In the business of selling cars, no buyer wants to come up against barriers – whether those are barriers of communication, barriers of information or barriers of time and expense – so it’s of paramount importance that your dealership prioritizes customer convenience. After all, you’re selling a pricey item; even though it’s an item that many people need, they still have the right to be choosy, and you have an obligation to be convenient.
But first, perhaps it’s useful to define what exactly customer convenience is. Customer convenience is the perceived feeling among your customers or prospective customers that they are saving time and effort. For proof of the power and effectiveness of offering customer convenience, you need only look at Amazon’s implementation of “one-click buying”, which saved customers both time and effort and translated to a massive sales spike. Once by removing a seemingly insignificant barrier – that of going through the checkout, entering your card number, yada yada – they changed their game completely and saw their profits soar.
So how does that happen in the car dealership world? How do you break down your customer’s barriers and save them time and effort? The absolute best place to start is by enlisting the help of a dealer chat service, which has people who can speak to your customers directly, whether they’re at home using live chat, SMS, or another of the latest dealer chat software options available . This direct connection, which allows you to answer questions, offer deals, spread inventory information and much more to a wide range of potential customers, breaks down that all-important first barrier – the communication barrier.
Once customers know that they can have their questions answered easily and thoroughly, they’re more likely to follow through. Put it this way: when a customer has the desire to buy a new car, however fleeting or small that desire is, they’re forced into one of two options: research cars myself, or just forget about it until later. Often they choose the latter, because, let’s face it, it’s easier. What dealer chat offers is a way of streamlining that first option, making it so easy that even the most underactive car shopper won’t be able to resist following through. It’s that one-click buying phenomenon – make it easier, and watch the people flood in.
From there, closing the deal is all about utilizing dealer chat to its full potential. Look for a dealer chat service that uses “dynamic offers”, which are basically a streamlined way of advertising a certain product to people who are more likely to want that product. This is another form of customer convenience, whether the customer realizes it or not; by constraining your advertising to only show them what they want, you are removing the clutter from their life.
Customer convenience is at the center of any good marketing strategy, and it’s particularly effective for car dealerships, which often get the “cast a wide net” part of the equation correct, but fail to turn that into closed sales. Think of it like that famous line from Field of Dreams, only updated for the 21st Century: “If you make it easier, they will come”.
Originally posted on November 29, 2017 @ 4:28 pm