Leads have ruled dealership conversations for a very long time, and rightfully so – an opportunity to engage with a customer should never be taken for granted. That being said, there is such a thing as a bad lead, and bad leads cost your dealership time, money and morale.
There are a number of reasons that bad leads happen:
- Customers are fishing for the best price from multiple dealerships
- Customers don’t want to share their contact information with you for fear of being hounded or added to another email list
- Customer expectations are out of line, maybe they are submitting a lowball offer or they’re a subprime lead on a vehicle that won’t qualify
- Calls to action are poorly timed or don’t align with customer expectations
- Poor quality traffic like bots or bad audience targeting from your campaigns
Generating more leads is great and it looks good for your stats but filtering through bad leads is discouraging and time consuming for your BDC or Sales Team. Luckily, there are a few things within your control that can improve the quality of your leads, and save your team time.
Deliver a Better Website Experience
Give customers the information they need to make a buying decision on your website.
Don’t hide the information behind a lead gate, make it accessible and be up front with your website visitors. Think of your website experience as Garbage Out, Garbage In – put out high quality information for your customers, get high quality leads. If you hide pertinent information from your customers behind a lead gate and make them jump through hoops to find out their trade value or payment information then you’ve wasted their time and the lead you get from those customers will likely end up wasting your team’s time.
Delivering a high quality customer experience on your website means that the people who take the time to contact you will be well informed and more likely to schedule an appointment or make a purchase.
A few tips to optimize your website for better quality leads:
- Work with your website provider to make sure that all of your department and vehicle details pages contain quality information:
Answer commonly asked questions like
- What to expect
- Where to go when they get to your dealership
- How to schedule an appointment
- Include your product and service pricing if possible
- Offer and update specials
- Remove Gimmicky and Overwhelming Calls to Action:
- We all know there’s no such thing as a special internet price
- Don’t offer a test drive scheduler if it just leads to a generic website form
- Don’t offer an online trade value if you’re going to tell the customer to come down to the dealership to get their value
- Give your customers what they want! Remove lead gates so that customers don’t feel compelled to give you fake contact info to get the information they need on a vehicle, product or service. John Doe just wanted to know what his payments would be on that 2022 truck.
Pre-Qualify Leads
Whether you’re using an onsite form, a Facebook lead ad or on a 3rd party site, using a qualifying question helps to weed out bot leads and accidental submission clicks (especially on pre-filled forms from mobile). Use a simple but relevant question to slow down submission clicks, and eliminate bot submissions while potentially equipping your BDC or Sales team with more relevant customer information.
Personalize & Time Your Offers
Personalization has been a heavy topic for dealership websites the last few years but it’s often left up to your website provider and will sometimes only happen on the homepage of your site. Customizing your customer’s experience on your website is easier than ever, and will deliver better quality leads through improved digital interactions.
Make use of smart tools like chat software that remembers your customers or gives a customer time to get oriented on your site before engaging; or a digital retailing tool that saves the vehicles a customer was considering on their last visit.
Smart Offer
sMedia’s recently revamped Smart Offer tool can let you customize offers to your website visitors based on the pages they visit, the vehicles they’re looking at, the time they’ve spent on a page, their behavior on the site and even where they came from before they landed on your website. You could create an offer specific to customers who are visiting from an email campaign, or who clicked on your Facebook ad, you could even create an offer for customers shopping for out of stock inventory. Smart Offer allows you to engage with customers in a personalized way without creating friction in their shopping experience.
In most cases, a customer’s experience with your dealership starts before they set foot on your lot. By providing positive experience before the lead, a timely and relevant offer when a customer is ready to reach out will help you generate better quality leads for your team.
