As we continue to navigate through the obstacles of running a dealership during a pandemic, one thing is becoming increasingly clear; digital retail is becoming a permanent staple in automotive. This isn’t to say that soon, all of your customers will go through the car buying journey completely online, in fact, many of them will eventually abandon the online experience entirely. How you follow up with the customers that drop off of the digital experience is the critical part and will be the difference between closed deals and lost customers.
Here’s a common example of how a customer will engage with your website and then leave the site with no further interaction. Homer works as a carpenter all day and comes home exhausted to browse a few vehicles and mess with a car loan calculator. After 30 minutes of browsing, he gets distracted and watches the rest of the hockey game, closing his laptop and forgetting about where he was looking at cars. It wasn’t too long ago where you as a dealer wouldn’t be able to follow up with Homer about his digital retail experience. You’d be lucky if you even got an email address that you’d be able to contact, likely only making it to their spam folder.
Today, as a dealership you should have the tools to be able to re-engage Homer by sending an automated deal link through a partial lead capture. This way, Homer can continue exactly where he left off in the digital retail process and you can assist him along the way.
Homer isn’t the only type of customer who will bail on the digital process, many customers will prefer to complete most of the process in the showroom. So if a customer partially completes a form, luckily AVA’s partial lead capture tool will give you enough of their information for you to contact and schedule an appointment with them.
As we all know, vehicle shortages have been a problem across the globe. Now more than ever, getting trade-ins are incredibly important. If you’re able to give your customers good value on their trade-in vehicle, it’s a win-win. The customer gets great value for their old vehicle and the dealership increases its used car inventory.
Most of your customers will end up financing their vehicle, meaning they need to know where their credit stands. Most people will not want to take a hard hit to their credit to find out what their credit score is, and this is where AVA Credit comes in. Powered by Equifax, AVA Credit allows your customers to check their credit score in what’s called a “soft hit” credit check, meaning it won’t affect their credit. This will not only increase engagement but also give you their contact information for you to follow up with them.
Regardless of how your customer choose to interact with your dealership, you need to have resources for them at every stage of the process. Let your customers decide how much of their interactions should be digital and or in person and be there to help them. If you need help improving your trade-in leads and credit leads, Autocorp can help you, just book a demo!
