Achieving Objectives Series: Increasing Enquiries & Conversion Rate

Increasing the number of enquiries from your website is a fine art. There are some wider logical principals that can offer some quick wins, but a lot of the time you will find that delivering continual improvements relies on A/B testing different options. In addition, because your website is unique (as are your customer base), what works for someone else won’t necessarily work for you – so trial and error is the name of the game. 

In this month’s instalment of the “Achieving Objectives Series”, our digital marketing team have put their collective thinking hats on to recommend some of the key ways to start improving your site’s conversion rate.

A/B testing is where you simultaneously run two versions of a page and measure to see which converts better. Ideally you will have made one single change, so you can accurately determine what specifically is delivering the improvement. You can also consider multi-variant testing, where you have more than two versions running.

There are plenty of A/B testing tools out there of varying degrees of complexity, but we have to recommend Google’s own solution, Google Optimize. For sheer ease, this is the way to go! The tool lets you make changes without a designer or developer, making it very quick to implement, and you can easily measure via Google Analytics. Once you know what works, you can simply ask your designer to implement the change permanently and turn the experiment off.

CTA Buttons

Make sure that your website has the right colour and style buttons in the right places to maximise your conversion levels.

Simple Forms

Are your forms short enough and simple enough to minimise hassle and commitment from your customers?

Testimonials & Social Proof

Are you giving customers reasons to trust you and choose you over your competitors? Reviews and testimonials are key here.

The Strength of Your Copy

We may be easily distracted, but powerful copy still delivers leads – have you checked what works best?

Do you have the right contact methods prioritised – both for the needs of your customers, and those which convert best for your sales team? Phone calls are convenient and forms may be the easiest lead, but we find customers often respond positively to live chat – which is more demanding for your colleagues.

You will need to find a balance between maximising contact points (thus getting more leads) and being able to handle those leads in a timely and efficient manner.

You should always run a usability review on your website, making sure that target customers can navigate it easily and that they aren’t encountering anything that blocks them from enquiring.

You and your colleagues are NOT the target market here, so we would strongly advise that you look outside of your business. Ideally you would use a tool like UserTesting.com to get targeted strangers to interact with your site and feedback any issues, or you could do something as simple as ask friends and family for feedback.

We expect that as car dealers you are already hyper aware of your competitors in the market, but it bears saying again. Car buyers do a LOT of research and shopping around, so they will have a good idea if your pricing is higher than average, your reviews are lower or if any other block is preventing them from choosing you over your competitors.

Getting a hold on this and implementing a plan to improve it is going to be key if the rest of the conversion optimisation you do is going to deliver results.

It is vital that the marketing you are spending money on is focused on your objectives. To put this into perspective, if you are spending most of your budget on branding activity you will be unlikely to see that traffic turn into conversions straight away – whereas a campaign with a healthy level of targeted PPC could be expected to convert faster.

You’ll want to make sure that your marketing strategy is broad, but also that it is appropriate for your budgets and your business objectives. If you want to know more about delivering targeted traffic, check out our previous article.

Now that your ducks are in a row, here are some things on your dealer website that can help boost enquiries:

A personalisation solution like our A.I Powered AutoEdge can have huge impact on your conversions. By changing the content of your website based on your visitors needs you can make the website more relevant, and increase the likelihood of them converting.

Top tip: As a bonus, our lead profiling software can give your sales team extra information on the customer’s activity when they receive a lead, helping to increase the chance of a conversion to sale.

With customers having become significantly more prepared to buy a car online thanks to COVID and Lockdown, a clever motor trade eCommerce solution like AutoTransact can help you to capture customers right then and there, turning them into a highly qualified lead (a reservation) or a full-blown sale (full cash purchase or a finance application).

You should at the least be tipping your toes in the water with this technology at this point in the game. 

Offering the right contact options at the right time (we’re looking at you, live chat!) is a very effective way of driving enquiries – and an extension of that is to consider different types of forms at different touch points. As an example, our dealer sites can offer appointment booking forms with in-built functionality, or alternatively could check whether a customer’s MOT is due as part of a service booking process.

We hope that this article has helped you to get some more ideas for improving your website’s conversion levels.