen his favorite makes and models, he googles dealerships in his area, and clicks on the one or two that are closest to his home or office. He begins browsing, when he notices an offer that interests him enough to complete the form before shutting his laptop.

Monday, 11:27 AM:

Five minutes later, Jim hears a notification beep on his phone and sees an obviously automated email from the dealership. He ignores it because he’s rushing to an appointment.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Here’s the first thing you have to know about follow-up to lead conversion: auto-responses are essentially useless. Why? Because they almost never answer shoppers’ questions and rarely stop them from seeking information– or a test drive– elsewhere. What’s worse, a 2010 US Sales Satisfaction Index reveals that 56% of dealership automated emails include basic errors in grammar, spelling, and punctuation. It’s hard to get a stranger’s attention. It’s harder when you appear sloppy and careless.

But anyway, back to Jim.

Tuesday, 9:30 AM:

22 hours after converting, Jim receives a phone call from one Julie, who says she’s calling from Motown Jeep. Jim has just sat down at his desk to multiple projects and messages, and has no clue what Julie is talking about. After a moment, he vaguely remembers that he filled out a form on some site earlier.

But he’s busy now and can’t speak to Julie. He hangs up.

What went wrong?

Julie did her job: she made the call. But she lost the deal. Why? Because she didn’t get around to calling Jim until 22 hours after he converted on the dealership website. 

Compare this lag to the follow-up time in your actual dealership. Would you tell a customer in your showroom to wait 22 hours for the next available salesperson? How about 12 hours? How about 4 hours?

The answer is no. Never.

Ten years ago, customers were visiting, on average, seven dealerships before actually buying a vehicle. Today, that number is more like two. If your team doesn’t speak with a customer on the phone within 10 minutes of their filling out some sort of interest form on your site, chances are that customer isn’t coming to your lot, ever.

It gets worse.

Research shows that the odds of calling to contact a lead decrease by over 10 times in the first hour. Waiting 30 minutes instead of five causes odds of contacting a lead to drop 100 times.

And yet, 2008 JD Power’s Internet Mystery Shopper Study found that only 68 percent of dealerships followed up with their website leads within three days, and the average response time for dealers who did follow up was 12.4 hours. 

Picture Jim sitting around in your dealership for over 12 hours. It’s laughable, right?

The bottom line is that you just can’t make a hot lead wait to speak to a person. It’s a needless waste of time and money to not immediately pick up the phone when someone comes to your site, expresses interest in buying one of your cars, and hands you their contact information.

And if you don’t reach them the first time? Try again. Data shows that reaching out to leads at least six times increases odds of reaching them by up to 90%.

This is another way your digital showroom needs to be an extension of your brick-and-mortar showroom, with the same standards, attention to detail, and excellence.

Which brings us to the next point. It’s not enough to make the call, and make it quickly and persistently. To maximize your lead nurture, you also have to prepare for the call.

Read the Lead

This might sound surprising after telling you to call your leads immediately, but there is such a thing as calling too fast.

Let’s say Julie notices Jim’s conversion right away, but decides to call him before taking a moment to read all the information in her CRM: not only his name and phone number, but also the number of sessions he spent on the site and pages he visited before converting, and any specific questions he asked.

She will likely ask him for information he has already provided, or offer him something he finds irrelevant. Think of it this way: have you ever called customer service with a problem and been passed along to four representatives, each of whom asks you for the same information, and then tries to get you to sign up for something you don’t want? Don’t do that to your converted leads.

Instead, take a minute– and it only takes an extra minute– to get a sense of who your new lead is. Are they further up the funnel or closer to buying? Have they expressed interest in a particular model? Do they have a specific question? Know this information. Then, when you make the call, you can offer value, avoid redundancy, and make a great impression.

So, next time a lead comes into your CRM, note it, read it, and make a call right away that is as tailored as your showroom’s in-person customer service. You’ll see happier customers– and make more sales.

If you’re like most dealerships, you work hard to achieve high conversion rates from your website. And rightfully so: a vast majority of car shoppers today use the internet to research their purchases and your dealership website is your best source of qualified leads. So you invest in creating high-quality, appealing offers, and use analytics to offer them to the right people at the right time.

But there’s no getting around it: no matter how appealing your offers are– no matter how personalized, clean, or relevant– some of your website visitors will not want to convert.  

Some of them won’t want to convert because they genuinely are not interested in your dealership– maybe they’re not shopping for cars at all and accidentally clicked onto your site. But many more are actually interested, but would prefer to browse at their own pace without giving you their information. Think of how many people like to walk into stores and look around without being approached by a salesperson. You might be this type of shopper yourself. People like that are not bad customers. After all, they’re checking out your website. They just need to be engaged in a different way.

So how do you appeal to these customers? How can you keep them engaged on your site, and encourage them to come back?

The answer is this: provide rich, high-quality content that asks for nothing in return.

The idea is that customers want to feel that you value them. This is why ice cream stores give free samples without requiring a sundae purchase, why optical shops often provide free repairs for glasses purchased from a competitor. They do this because a valued customer is, more often than not, a return customer.

Here are some examples of content you can provide to help commitment-wary customers feel valued and engage with your website:

• Comparisons of different models. Make it easy for customers to compare and contrast on their own time at their own pace. Anticipate their questions and answer them clearly and concisely. Help them decide what’s best for them without having to pick up the phone.

• Specific information about specific models. Explain and highlight the performance information, fuel economy, and features of the cars in your inventory. Allow website visitors to do extensive research before coming into your dealership. This is, after all, the way a lot of people like to shop these days.

• Customer reviews. More than ever, peer recommendations are important for today’s shoppers. They seek out testimonials, so make it easy for them to find them.

• Charts, photos, and videos. Present your information in accessible, appealing formats. People gravitate towards information that is presented visually, and who doesn’t love a video these days? 

The more quality content you provide, the more time visitors will spend on your site, the more pages they will visit each session, and the more they will turn to you when they have questions. Of course, shoppers can find a wealth of information on third-party sites or OEM pages. But if they can find it on your site, they won’t have to leave your site and forget all about you. And the truth is, they don’t want to have to go looking elsewhere because customers want simplicity. A site that can streamline the entire car shopping process for them is extremely valuable.

Your dealership will see several benefits from providing quality content on your website:

• Consideration. The longer shoppers stay on your site and engage with your content, the more they consider buying from you.

• Credibility boost. If your site provides an outstanding shopping experience, you can build your dealership’s credibility and establish trust with customers. This not only makes them more likely to buy from you– it also makes them more likely to recommend you to their friends. Remember how important recommendations are these days? You can get more of them with great content.

• Early lead capture. You want to engage customers when they are not ready to give you their information. But here’s a little secret: if you do engage them, they are more likely to hand over their details. If you can give early stage customers the value they want without asking for anything in return, chances are, you will earn their trust and they will convert faster than they would have without access to quality content.

Providing great content gives your dealership more ways to connect with a wider variety of shoppers. It lets people use your dealership website according to their shopping style and is likely to ultimately bring more people into your showroom.

You've probably heard by now that Google has released new rules that limit the size and type of popups for mobile sites. If the mere sound of this strikes fear into your heart, you're not alone. People everywhere are wondering: do the rules mean that every mobile site with a popup will be ranked lower in searches? Is optimizing my mobile site a lost cause? 

These questions are particularly urgent for dealerships, whose offers are crucial to lead capture. But not to worry – you can make these new requirements work for you and create the best engagement and conversion rates possible on your dealership website. 

First, the details: according to the new rules, Google will lower the search rankings of sites that have "take-over" popups– ones that fill the entire screen, block all content, or position themselves to look like the real webpage when they are not.  On the flipside, Google will award higher rankings to mobile sites that abide by their standards.

Google's stated goal is mobile friendly sites with well-positioned engagements and easily-dismissable popups. And the truth is, your visitors probably want the same. Now is a great time to update your content and offers to make sure they not only fit the new standards, but are also providing the highest quality engagement so you capture more of your site traffic. 

So how do you make sure your dealership website is ready for the change? First, check your mobile engagements to see if they fit the new requirements. If you work with a vendor, confirm with them that your site is in good shape. If your popups don't fit the qualifications, it's time to update them so your rankings remain high and customers can find your dealership website.

Not sure where to start? Here are some best practices we’ll be using at AutoLeadStar to create effective and mobile-friendly popups:

1. Make your offers fat-finger friendly. Your mobile popup fields should be big and easy to fill out. This is crucial for engaging mobile users, who need to be able to fill in information quickly on the go. But remember not to let the fields take over the entire page of content. Find the right balance.
2. Limit the number of fields in your offers. The fewer boxes to fill out, the more likely you'll get visitors to convert into leads.
3. Pay attention to size. Optimize the dimensions of your popups for mobile so your site visitors have a good experience – and so that you comply with the new Google requirements. One option is to position your popup as a banner along the top of your site or as a slider in the corner. Make sure to optimize your text size and font, too. If your readers have to zoom in to see, Google will no longer consider you mobile friendly.
4. Highlight the infamous "x" button. Make your popups easy to exit. If you don't have a clear "x" or "no thanks" button, you'll probably be marked as spam by Google. Don't try to lock your website visitors into a commitment to convert. They'll probably get annoyed and bounce – and once the new requirements kick in, they won't even see your site. 
5. Nix the add-ons. If you have applications like Flash on your mobile site, the time has come to remove them. These are not compatible with the new standards and will affect your ratings negatively. For dealerships that are using "click-to-calls" and live chat boxes, make sure users don't have to download anything funky to engage with your site.

So no need to freak out– Google hasn't banned popups. In fact, Google will probably reward sites with compliant mobile popups– so make sure yours are the best they can be.