Today, automotive dealerships must go beyond a static template website to gain the competitive edge in engaging and converting their online website shoppers. There are thousands of potential buyers visiting the average dealership’s website every month, but only about 2% of visitors convert. The question becomes, “What is happening to the 98% of shoppers who are vanishing from your online store without a trace?”

What are you doing to increase your website’s conversion rate? Copying your competitor? Driving more website traffic? Leveraging Social Media? Surveying shoppers who don’t buy? Anything? All these things mean very little without online testing and in fact could hold you back from increasing your lead conversion. Using either a simple A/B split testing or the more complicated multivalent testing is the only answer. You must learn how your shoppers are behaving on your website and what is driving shoppers deeper into your website conversion funnel or bouncing them out of it. Leaving this up to your gut feeling of what will work is not the answer.

You must begin by creating an environment in which you can start to test elements of your website pages. You will be surprised to know that even small changes to a form from four required fields to only two can have over a 50% conversion increase or more in some instances. By creating a testing platform your website will incrementally improve over time instead of remaining at its same low conversion number. There is nothing else you can do except testing to achieve incremental gains in regard to on-page conversion.

Step one is to open a Google website optimization account, which, by the way, is free. Next is have your website developer create an exact page on your existing website except for changing one element which you want to test. Testing a lot of elements at once requires a huge amount of website traffic to get to the point to have a valid test completed and this is not conducive for the average automotive dealer. So unless your site is receiving more than 50k visitors per month stick to simple element testing.

Now you need to look for places where you think you can get the most impact. An example would be to test elements on your inventory pages which have a form for your website visitors. This is what is called a high impact page on your website where the shopper is at a critical stage in his or her decision making process. Learning how to increase your conversion by understanding what is making your shoppers click is crucial. Incredible gains can be made with such simple changes as the words on your form buttons. It is so funny to me that most website developers will put submit on the button yet a marketing person would never use that term in an ad or on a web button. When was the last time you wanted to “submit” to someone online?

This is a simple example, but I think it is important to realize that subtle changes can have a huge impact on your dealership’s bottom line. It all begins with setting up your testing platform and let the experiments begin. Just think about the impact you would have if you doubled or tripled the amount of leads you are generating from your website over the course of this year.

At ActivEngage we have begun testing different proactive invitation and static buttons even down to which colors work best. I will keep you posted on the results. This is a very exciting time so start testing today and develop your competitive edge.

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