Are you doing all you can to engage those shoppers that are ‘Ready To Buy’?

The stakes are high: sales are slipping, your competition is stiff, and today’s shoppers are the most savvy yet.

But there’s good news – there are a segment of shoppers that are 4x more likely to buy a car than other shoppers.  They’re called ‘Likely Buyers’ and you can target them.  

How to Spot a “Likely Buyer”

Roughly 29 percent of today’s shoppers are likely buyers.3 So, how do you tell them apart from other digital automotive shoppers? On average, we found they have:

• 43 percent more page views
• 90 percent more time on site
• 52 percent more inventory searches
• 62 percent more vehicle views

Likely Buyers leave their digital tracks in many places. A range of different signals determine their intent to buy, including; vehicle page views, brand site visits, models considered on dealer’s websites and car research sites including Edmunds, CarGurus, KBB, the OEM sites as well as dozens of auto-related ad network partners such as Amazon, Google and Facebook.  

While your shoppers are jumping around the web - do you track their actions and turn the data into valuable insights you can use to help target your most Likely Buyers? Take advantage of a data ecosystem that plugs into a variety of different sites and pulls together the information you need to determine which customers are most likely to convert.

Personalize Their Experience

What if you had access to the data and shopper insights, including the sales and services data from your own DMS, CDK website and your advertising activities/investment. You could apply those insights to tailor your digital experiences per shopper to grow your sales conversion rates.

Personalization is powerful: Amazon, Netflix, and other leading ecommerce dealers are already taking advantage. They deliver customized shopper experiences – because it works. Amazon’s recommendation engine generates 35 percent of the ecommerce front-runner’s revenue, and 75 percent of all Netflix users select movies based on recommendations - including me. 2

When a dealer personalizes their shoppers’ digital experience, we see significant increases in shopper engagement including 2 times more return visitors, they’re 53 percent more likely to view a VDP and 60 percent more likely to search your inventory.3

If you take it one step further and personalize deals to target likely buyers, we see an even more significant jump. When targeted, dealers saw a 90 percent lead submission rate increase from likely buyers for key lead conversion forms.3

Tip of the Personalization Iceberg

But the power of likely visitors doesn’t stop at personalization. Between known customers in your DMS/CRM, website visitors and likely buyers – you’ve got a powerful mix of customer information on your hands. Leveraging machine learning and tools like Facebook’s “look alike audience,” you can begin to optimize for potential customers who are likely buyers, and surface ads that include a strong call to action. When our dealers followed this process, they saw a 230 percent increase in website engagement, 121 percent higher click-through rate and a 71 percent lower cost-per-click.3

Likely buyers are already out there. But having the tools and strategy to find them, personalize their experience and drive conversions is not as easy to come by. If you don’t already have a process to capture and convert likely buyers, reach out to someone at CDK Global to learn more about how we can implement such a strategy in your dealership. 

1 Gigamon.com, 2017

2 Venturebeat.com, 2016

3 CDK Global Business Intelligence, 2016