Your Website

As i discussed in the last post more and more consumers are going online to get information and prices on cars. So what does this mean for auto dealers, well it means you need to have a strong online presence so potential customers can find your site. In my opinion there are 3 major objectives to using your website as a selling tool. Number one consumers need to be able to find your site, number 2 your site needs to be user friendly, and number 3 your site needs to have good content. All three of these objectives are equally important and should not be over looked. Think about it you could have the most customer friendly site in the world with all the content anybody could want to read but if potential customers cant find your website it does you no good. On the same token you can have a site that's easy to find and has great content but if it is to hard for potential customers to navigate they will leave your site frustrated and search for a car somewhere else.

In the rest of this post we will discuss how to make objective number 2 and 3 strong points of your site, objective number 1 is a long process and will be the entire body of my next post. Lets start with making your site user friendly. The first thing you need to do is define your target market, who are you selling cars t0? If you are selling Cadillac your age group of buyers is probably around ages 40 and up, if your selling Mitsubishi your age group of buyers may be from ages 16-35. Why is it important to define the age group of people using your site to make decisions in making your website user friendly you may ask. Well the reason is younger people tend to be more computer savvy than older people, so if you are expecting mostly people ages 16 - 35 to be visiting your site you will be able to add more features to the navigation than you would be able to if you were expecting people 40 and older to be using your site. When catering to an older audience try to avoid using features like drop down menus where consumers will have to know to open something up to see all there options. Do your best to give the consumers as much information on a page without making it cluttered so that consumers don,t have to click through a lot of pages. And where there are links to other pages of your website, make it very clear that's where they need to click to continue.

Once you have your navigation is set up and your site is running you need to get a group of people together to test your site that had no part in building it, grab a couple of guys from your service department, a couple of sales people, and some potential customers if possible and ask them to find certain information on your site. It doesn't matter what you ask them to find pick a few products or certain information about a car. Then watch them try to find it, if they can easily find the information then your navigation is user friendly, if you notice people are unable to quickly find the information you asked them to find your navigation may need some work. There is also a great piece of software out there that is easy to install on your website and is affordable that allows you to monitor and interact with people on you site. Monitoring people on your site is priceless for seeing where there are problems with your navigation, when you notice multiple customers getting to a certain page and then leaving you can assume that they are not finding what they are looking for and that is what is causing them to leave. The software i mentioned is called chat and you can get it at www.liveperson.net it costs $99.00 a month. We will discuss this software more when we discuss your sites content.

How do you make sure your site has good content? Content is something that will always be changing on your site as you add new products, or your running some sort of promotions. Your website should be used as a selling tool you want to have any promotions, sales, or programs you are offering listed and explained on your home page, this should be information that separates you from your competition. Also on your home page you should have a mission statement of what your dealership stands for. Your home page will be the page that changes the most and is your most important page because most visitors to your site will start on that page. As far as content for the rest of your site it is important that you have as much information about your products listed as possible. People search websites to find all the details and features of a product before they buy so you need to make sure you have all the details regarding you products listed and make sure to explain why all the features of your products are valuable. Some of the most important content your page needs to have is ways to contact your dealership, your phone number and email address should be prominently displayed and once again i would advise everybody to add a live chat feature to there site. Having live chat allows customers to immediately ask someone at your company questions without ever leaving there computer or your website. The live chat feature will stop many customers from leaving your website when they struggle to find information, instead of leaving they ask the sales person manning your live chat and often times those conversations turn into sales. Also if you notice customers using your live chat asking you the same questions its a sign that whatever they are asking is something that needs to be added to your content. Please leave comments on other ways auto dealers can make there websites more productive.