Throughout our Digital Retailing Best Practices series, we’ve been exploring the details that really matter when it comes to your digital merchandising and online retail experience. We kicked off the series discussing how using real vehicle pictures on your dealership website can boost conversation rates. In part two, we talked about the importance of implementing the right words and vehicle descriptions on your website. Part three explored the vitalness of using real prices and total price transparency.
To round out this four-part series, we’re diving into: Clear Calls to Action or CTAs…
Just like using real prices, the right words, and the right vehicle pictures, an effective and clear CTA is essential to an online sale. It helps buyers be more confident in interacting with you via your website, and thus helps push them through the sales funnel–increasing the likelihood of a closed sale.
Through our proprietary industry data monitoring, we’ve found that top performing websites include CTAs that direct customers to specialized pages, like a new vehicle specials page for example. Those CTAs could take the form of custom homepage buttons, specialized banners, a new navigation item, or even a powered widget.
Evidence has shown that the top performing sites, who deploy such CTAs, generate up to 3x the number of leads compared to bottom performing sites.
What’s more, our data further indicates that customers gravitate towards CTAs that also clearly offer financing or payment calculations in them. That also goes for CTAs that clearly offer a look at trade-in values. The same goes for the more traditional CTAs, so long as it is clear what’s going to happen once a customer clicks on it, such as “Get e-price” or “Get Today’s Price.”
Really, it’s all about the clarity of the action to be taken. Think of the online interaction as a face-to-face interaction. If you’re asking a customer to do something, or even just asking a question, and they aren’t sure what you’re asking, or are confused about what they need to do, chances are you’ve lost a sale.
In other words, clarity is king. As we’re fond of saying, and it’s worth repeating, the more real you make the digital experience, the more real the sale becomes.
Shift Digital can help define and implement the processes you need to deeply engage your customers in the sales process from the comfort of their homes. We help facilitate those processes through comprehensive and validated web technology, VDP creative delivery, and advanced support communications, including chat, phone, email, etc. We ensure your sales representatives employ best practices for lead follow up, increase alignment with OEM regulations, and help you grow your online sales, regardless of your digital platform.
For more information on how your dealership can effectively manage digital retailing/merchandising in today’s world, and for support implementing your own customized plan, contact your dedicated Shift Digital representative.
