The Ultimate Car Dealer Website
Excerpt from "Mastering the Art of Selling Cars Online"
By: Eddie Coleman
Public “B”
The textbook description of public “B” would naturally be the polar opposite of public “A”. An individual fitting the profile of public “B” could be described as the customer that strolls into the dealership on a Saturday, has more fun telling stories to the dealership's employees than learning about the vehicle he just took a test drive in, pays the dealership a $3000 front-end profit, bites off on just about every product pitched by the F&I department, refers everyone he knows to the dealership, and then winds up purchasing his next vehicle from the dealership as well!
An individual who has had the majority of randomity suppressed out of their behavior will we be less likely to be a natural computer programmer and will tend to become a better communicator. This comes from a learned ability to “slow down”. Most exceptional sales people, managers and Dealer Principals in the automotive retail business reside in the public “B” group to one varying degree or another.
Emotional types and e-dealer website design
Many dealerships express frustrations with Internet buyers. An Internet buyer is often times described as an individual who will research a vehicle to the point of insanity, refuses to pay the dealership more than $200 profit, requires a great deal of effort to acquire as a customer, is a poor fixed operations customer, refers few if any people at all to the dealership, gives the credit for his exceptional bargain to the Internet as apposed to the dealership that accepted his offer, and then finally ends up buying somewhere else at the end of his lease. The question is, why do many dealerships have this horrific opinion of Internet customers? I believe the answer to this question is fairly obvious.
Look at which public the average web developer most likely fits into! I don't believe it will take you much time at all to realize that the average web developer fits nicely into the categorical profile of public “A”. Now, without getting too deep into the psychological aspects of this whole scenario, let's take a look at how this reality affects the average car dealership's web site.
First of all, it's important understand that when an individual creates something from nothing, the end product must make sense to them mentally. In other words, the structure, flow, content and design of the website must make conceptual sense for the individual who has been placed in charge of creating it. This is common in any design field whether it be computer programming or structural engineering. This becomes a problem in the field of automotive retail web development because there is a specific psychology necessary when creating a web site that will disseminate to the market that we are after.
When a group of individuals that fit the profile of public “A” are assigned the task of designing and developing a website for the purpose of convincing thousands of people to take the next step towards making an extremely emotional and expensive decision, you wind up with what potentially can be a 52 car pile up on the Santa Monica Freeway. In the end, the common sense aspects of this concept are relatively simple. If an individual that fits the profile of public “A” is commissioned to build a public website, it only stands to reason that the public that will most likely respond will have a similar psychological make-up as the individual or group of individuals that were responsible for its creation. This is the primary reason why websites in the retail automotive industry consistently produces what I believe are unacceptable conversion rate percentages. It is also the interconnecting recipe for improving a dealership's online state of existence.
Building the ultimate e-dealer website
At this point, we can ascertain that to create a retail automotive website that produces staggering conversion rates consistently day in and day out, we would need a website that disseminates aggressively to public “B” (which, as we estimate, makes up more than 90% of the buying public). The trick is to empower individuals that emotionally fit into the profile of public “A” to participate in the construction of websites that best target their emotional opposites. Hand-in-hand with this is a system that allows us to isolate certain individuals that have equal amounts of public “A” and public “B” characteristics residing in their emotional makeup. Creating and orchestrating a design team of this nature is one of the four keys to dealer website design success.
This is not a topic I will be covering in any great detail in this book as it represents behind the scenes principles that really only apply to the web development industry. What I am looking to demonstrate in this section, instead, is an overall understanding of the automotive related web development industry from a design perspective along with the factors that control the level of success dealer websites achieve.
Going local
When it comes to a car dealership's website, going local is what it's all about. It's here that the rubber meets the road. It's here that consumer research takes on a whole different meaning. Developing a website for a dealership that is based in a local community requires a great deal of understanding of that dealership's specific public. This topic is covered in greater detail in the marketing sections of this book. For now, what we're looking to do is explain how understanding what creates a reach from an individual that resides in one community as opposed to another is critical in creating an above average conversion rate for a dealership's website.
Understanding the differences between public “A” and public “B” is important, but it just isn't enough on its own. Now we have to understand two additional things: how a dealership's local community responds to marketing differently than that of the national index and how to create a overwhelming reach or conversion rate based on that information.
As I mention in the marketing chapter, a bruised credit customer in one city will have an entirely different emotional response to a website than a bruised credit customer in a different city looking at the exact same website. It follows then, that when building a website to serve a local community in the automotive industry it is absolutely imperative that this stone is uncovered and dealt with in a scientific manner.
Continue to Part Five
Eddie Coleman ,C.E.O. Hyperdrive Technologies Inc.
Park Plaza Tower 715 SW Morrison Ave Portland, OR. 97205
503.227.3515 ext107 503.227.6437 fax
eddie@hyperdrivetech.com
www.MasteringTheArt.com
www.HyperDrivetech.com
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