In my previous article, I emphasized the fact that consumers visiting your dealership’s website for the first time likely wouldn’t be ready to buy from you — or rather — any dealership, for that matter. Consumers aren’t going to respond early on to buttons or calls-to-action that possess “buy now” language like “Start a deal” or even “Schedule a test drive.” You have to get them warmed up a bit and the personalize the messaging to low funnel CTA’s when the time is right.

Consumers who are currently in the research phase are going to be far more inclined to go to sections of your website and leverage tools that answer many of their preliminary questions. High funnel interactions or tools like “Appraise My Trade-In,” “Estimate My Payment,” or even “Get Pre-Approved” are common website experiences that your consumers in the research phase would be happy to leverage before they would even consider talking to someone within your dealership.

Although they may seem less valuable than a consumer structuring their deal, these “one-off interactions,” or individual interactive experiences, are actually quite important because they allow consumers the opportunity to move further down the purchasing funnel. T

The trick is having as many of these interactions as connected and personalized as possible. Once a consumer, for example, gets a trade estimate on their current vehicle, they’ll obviously want to move on to the next step. That, in essence, is what digital retailing was all about. Not just the part where they agree on a payment or sign the digital dotted line.

Instead of trying to immediately shove a consumer towards a binding agreement with a “Buy Now” button, optimize your website to take on a more top down approach to digital retailing.

To further optimize your dealership’s website for digital retailing, you’ll want to first make sure you have experiences or tools that cater to consumers who don’t know what they want just yet. They’re in the early, early stages of the research phase and are just now figuring about to proceed. Things like assessments, calculators, and other premium interactive content.

Once consumers engage with those tools, your website can then personalize CTAs (calls-to-action) that encourage consumers to go to the next step. For example:
 

After a consumer gets their trade-in appraisal, a CTA can pop up on the same (maybe the page after) to offer an opportunity to check for special offers (specifically for them) or schedule a test drive.

Try to avoid having consumers re-enter information whenever possible. If each individual interaction is optimized in a silo or not working together with your lower funnel tools, your conversions are going to suffer.