|
||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||
|
Use of this website signifies your agreement to the Terms of Use. |
||||||||||||||||
Top 5 Reasons Dealers Should use Live Chat Online
1. Enhance Customer Experience. Most car shoppers dread the experience of drudging to the local car dealership to shop for a vehicle. There is a preconceived notion that car buying is a difficult experience. The solution for shoppers to obtain basic information without having to interact face-to-face with a salesman is Internet shopping. That’s right. Car shopping has gone online and shoppers are using your website and the websites of your competitors to find information on their next new or used car. So what happens when your online shoppers have a question about a vehicle you have listed on your website?
With Automotive live chat on your website, it puts you where your customers are—allowing you to provide answers to their questions immediately. Time kills all deals so the faster you can respond to your potential customers’ questions and concerns, the better your chances are of converting these prospects into customers.
2. Increases Lead Opportunities. If you’re like most car dealers, driving traffic to your website is not the problem. Turning your website visitors into qualified leads is the problem. Despite the large amount of money dealers spend each year on lead generation campaigns, most car dealers are lucky if they are able to convert 2% of their website visitors into quality leads. When you have live chat software available to interact with visitors on your website, it creates an automatic lead generating system. Having a live chat service on your website often more than doubles the amount of car sales leads dealers receive online.
3. Boost sales. A dealer chat service also helps convert a higher amount of your leads and website visitors into sales. Using a live chat solution allows you to take a proactive approach to communicating with your potential customers. A live car chat creates more interaction between you and your dealership website visitors. An experienced dealer chat service provider, using proven processes, can convert six out of ten sales chats into leads. These leads typically close at a rate that is two to three times higher than leads dealers purchase from a third party Auto Sales leads provider.
4. Enhance car dealer marketing strategies. Automotive live chat is one of the most effective and valuable components of car dealer marketing. Live chat will help you convert more prospects to leads and sales. Rather than thinking of live chat support as an additional form of communication separate from other marketing initiatives, it’s important to work with a live chat service that helps you integrate offline marketing efforts with online marketing efforts.
5. Makes you stand out from your competition. Brick-and-mortar car dealerships have hours of operation. Salespeople at the physical locations go home. What happens to your potential customers during the hours when your business is not open? With a car chat service, you extend your business operating hours to 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Premium automotive live chat services proactively engage and welcome site visitors, any time day or night, when they visit your dealership website. Live chat operators help visitors find specific content they’re looking for on your website and provide sales, service and parts information. It’s also a great way to promote special sales events, provide post sales and service customer support. The bottom line is that a dealer chat service sets you apart from your competition because it improves the overall satisfaction of your website visitors by providing instant, professional and courteous support.
Success is in the Approach
Live car chat allows you to increase auto sales leads without spending more money on auto internet marketing in an effort to increase website traffic.
As an auto dealer, you’re probably spending thousands of dollars each year to drive traffic to your website. Smart dealers understand that you need to focus your sights on converting these valuable visitors into auto sales leads and increase vehicle sales. The average conversion rate for a car dealership website is less than two percent. The remaining 98% of website visitors that are not converted into leads represent a huge amount of missed sales opportunities. This is especially true when you consider that the leads generated from your own website tend to have the highest closing ratio and offers a much better return on investment, as compared to trying to convert third party leads into sales.
By offering live support chat, you’re changing your website from a static informational format to a conversational one.
Live support chat software:
A 24/7 live chat service provider uses an approach similar to the approach used at your dealership and improves visitor satisfaction while building loyalty with previous customers.
Effective live chat process:
After Sales Support
Having a live chat service on your website also allows you to provide superior customer service to your existing customers. It’s less expensive to sell to an existing customer than it is to find a new one. Providing quality customer support using state-of-the-art live chat car dealer software, along with a proven process, is the key to your success. Answering website visitor questions, while building a rapport with them, will allow you to offer your customers convenient and immediate support. A direct approach with live chat support services enables your dealership to exceed visitor expectations and provide a high level of quality support before and after the sale.
Are You Losing 98% of Your Website Traffic?
As the generation of car shoppers becomes more dependent on the Internet and advanced technology, you have to engage your website visitors as soon as they come to your website. If you don’t engage them, then you’re probably missing a large percentage of your visitors every day. If this strikes fear in your heart (and it should) then now is the time to do something about it. As we move into a Web 3.0 world it’s more important than ever to transform your one-sided communication website, where approximately 98% of your site visitors are clicking away, into an interactive auto sales lead generating and capturing machine.
If your website generates 3,000 site visitors per month and 98% of them are lost to you forever, you are literally losing 2,940 opportunities to make a sale each month.
3,000 sites visitors x 98% = 2,940 lost opportunities
By adding an interactive service, such as automotive live chat, your visitors can get the answers to their questions immediately, and it’s a proven way to capture auto sales leads. Even if you could only convert an additional 2% of these missed opportunities, you would be increasing your potential prospects by 58 leads per month.
2,940 originally lost opportunities x 2% = 58.8 potential new customers
If you could convert even twenty percent of these prospects into paying customers, what would this mean for your business? How much would it boost your bottom line to add another 11 customers per month to your sales numbers? Remember, this is on top of what your website is already doing for your sales numbers, and is in addition to your face-to-face sales.
Visitors to your website always have questions or need some kind of assistance. When you offer a live car chat service on your site, you’re able to help them immediately. If they have to wait until your business opens, or if the information they are looking for is too hard for them to find, or if they have to take an additional step such as writing an email, it delays your interaction. This delay may eliminate the possibility of ever interacting with and converting these customers. Live chat allows you to answer even the simplest of questions and jumpstarts your relationship with the visitor—allowing you to guide them through the sales process faster and easier.
Creating Positive Customer Experiences on Your Website
Your car dealership website is your virtual dealership. It’s your opportunity to broaden your reach of potential customers. No longer is the reach of your dealership limited to the neighborhoods that surround your brick-and-mortar office. You literally have the opportunity to reach customers all over the country. The primary way to win customers over is to create a positive customer experience every time they have contact with your business, which includes creating a high quality experience for visitors on your dealership website.
Visit and Compare
How do customers rate their experience on your website? The answer is they compare your website with the experiences they’ve had on other websites. Now is the time to ask yourself how your website measures up to other websites. It’s also important to note that it’s not just other dealership websites visitors are comparing your site to.
What Makes Your Site the Best Place on the Web
When you put yourself in your customer’s place, you can easily determine whether your website is creating a positive experience for visitors or is frustrating them and sending them away. Spend some time surfing your own website and ask yourself these questions:
Your Website is Your Dealership
Recent studies show that more than 80% of people shopping for a product go to the company’s website first. This means the first impression car shoppers have with your business in on your dealership website. In essence, your website is your dealership. It’s important to understand this because if your website doesn’t engage them on their first visit, you may never get another chance to modify the first impression they leave with.
When customers come to the physical dealership they are met by a friendly and welcoming salesperson that interacts with them. You need to have this same type of interaction with your website visitors, so you can make the right first impression the first time. The Internet has changed over the last few years and Internet shoppers are savvier than ever before. This requires your website to be savvy too, in order to stay ahead of your competition and meet your customer’s needs.
When used appropriately, live chat provides an avenue to interact with your potential customers and creates a positive experience for every visitor to your site. Statistics reveal that the purpose of the first visit to your site by car shoppers is to see what types of vehicles you have available, to find out prices, look for incentives, and to find the hours and address of your business. Live chat makes this search productive and beneficial.
The Numbers of Creating a High Quality Experience
In the end, creating a high quality experience for website visitors translates into customers for your dealership. In recent studies conducted by National Automobiles Dealers Association (NADA), statistics reveal that dealers are generating at least 50 leads per month from their dealership website. The same study shows that approximately 15% of these leads turn into sales. This calculates out to be approximately eight sales per month coming from the dealer’s website. With the average vehicle sale being $16,000, dealerships are generating approximately $1,536,000 per year in gross sales, solely from leads received online.
These figures represent dealer websites without automotive live chat.
So what happened when a live chat service was available?
Live chat increased the number of website visitors converted into quality leads by approximately 50%, which led to the dealer almost doubling its auto sales—all from their own website. Instead of selling $1,536,000 per year from online sales, the dealership could easily increase gross sales to $2,304,000 —all for the nominal cost of adding a live chat service to their website.
What could an additional $768,000 in gross sales mean for your dealership?
With a live car chat service, it’s not about spending more money to drive traffic to your website. It’s about effectively handling your website visitors to capture their information and convert them into auto sales leads. Once converted into a lead, it’s all about turning them into a sale. Live support chat allows you to accomplish each of these steps in a more effective and efficient manner.
How to Use Dealer Chat to Engage Your Visitors
Now that you see how live chat support can boost your website sales, you may wonder what the specific ways you can use the live chat software.
Here are some ideas to get you started.
What to Drive Away with
Live chat support helps you offer the same level of service to your virtual car dealership visitors that you do at your physical location. When you offer a high quality service such as this to your website visitors, you are also increasing the number of vehicle shoppers that visit your physical location. Using dealer chat engages your website visitors so you can capture valuable information about who they are and what their needs are. With this information, you can then convert them into customers—into sales for your business—whether it’s vehicle, service, or parts sales. Stop losing 98% of your website visitors because you don’t have a service that engages every visitor. Utilize a live car chat service to capture a larger percent of your website visitors, turn these into sales opportunities, and boost your bottom line.
Use live chat to:
Automotive live chat support software provides a medium to boost sales—and that is something you can drive away with, all the way to the bank.
Why Dealers Use Dealer Automotive Live Chat to Increase Auto Sales Leads
Your customers are living in
and your business is operating in a Web 3.0 world. Creating the best
customer service experience possible can mean the difference between
taking your car dealership to the next level of success or leading it
down the road to failure. If you’re not using automotive live chat
software as part of you automotive Internet marketing efforts, then
you’re not engaging visitors to your website as much as you could
be. Worse than your lack of engagement is the fact that you’re probably
losing up to 98% of your visitors every day because you’re not capturing
the car leads of the visitors to your site.
Adding dealer chat software
to your website means you’re accomplishing two goals with one interactive
method. First, it gives you the ability to answer visitor questions
immediately. SiteLive support chat provides immediate answers to your
website visitors’ questions. This instant form of gratification helps
you to generate automotive leads you can move along to converting into
a sale at a faster rate.
Second, automotive live chat
software offers a proven system to capture auto sales leads your sales
force then has the opportunity to convert into sales. After the car
chat operator answers the questions the visitor has, the next easy and
logical step is for the operator to schedule a test drive of the vehicle.
With a pre-scheduled test drive appointment, it allows you to bring
your customer service to the next level because the vehicle can be prepared,
ready and waiting for the customer when they arrive at the physical
dealership location.
Generating a lead from dealer websites always has a higher quality and better chance of converting into a sale because visitors to your website are interested in what you are selling. Implementing an automotive lead generation tool such as Car Chat 24 allows you to capture the high quality lead without spending a lot of extra money.
Dealer marketing tends to focus marketing efforts on driving traffic to its physical lot. The executives or owners of a dealership tend to believe that sales of tangible items such as cars require face-to-face interaction. Considering that consumers do not make a sock purchase without conducting extensive online research, car dealers that think this way are missing out on a high volume of business online. According to recent studies, when a consumer is shopping for a product, their first stop is the company’s website.
What does this mean for dealer websites? It means the first impression your website makes on its visitors is equivalent to the first impression a potential buyer receives when they walk onto your physical car lot. You can create a lasting and positive first impression on your website visitors by offering stellar customer service. An interactive automotive marketing tool such as Car Chat 24 allows you to make a great first impression.
Then there are those car dealers that have a mentality that all they need to do to create an online presence is to throw up a static website—essentially an electronic brochure. Car dealers with these dealer websites do not know and understand their audience or the automotive marketing environment. Today’s consumer is a savvier shopper than ever before. They do not want to buy products from a company that talks at them rather than interacts with them.
The third group of dealer websites represents those dealers that understand the landscape of automotive Internet marketing. They understand that they must integrate their online marketing efforts with their offline tactics. These dealer websites are successful in attracting a huge volume of traffic and in providing information visitors find helpful, useful and relevant to them. There is, however, one problem. No matter how much traffic you get to your site, you’re only going to make money if your website converts the leads you capture into sales. If part of your dealer services isn’t collecting information on your visitors and offering Site Live interaction with these visitors, then your automotive Internet marketing is not as effective as it could and should be.
It’s a Soft-sell Approach that Works
One of the easiest ways to gathering qualified automotive leads is directly from your own website. The intention of adding an interactive approach to your website is not to sell to visitors right away, but rather your goal is to get them on your list. A car chat provides an opportunity to capture car leads information right away. This opens up the door to converting these leads into customers.
Even with massive amounts of traffic coming to your dealer website on a daily basis, if you’re missing the opportunity to capture, nurture and convert these visitors into customers, then you’re wasting opportunity after opportunity. It’s always more cost effective and easier to convert a qualified lead that you generate from your own website than it is to try to convert leads from a third party. Third party leads are more expensive and tend to be of low quality, which translates into a poor rate of return on your investment.
Visitors to your website are your target audience. They wouldn’t be there if they weren’t interested in your autos, auto services and parts. Use this opportunity to capture car sales leads by engaging visitors with dealer chat software. Automotive software provides your dealership with the platform for creating conversations with your website visitors—whether they are interested in buying a new automobile or servicing one they already own.
Don’t waste your time or your money buying high volume car sales leads when you can generate high quality leads from your own website using a low-cost Contact At Once live chat software. Third party car leads have a lower closing rate than self-generated leads because these consumers did not opt-in to receive information from you. This means they may or may not have an interest in what you have to offer. It’s a little like playing roulette. It may or may not pay off, but nine times out of ten, using third party leads ends up being a waste of your time and your money. To buy a lead list and spend money marketing to the leads to find out that nobody bites simply leaves you disappointed and with less money in your pocket.
Why Chat Sales Leads are Better than Form Leads on Your Dealer Website
Set aside your dealership hat for a moment and think about the last time you were shopping or searching for something online. Let’s say you were shopping for a book and you went to an online bookstore. You find the book you’re looking for, but when you read the description, you’re confused and have a question. It’s after business hours so you can’t pick up the phone and ask the question. They have a form you can complete, but you don’t want to wait for a response. In fact, if you get the response you’re looking for; you’re ready to buy right now. That’s when you see it. It is a live chat service, where you can chat online with a representative from the online bookstore, obtain an answer to your question and they even offer to help you place your order—all in a few minutes time.
This may have had a different outcome without the live chat option. You probably would have clicked away from the website, found another online bookstore selling the book, located the answer to your question and bought the book. The original bookstore wouldn’t have been the wiser because they would have no way of knowing you were even shopping on their site.
A book is a small ticket item, so it’s even more important to provide superior service, something automotive live chat can offer your auto sales leads, when they’re searching for bigger ticket items such as vehicles.
How Automotive Live Chat Software Changes the Landscape
There are several advantages to using automotive live chat as part of your dealer marketing. The three main benefits include enhancing your customer experiences, increasing the amount of high quality car leads generated and boosting sales.
Enhances customer experiences
Nothing is more frustrating to your website visitors than when they land on your website and have a question, but can’t find the answer. By implementing a Contact At Once live support chat on your website, you’re interacting with potential customers, solving their problem and capturing information on them simultaneously and immediately. Some profound sales person said, “Time kills all deals.” When you can immediately respond to online visitors, you have a much better chance of converting car leads into car sales.
Automotive live chat software can also enhance the experience of your existing customers that are coming to your website to schedule service appointments or purchase parts for their vehicles. When you provide quality customer service to existing customers, you’re saving your dealership money because it’s less expensive to sell to an existing customer than it is to find a new one. When you offer cutting-edge dealer chat software, you’re able to answer questions, provide immediate support and build a rapport with your visitors—something a static website that lacks automotive live chat access doesn’t accomplish. The interaction between your dealership and your customers provided by live chat support services exceeds visitor expectations, provides high quality service to help you make sales and ensures repeat business.
Increases Amount of Quality Leads
When it comes down to lead conversion, quality is much more important than quantity. Dealerships spend a ton of money on automotive marketing every year. The lucky ones turn their dealer marketing efforts into qualified leads about 2% of the time. By adding live chat software to dealer automotive Internet marketing, it more than doubles the amount of car sales leads. The more quality leads you have at your disposal, the increased chance you have to convert these leads into paying customers. Not only does it help you generate sales on the front end, but it can also help to create secondary finance leads for your internal finance department to provide the financing for the purchase of the vehicle. Automotive software can generate front end and backend leads for your business. The more you engage and connect with a client, the better chance you have of turning this into a repeat customer and a customer that’s going to send you referrals. Did you know that you have a 107% better chance of converting a referral into a client than a cold call or a prospect?
Increases Sales
Dealer chat software also helps
you to convert a higher amount of your leads and website visitors into
customers—into sales. Studies show that the primary reason a car shopper
goes to your dealer website is to view vehicle inventory, determine
pricing and find out where you’re located. Automotive live chat helps
car shoppers turn their visit to your website into a productive search
because your live chat operator can act as the guide that leads them
to the answers to their questions. A live chat service is equivalent
to having a GPS system in a car because the live chat service walks
the customer step-by-step to the answers they are searching to obtain
on your website.
Using a live chat solution
allows you to take a more proactive approach to communicating with your
potential customers by creating more interaction between you and your
customers. Proven chat process services can convert six out of ten sales
chats into car sales leads. These six leads typically become closed
business at a rate that is two to three times higher than when dealerships
purchase or obtain automotive leads from a third party.
The
proof of how effective a live chat service can be is all in the sales
numbers. According to the National Automobiles Dealers Association
(NADA), dealer websites generate a minimum of 50 auto sales leads per
month and approximately 15% of these automotive leads convert into sales.
When a live chat service became a part of the dealer websites, it increased
the number of the auto sales leads generated from the website by 50%.
These figures reflect auto sales leads and conversions from the dealer
website alone—without the added expense of buying third party leads.
This proves it is more cost effective and you have the ability to generate
higher quality leads from your own website than from outside lead sources.
Turns Your Automotive Internet
Marketing Way Up
Car Chat 24 is one of the most
cost and time effective ways to add value to your website visitors.
When prospects find value in your online efforts, they equate this to
a high value in your products and services. Everybody wants to work
with the best car dealership to find the perfect automobile for him
or her. Consumers demand high quality service and adding automotive
software provides a valuable form of communication between you and them
that integrates offline marketing efforts with your online efforts.
Makes You the Leader of the Pack
With the large number of dealer websites customers have to choose from, why should they turn to your website? With automotive live chat, your business continues operating long after your competition closes their brick-and-mortar car dealerships and their salespeople go home for the night. Car Chat 24 turns your dealership into a 24/7 business that engages and welcomes site visitors, helps visitors find specific information and expands your sales and service efforts to outsell and outperform your competition. Live chats also help to promote special sales events and provide post sales support. This service gives you a competitive advantage that has your dealership surpassing your competition long after they’ve closed up shop for the night.
Customers that purchase vehicles from you are still your customers. Remember, it’s much less expensive to turn an existing customer into a repeat customer than it is to find a new one. Automotive lead generation doesn’t stop contributing to your sales after the sale of the car, but can also work to garner repeat business. One option for interacting with your existing customers is to setup your car chat as a means to schedule a service appointment for their vehicle. This can be a money and timesaving tool for your dealership and for your customers. When you provide quality service pre- and post-sale, you’re gathering quality leads without spending more money, and then you’re nurturing these leads without any added expense. These types of leads and relationships are much more valuable than cold leads you obtain from sources outside of your business.
Build Your Own List to Achieve the Best Results
It’s so important that it’s worth repeating. Many dealers worry about the quantity of leads they have rather than the quality. Statements such as, “Our email list is small. There isn’t enough there to achieve the results we want,” or “We’d rather spend money on buying a list of leads than waiting to capture enough of our own,” are often heard.
Marketing professionals all over the world cringe at these statements because it is always better to focus your marketing efforts on gathering quality leads than it is to buy leads or worry about the quantity of subscribers you have on your mailing list. Think about it logically. Do you have a better chance of making a sale to someone that chats with one of your representatives online and hands over their name and email address or with a name and email address you bought from a list broker? The answer is you double your chances of making a sale to a qualified lead you generate from your own website than a lead from a list--every time.
Focus on Building a Quality List
Capturing quality auto sales leads and building a quality email list takes time, but you can speed up the process by adding automotive software to your website. The time and small investment required to add Car Chat helps to build your mailing list because it creates a high quality list that provides the most benefits with the least amount of risk.
3 Steps to Attract More Qualified Leads with Car Chat 24
Make ContactAtOnce between you and your visitors readily available. Announce the live chat service to your visitors on every page of your website, in your email messages, on the transactional pages of your website (forms pages) and on the invoices given to customers by your service and parts departments.
When you use your automotive live chat as a personal automobile shopper, it allows you to guide the online car shoppers to find the new and used vehicles they’re looking for based on the inventory you have. Not only does this allow you to gather high quality leads—consumers looking for the products you have to offer—but it also presents an opportunity to provide superior customer service to help car shoppers make educated decisions on the purchase of their next auto.
You can also put your automotive live chat and dealer services on autopilot. When visitors come to your website, you can set your live chat service up to automatically greet the visitor to let them know that a real, live person is available to assist them with their needs. It’s similar to inviting a guest into your home. When they knock on your door, do you open the door and greet them with a warm welcome or do you leave them standing on the porch?
Make your online visitors feel welcome by giving them the royal treatment. Use your Site Live service to offer exclusive online savings and deals. It’s a great way to gather information on the visitors to your site and it’s a great way to reengage existing customers that are visiting your site as well.
Reengage old customers. When you make a sale, your automotive marketing does not end there. You can also use a live chat service to reengage customers that haven’t conducted business with you recently. You can create a special campaign targeting previous customers to get them to come back and do business with you again. Send them a special offer on the purchase of a new vehicle or for a service on their existing vehicle. Encourage them to find out more by visiting your website and utilizing your online Car Chat 24 to schedule an appointment for service or get an answer to their question. Surveys are another great way to garner the attention of, obtain a response from and drive old customers back to dealer websites.
Existing customers that purchased a vehicle from you in the past, but are not in the market to buy another vehicle, are probably in the market to maintain and purchase parts for their existing vehicle. This is where CarChat24 can come in handy as well. When your live chat operator services extend to assisting do-it-yourself customers to find and order a part they need to repair or perform maintenance on their vehicle, in a few minutes time, you have reengaged the customer, made a sale and provided such a high level of customer service that you have probably ensured a customer for life.
You can use these three techniques to start building a higher quality lead list—organically and without having to turn to a third party to buy auto sales leads of poor quality. Quality beats quantity because it creates better conversion rates when you’re communicating with visitors to your website that have an interest in what you have to offer.
Why Car
Dealer Websites and Live Chat Support Go Hand in Hand
While purchasing a vehicle
is a tangible purchase, it tends to be a very emotional decision for
customers to make. Site Live chat services help connect your sales people
with customers—allowing the consumers to connect emotionally with
the person behind the sale. When a visitor lands on your website, they
are your target market, which means they are a high quality lead for
your business. It’s a prime opportunity for you to capture this lead
and then work toward converting it into a sale, which is business and
money for your dealership. Dealer chat software works to engage visitors
to your website right way. It allows you to capture valuable information
about the visitor and their needs so you can then funnel them into the
correct line of business—a vehicle purchase, to schedule a service
appointment or buy a part.
The bottom line is car dealerships
use live car chat to stop losing 98% of their website visitors by capturing
a higher quality lead and to boost sales.
You can use live chat for a variety of reasons:
In the end, automotive live chat software is an automotive lead generation, customer service and sales tool all wrapped up into one cost-effective automotive Internet marketing tactic.
