The biggest flaw in automotive marketing today is the abysmal conversion rate on most dealership web sites. The conversion rate is defined as the percentage of unique visitors that become leads. Despite vast sums of money being invested to drive traffic to dealership web sites, most web sites completely blow the opportunity because only one or two percent of the unique visitors become leads.
Why do so few visitors become leads? For a variety of reasons: due to limited inventory, most customers don’t find what they’re looking for, so they don’t request more information; most web sites are so confusing that there is not a clear path for visitors to follow—customers don’t know what you want them to do; once a customer sees the price of the vehicle they’re looking for they have all the info they need—there’s no compelling reason for them to become a lead. In fact, most customers visit dealership web sites just to check that dealership off their shopping list (Nope! They don’t have what I’m looking for!).
Alternately, our members enjoy conversion rates of 20 percent — 45 percent, every day, month after month. Imagine how much more traffic your dealership would have if 30 out of every 100 visitors to your web site became leads versus only 2 out of every 100 visitors becoming leads. It’s easy to double traffic when your leads multiply by 10x or 20x.
So what’s the secret? Simple. Ask visitors to provide their information before you give them what they want (exchange value for value). Of course, some people will be turned off and won’t provide you with their information. But nearly half of the people will, which is a huge win and results in a flood of traffic compared to the alternative.
You’ll know this is working for you when your web site generates more leads than you can keep up with.