Is Your Digital Marketing Converting to Sales?

What’s the most important thing for your car dealership to succeed? Sales are the overall goal of any business including your dealership.

What you need is a sales funnel that takes your digital marketing efforts and brings them from the first point of engagement with a customer to the completion of a sale. This is a measurable way of seeing the impact of your marketing efforts.

Marketing is More Difficult than Ever

Before the internet, marketing was done via print ads and television commercials. Whether that print was on billboards, in newspapers, or in mailers that came to your home, the marketing avenues were fairly straightforward. Today, marketing has to be done digitally through various online programs and platforms. This has made marketing more difficult and more expensive than it was in the past. With this in mind, you want to make sure you’re getting the most out of your digital marketing efforts.

What Are the Parts of the Digital Sales Funnel?

It’s important to know when and where along the sales path you should be measuring the success of your marketing. The digital sales funnel has six parts to it and those parts, or steps, allow you to make improvements when needed and see the success that you want to enjoy when they are working right. The six parts of the funnel are:

1. Leads
2. Leads that can be contacted
3. Appointments set
4. Appointments that show up
5. Sales from appointments
6. The total conversion rate of the five previous steps

By using each of these parts as a percentage of the total, you’ll find the places where you need the greatest improvement in your digital marketing efforts. By identifying where you need to improve, you can create the funnel that benefits your dealership.

Defining the Parts of the Funnel

Let’s take a look at each of the parts of the digital sales funnel and put some numbers on what you should expect. All numbers are according to 9clouds.com and should help you understand what to expect and how to improve your marketing to gain a greater level of success.

Digital Marketing Turns into Leads

Success in digital marketing could mean you have as little as one percent of your online traffic converting to actual leads. This means one out of every 100 people that views an ad, sees your website, or engages on social media will take the next step to start the process toward buying a vehicle. If you find that you’re having trouble getting leads, which means any information from the customer to be able to contact them, you need to make it easier for customers to give you their information. There are many great ways you can do this and improve your lead percentage.

Shouldn’t You Be Able to Contact All the Leads?

In theory, yes, you should be able to contact all of the leads you receive, but some people will put fake information into lead pages just to move toward the next step in the process. With that in mind, you should be able to contact at least 70 percent of the leads. If you’re having trouble reaching this number, pair down the information being requested to only the information you need.

Create the Appointments for Your Dealership

An average conversion from the lead contact to an appointment being set is 35 percent. If you’re able to turn more of these leads into appointments, that’s great, but if you are at a lower number, it may be time to change your tactic. Use a specific script for phone calls and a template email that can be sent out. These items will help break the ice when trying to make an appointment.

Are Customers Showing Up for the Appointments?

If a customer has taken the time to give you contact information and set an appointment, there’s a very good chance they are going to show up for the appointment. In fact, the average is 80 percent for people showing up at the car dealership for appointments. Use reminders through text or phone messages to help remind customers of the appointment time and date.

Turning Appointments Into Sales

When a customer shows up at a car dealership for an appointment, they want to buy a vehicle. Most people don’t just go by a car dealer just to look or browse, that’s what people do at malls. The average conversion rate for appointments is 70 percent and it has everything to do with the sales techniques being used.

The Final Piece

Using digital marketing to create leads should result in an average of 13.7 percent of sales from the customers that engage and offer their information to your car dealership. This is an average and offered by 9clouds.com as a number for you to strive for every month. Uses the numbers presented to measure how your digital sales funnel is working for you.