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Is your auto dealer website design stuck in the 90s? Even some small design tweaks can bring major positive changes to your bottom line
10 years ago, buyers visited an average of five dealerships while car shopping. Now, they only drop in at 1.6 auto dealerships because they do most of their research and shopping online before they ever come to see you.
And in a 2015 survey by Accenture, 32 percent of participants said that dealer websites are “extremely influential” when they’re deciding to buy a car. Another survey from Adobe found that 38 percent of people will stop engaging with a website if the content/layout is unattractive.
Are you driving away one-third of your potential customers because your auto dealer website design is sub par? Just imagine the increase in profit that you could realize if you took some time to improve the visitor experience on your website — it’s pretty remarkable.
Not sure where to begin? Here are a few tips to help you get started with updating your auto dealer website design.
It’s time to modernize your auto dealer website design
You’re an expert in the auto industry and selling cars, but chances are, you didn’t go to school to learn to build websites. Hire a professional if your site needs a total overhaul and talk to them about these changes you’d like to make:
1. Invest in a responsive design – Back in the day, companies would have to create a mobile version of their website from scratch and a desktop version of the website from scratch. Now, there’s an option called responsive design where you only need to make one website and it will adjust itself automatically to fit the device it’s being viewed on. A responsive design creates a user-friendly viewing experience every single time and it makes your life a lot easier.
2. Prioritize quality photos – Potential customers are using your auto dealership website to shop in a virtual setting. This is your opportunity to make your vehicles look their very best so that the online shopper becomes an in-dealership buyer. The photos are going to bring paying customers into your dealership, so have a photographer on staff that can quickly and efficiently take stunning pictures and upload them onto your website. The photos should be high-resolution, able to be enlarged for close-ups, and there should be more than enough to show every square inch of each vehicle.
3. Add contact forms – You’re happy people are visiting your website, but you would obviously rather that they come to see you in person. Encourage them to get in touch with you by having a contact form on nearly every single page on your website (especially on the individual vehicle pages). If they see something they like, and for a fleeting moment think about reaching out to your dealership, a contact form should be readily accessible and easy to fill out immediately.
4. Include testimonials – Not everyone is going to visit your Yelp page, and there could be some amazing customer testimonials spread across the Internet that have the potential to help you make a sale. Collect your best testimonials and feature them prominently across your website. Testimonials help build trust (something that can be difficult to achieve in the auto industry) and be a real differentiating factor for customers that can be “tough sells.”
5. Less is more – A sleek, classy, user-friendly design is going to do much more for your website than cramming too many specials, vehicles, and general information onto a page. Vehicle pages should contain as much information as possible to help move a sale along, but the rest of the website should be easy to navigate and feature only key information.
How will you know if your new auto dealer website design is working?
With a good CRM and analytics tools, you’ll be able to track leads and sales over time that will help you attribute profit to your website. Analytics can also be helpful in pushing you to constantly make your website more effective — you will be able to see which pages have the highest bounce rates (where customers completely leave the website) and make tweaks that could improve page performance. Take a test drive of our dealership CRM today.
The rules of the road are always changing when it comes to website design, so stay on top of the latest usability developments and aim to constantly improve your website.
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