On average, 4.2 websites are visited by customers before making a purchase.
What does this mean for your dealership?
It means your website is key for your marketing. It’s critical that your website is up-to-date in many areas including:
- Mobile-friendly, so that your site is easy to use on the device people are most likely to view it
- Search engine optimization (SEO) so your dealership shows up when customers search
- User-friendliness, so that you never turn away a customer that’s frustrated by your site
Digital channels are also essential for automotive marketing, and your website acts as the hub for all traffic. How do automotive customers arrive at your site? Based on industry trends, there are a few channels that are doing much of the heavy lifting:
Organic and Paid Search
It’s a good idea to invest in the techniques that help customers arrive at your website from a search, whether that’s paid or organic. Paid search accounted for 38% of all traffic to websites, the highest among digital channels.
But if your budget is tight, that doesn’t mean you have to scramble to rearrange funds. Organic search is another great driver of web traffic, with 28% of website visitors to automotive sites coming from organic search.
Social Media
Organic social media engagement leads conversions in the automotive industry, with a rate of 2.9%. Social media is a great place to build relationships, which are critical in automotive sales. You don’t want just the one sale; you want the customer to return to your dealership with every twist and turn of life from their first job to their retirement.
And if you are debating whether there is still a role for direct mail in automotive marketing, there are clear ways to demonstrate its important contribution. Set up a landing page on your website, with a QR code to match on your direct mail so that you can directly track whether your mailer is driving traffic to your site. There are some ways to increase the effectiveness of your mailer:
- Target audiences specifically, using data to match promotions and mailers with the right mail recipients.
- Personalize your mailer. Using a name significantly increases response rates.
- Be direct and to the point so that your mailer doesn’t get tossed with junk mail.
Reaching automotive audiences gets easier when you have an automated marketing platform. Contact us at DirectMail.io to learn more about optimizing your automotive marketing to reach more customers with far less time invested.
