What Does Digital Retailing Mean for Your Dealership?

What Does Digital Retailing Mean for Your Dealership?

Digital retailing has been a hot topic over the last few years. Manufacturers have certainly pushed the concept, and many dealerships have embraced the trend. While many customers seek deals online, we must examine what this ultimately means for your dealership. The answer is essential for anyone involved with dealership website marketing.

What is Digital Retailing?

Before we can talk about whether digital retailing has positive or negative effects on your dealership, we first need to clarify what we mean by the term. To some, it means buying a vehicle online. At the same time, other dealership website marketing experts understand that 70% of auto buyers won’t buy a vehicle sight unseen. They consider digital retail to be the process of making as much of the sales process available online as possible. Still, others believe that digital retailing is a way of using digital marketing to personalize a customer’s experience inside the dealership.

An Easier Shopping Experience

From the viewpoint of shoppers, digital retailing offers a personalized and convenient shopping experience. Today’s customers can access your dealership’s website 24 hours a day from their phones, tablets and home computers. They can use social media to get answers to their questions instantly. They can also receive product suggestions and ads, and interact with websites that respond dynamically to their buying preferences. All in all, digital dealership website marketing has made shopping for a car easier than ever.

New Opportunities for Dealerships

Dealers may find that providing the digital marketing experience customers are increasingly demanding to be a challenge. Keeping up with the latest trends can be a daunting task. On the flip side, the changes in digital dealership website marketing provide dealers with substantial benefits. They now have more understanding of customers’ needs than ever before. They can track customer behavior online, and view clicks, impressions and conversions from their digital marketing campaigns. Dealerships can see which of these campaigns have been effective and which haven’t. They can also track foot traffic inside their dealership. Although customers have become more demanding, these demands have created new opportunities for dealerships to provide customers with service tailored to their needs. It’s easy to see how this translates into advantages for the dealership.

Practical Considerations

Digital retailing starts with the awareness that customers aren’t content to use dealer websites to simply browse inventory. Some believe this means customers are looking for an e-commerce experience where they add a car to a website’s shopping cart and arrange credit, financing and trade-ins online, then visit the dealership to pick up the vehicle. But only a small percentage of consumers buy a car this way. It isn’t necessary to make a sea change in the way your dealership does business to accommodate roughly 10% of buyers.

The Goal

Automotive digital retailing should make it easy for customers to research and purchase vehicles. Customers want to visit your dealership, so the goal should be to provide them with all the information they need before the visit. In the end, the critical factor is your team and your dealership’s process.

The goal is to use data to create a more customer-centric model that allows you to take advantage of more informed strategies based on the data collected. In the end, this provides your dealership with an opportunity to be proactive. Instead of racing to stay up to date with the latest trend, your dealership can concentrate on using data to understand your customers’ wants and needs. Additionally, it will allow you to address your dealership’s pain points and provide tools for alleviating them. The right digital marketing strategy will allow you to put together a more strategic marketing plan, reach more customers, and sell more cars.