There’s little to no denying that high funnel interactions are important for folks in the early stages of their shopping journey. In a nutshell, these interactions are often basic actions that consumers take on your dealership’s website like: getting your trade-in appraised, estimating your monthly car payment or simply researching the different services and incentives you’ll receive for making your purchase at a specific dealership.Think discovery questions customers are having to help guide them towards the right decision.

Because there are more folks on your website NOT ready to start paperwork, it’s safe to assume that the majority of those consumers aren’t ready to “start a deal” either.  At this point in time, they’re simply trying to figure out what it is they want regarding financing, preferred services, and naturally, from the vehicle they’re wanting to eventually purchase.

While it might be tempting to set your website up to showcase a “Schedule a Test Drive” CTA for first-time website visitors (in the hopes that they know what they want), you must understand that those types of CTAs can and will drive these types of consumers away. Why? Because most of your first-time visitors don’t know what they want. It might not be as harmful if this type of CTA pops up following a consumer completing another type of experience, but something to understand is that these types of decisions take time. Starting a deal requires a significant amount of commitment that they simply might not have yet.

Just because a consumer has already went through one early stage experience (the trade appraisal experience, for example) doesn’t mean they’re ready to immediately "start a deal." Quite the opposite. In fact, the majority of consumers visiting your site will eventually leave to conduct research on another dealership’s website. Many consumers aren’t committed to anything at that moment, so why wouldn’t they explore every option possible?

Even though it’s crazy tempting to do so, optimizing your website entirely for digital retailing (or for “starting your deal”) isn’t doing your dealership any favors. It completely ignores the majority — folks who are in the research phase of their shopping journey — and attempts to cater to the minuscule number of folks who are ready to buy. That is, if there are any “ready to buy” consumers who are willing to leverage the “make a deal” experiences on your website at all.

Here’s the thing: most of the consumers who eventually get to the “ready to buy” stages of their shopping journey got there because they’ve been consistently working with your dealership. It’s very rare that a consumer will waltz in one day without any working relationship and sign on the dotted line. Conversations need to be had and things need to be figured out. You can’t set your website up to only cater to bottom of funnel consumers without having catered to them as “research phase” consumers.

Ideally, you want to be with that consumer every step of the way — even when your consumers are conducting research on their own. You want to build that digital relationship and be there to offer guidance when they eventually need it. Bombarding them with those messages of “start a deal” gives consumers the impression that you don’t care about them. You only care about selling them something and moving to the next consumer.

As tempting as it is to wanna focus heavily on interactive experiences that help consumers start their deal (Ex: Schedule a Test Drive, Buy Now, etc.), those separate tool interactions are far more important than you’d think. One-off website interactions can actually help with your overall digital retailing efforts.

We have a tendency to overreact in this industry and the idea that people want to experience most of the buying process online has some dealers turning their whole website into a shopping cart. Slow down a bit and do some well rounded research. It will show that there are at least, if not more consumers browsing your site that aren’t even in the buy phase yet. What interactions are driving shoppers down the funnel?

Take a look at your website and ask yourself this: “What interactions on my site are actually driving consumers to start arranging their deal in the first place?” If you make it easier for consumers to begin interacting with your website, then it’ll be much easier to push them towards a full-fledged digital retailing action like “Schedule a Test Drive” or “Buy Now.”