How User Experience Can Increase Leads For Your Dealership

From customer service to financial incentives, auto consumers expect the very best. Today, consumers’ interactions with car dealerships are no longer solely limited to in-store visits, either. Users are buying and researching cars online more than ever, and are looking for an experience that matches or even exceeds the in-person process. For dealerships looking to capitalize on this, the path to success is clear! Optimize user experience online and conversions resulting in very real sales are sure to follow. The importance of conversions cannot be understated, and a good user experience is what it takes to keep online consumers on the site and lead them towards that end goal.

The Importance Of Conversions

A conversion is any goal you might set on your website based on a user action. If the action is completed, a conversion is recorded. This could be anything from filling out a “Contact Us” form, to clicking on a “Directions” embed, from scheduling a test drive, to ordering parts online and everything in between. For dealerships, conversions bring the sale or potential of a sale to the customer, providing an opportunity to convert potential buyers into buyers, as well as offering valuable metrics as to which webpages are effectively targeting customers. Conversion and conversion metrics allow dealerships to work both harder and smarter.

User experience is, put simply, how users interact with sites, and how these interactions feel to the user as they are occurring. A good user experience isn’t something that’s in your face, but is effortless, whereas poor user experience will create tension around the users ability to accomplish their intended goals on the site. Everything should work just as it’s supposed to, providing the user a seamless online experience.

Why Users Leave

Bounce rate is the rate at which a user leaves a given webpage. It is possible that a high bounce rate means that what you’re doing is working, or alternatively, that you are not fulfilling the needs of users. The end result is that users might not be funneled towards conversions like you want them to be. This is where the lack of a strong user experience can become devastating to your dealership.

What negative traits could make a user leave a page? It doesn’t take much. Perhaps a page takes too long to load. Maybe the images are formatted poorly, calling into question the legitimacy of a dealership. Worse yet, maybe a user is at the end of the buyer’s journey and the link they want to click on is broken?

Taking care of issues like these are an expectation of providing a good user experience to users, and it only takes one unpleasant error to convince a user that their online efforts might be better off elsewhere.

User Experience Funnels Consumers Towards Conversions

It seems pretty obvious that providing a poor user experience could hurt your site’s ability to accumulate conversions as people don’t have much patience for a shoddy online experience. But how can optimized user experience concretely improve your dealership’s conversion rate? It all goes back to the conversion funnel. The idea is to build from awareness, to interest, then desire, and finally action (conversion). The moment a user enters your site, your goal is to “funnel” them towards a conversion.

To illustrate, proper SEO can increase awareness and get the user to your site. When the user arrives, they are greeted with an informative blog that generates interest. From their they find easy to read research pages that compare one brand versus another, confirming the users desire. Now finally, once that desire has been cemented, they can easily navigate the site, take an action and convert. Whether choosing to visit their vehicle of choice’s display page, scheduling a test drive, contacting the dealer, etc, the better the user experience, the faster and more likely the user takes the action and converts! And at any point of time, a breakdown in user experience could have disrupted this funnel.

It’s obvious that a better user experience is going to improve your company’s conversion rate! It’s time to take some steps towards that and start selling cars today. If you want to find out more about how Aronson Advertising can help improve your dealerships user experience, call us today!