Creating a Successful Online Presence Using Live Dealer Chat
By: Fabiola Grosshan
Submitted: 2010-04-09 03:51:14 | Word Count: 716
Despite the rising usage of dealer chat in the auto industry, some dealers aren’t as quick to buy into the opportunity to generate their own automotive sales leads from their website. This is mostly due to the fact that they don’t see the need and would rather spend money obtaining viable potential customers from third party vendors regardless of their often high number of invalid referrals. These dealers, while they may be successful, might also be missing out on the one thing that can take their dealership from good to great: Optimizing their dealership website with dealer chat software.
Some car dealers have the mentality that all they need to do in order to create an online presence and create automotive sales leads is to simply put up a static website – essentially an electronic brochure. Car dealers with these static websites do not know nor understand their audience or the automotive marketing environment in general, and what they need in order to get quality automotive sales leads online. Today’s consumer is a more intelligent and savvier shopper than ever before. They do not want to buy products from a company that talks ‘at’ them rather than interacts ‘with’ them.
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There is an additional group of dealers that understand the landscape of auto internet marketing and understand that they must integrate their online marketing efforts with their offline efforts. These dealer websites are successful in attracting a huge volume of traffic as well as in providing information that visitors find to be helpful, useful, and relevant to them.
There is, however, one problem.
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 covert these visitors into automotive sales leads, showroom traffic, and sales, then you’re wasting opportunity after opportunity. It is always easier and more cost effective to convert a qualified lead that you generate from your own website than it is to do the same from third-party potential customer referrals as they are more expensive and tend to be of lower quality. This translates into a poor rate of return on your investment.
Why waste your time or your money buying high volume automotive sales leads when you can generate high quality leads from your own website using low cost dealer chat software? Third party automotive sales 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 almost like playing a game of roulette. It may 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 list and spend money marketing the automotive sales leads only to find that nobody sells, simply leaves you disappointed and with less money in your pocket.
When your website has a dealer chat function, you create your own quality automotive sales leads. Visitors to your website are your target audience. If they weren’t interested in your autos, auto services, and parts, then they wouldn’t be on your website to begin with. Use dealer chat to capture automotive sales leads by engaging potential customers 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 the one that they already own.
The first impression you make to visitors of your website (and potential automotive sales leads), is equivalent to the first impression you make to potential buyers who visit your physical car lot. You can create a lasting and positive first impression on visitors to your website by offering stellar customer service. An interactive auto marketing tool such as live dealer chat enables you to make a great first impression. If part of your dealer servers are not collecting information on your visitors and offering live dealer chat interaction with them, then your automotive internet marketing is not nearly as effective as it could and should be.
