In my last blog post, I discussed how to generate car sales leads by encouraging their consumers to take action on their website through interactive experiences. There are 3 primary reasons why this is so important: 1) Your dealership wants to capture a lead. And there’s no shame in that. 2) You wanna be able to provide your consumers with something they want or need (say, a coupon, an appraisal or assessment). And the last reason -- 3) You want to learn more about what your consumers are interested in so that you’re able to better assist them in the showroom. 

Boosted consumer interactions will (hopefully) allow you to collect lots of useful information on prospective car buyers in order to build individual consumer profiles. Consumer profiles can provide your dealers with a general overview of specific car buyers. Not only will you generally learn about their shopping preferences (if you ask about them, naturally), but you’ll learn more about where they are in their shopping journey. These are generally what I refer to as “positive interactions” — interactions that lead to specific data being collected from an interested party. 

Unfortunately, not all of the data you collect will consist of “positive interactions.” Sometimes you’ll discover that you have quite a number of visitors on your dealership website (through programs like Google Analytics, etc.), but that they aren’t finishing experiences or they’re just leaving your website. Although you often can’t get specific individual consumer information out of those “negative interactions,” those actions taken on your website can still be incredibly useful to both your marketing and, in some cases, your follow-up efforts with other individuals or groups of prospective customers. 

Regardless of whether or not the interactions on your dealership’s website are positive or negative, there are ways you can collect that data and use it to your advantage for your marketing and follow-up efforts. Here’s how:

Leveraging Information from Positive Interactions

As I just mentioned, I often refer to “positive interactions” as completed actions on a dealership’s website — like when a consumer gets the results of their trade appraisal, or they filled out an assessment in order to receive a coupon. Ultimately, your goal as an internet manager (or even a general manager) is to get as many of these “positive interactions” as possible. The more consumers engage with your website, the more likely they are to relinquish their information.

Now, depending on the questions answered (or even the type of experience), the consumer profiles you receive might contain unique information that can be leveraged for any and all future online or even in-store interactions. In fact, even if those positive interactions are repeated, and a consumer is going through various experiences on your website (e-price, trade appraisal, assessment, etc.), you’ll likely receive even more information on them. Additionally, those completed experiences are also a good indicator that a consumer has shown considerable interest in your dealership. If you notice a lot of activity from specific consumers, and you continue to get useful information (purchase intent, vehicle interest, income level, etc.), don’t hesitate to follow-up as soon as you can. Once you know that a consumer is interested (and you have an idea of what they’re interested in), you can initiate a conversation that pushes them further down the purchasing funnel.  

Negative Interactions are Just As Advantageous 

Now you might be asking yourself “What about the negative interactions? What about the consumers that leave my site before completing an experience?” Believe it or not, negative interactions can be just as valuable as the positive interactions. Assuming your dealership’s website uses a web analytics service like Google Analytics, those negative interactions can still be tracked and analyzed. If you’re not getting very many positive interactions from a particular experience on your website, you can go into a program like Google Analytics and examine the activity on a particular page or section of the website. Metrics like bounce rate, page acquisition and behavior flow, can provide insight into what the majority of your consumers are interested in.

If you find, in the behavior flow section, that consumers are dropping off at a section that asks for their e-mail, you might consider adding something more interesting to the experience; or eliminating a section of the experience. It mainly depends on how the consumer got to that point in the first place. Once you have this information, you can work with your provider or website designer to alter the experience to better suit consumer needs.

Depending on how it’s constructed and what experiences you’ve provided to consumers, your dealership website can be the ultimate treasure trove of consumer lead information for your dealership. The more information you have to work with, the easier it’ll be to plan out future marketing strategies and follow-up plans. 

Have you taken the time to observe the positive and negative interactions on your dealership’s website? What was it like?