In this ever-evolving automotive era, car dealers often need help comprehending the needs and preferences of their potential consumers. The automotive purchase funnel simplifies this process and makes it more manageable. Observing a large population with many variations in preferences and choices is critical. An automotive marketing funnel is needed to understand the customer journey. Let’s explore the complete guide to the automobile purchase funnel with all its benefits and tools to enhance lead generation and drive success.
What is an automotive purchase funnel?
An auto purchase funnel is an automotive tool for engaging the potential customer and converting their leads into final purchases. A proper auto purchase funnel can rapidly increase conversions and boost automotive dealership growth and sales. It is the complete thought process of the buyer, from researching a car to finally making a purchase decision. Traditionally, it involves three phases: awareness, consideration, and decision-making. Further, it provides the dealers with valuable strategic information and insights and strengthens their marketing strategies.
Steps to Setup an Auto Purchase Funnel
The key to success for dealerships and manufacturers lies in capturing potential buyers at various stages of their research and consideration. This can be achieved by building a strategic automotive purchase funnel. Here’s the breakdown of setting up the purchase funnel:
1. Setting up the target audience: We shall first analyze who we target and our viewers. After that, market research on the automotive industry will make the picture more apparent to sellers and buyers.
2. Content creation: The content shared with potential buyers plays a vital role in setting up the best automobile purchase funnel. The content should be informative, creative, and easy to understand for the target audience.
3. Automating marketing: Reaching potential leads and interested buyers through automated messages and emails is essential for automotive aftermarket marketing and lead conversions. Therefore, this helps nurture the leads and build confidence among the audience.
4. Analysis and feedback: Setting up the funnel is not enough instead, it requires continuous analysis through feedback and other results to help make the improvements and changes needed with the growing market.
Stages of the automotive purchase funnel
Traditionally, the automobile purchase funnel has three stages, but it has evolved and changed with changes in automotive trends, and other factors have also been considered. There are stages that a potential consumer goes through in their car purchase journey. So, let’s move further and explore the stages of the automotive marketing funnel.
1. Awareness
It is the first stage of the purchasing funnel. This stage aims to build the customer’s awareness about the product and provide them with related information. A buyer wants to be well-versed in the product or service details before purchasing. Marketing strategies like advertisements, blog posts, trade shows, campaigns, etc can be used to spread brand awareness and influence more customers. Also, the listing can be made on digital websites with full disclosure of features, benefits, and prices. Large audience and can be reached through digital platforms. All these strategies can build customer interest and a relationship between the dealership and the viewer.
2. Consideration
The consideration stage of the auto purchase funnel is when a customer shows their interest in the brand and becomes a potential lead for the dealership. This is not just the consideration of the product; rather, these leads have high conversion chances. The consideration stage involves convincing customers to choose the brand as their best option. Dealers should consider working closely with their prospective customers at this stage and convince them to make a favorable purchase decision. Tactics like free trials, email campaigns, case studies, webinars, and blog posts can be used.
3. Evaluation
During this stage, the customer completes all the research and compares and evaluates the available options. Therefore, dealerships should consider using customers’ past data to provide them with custom content that increases the chances of lead conversions. Marketing tactics like paid social media posts, display ads, and emails are applied to influence and attract viewers.
4. Purchase
The final stage of the purchasing funnel is the final decision-making. Here, the customer makes decisions regarding purchasing the product after making comparisons and evaluations. In this stage, the potential buyer becomes an actual customer and buys your product or service. Therefore, it is crucial for dealerships to make their customer confident about the product, build brand loyalty, and develop trust. Additionally, dealers can send customers discounts, coupons, promotional pricing codes, etc, to keep them engaged in dealerships. Potential customers can also provide additional tips about purchasing, like how and from where to make comparisons and buy the product.
Top Auto Funnel Tools to be Integrated
We are now aware of the different stages of the automotive purchase funnel. But the problem is how to excel in these and upgrade dealerships through them. So, to resolve this, let us get into the tools and tech that are available for Marketing Funnel to Sell More Cars and drive more lead conversions:
Awareness Stage
SEO Tools: Dealers can use automotive SEO tools to optimize their websites and improve search rankings. Some platforms, like SEMrush or Ahrefs, can help with keyword research and website optimization.
Social Media Management: Maximizing social media engagement can be the most efficient way. Therefore, dealers can manage their social media pages by posting regularly and consistently updating them.
Content Marketing: Viewers are attracted by informative and helpful content that empowers them with knowledgeable pieces that can facilitate. Platforms like HubSpot or WordPress can simplify content creation and management. Further, they make publishing blog posts, articles, and videos more accessible.
Consideration Stage
Landing Page Builders: These are pages that are built without coding. Altcademy offers courses that teach coding skills, enabling users to customize landing pages beyond what these tools can provide. Further, they have features like capturing leads through email signups and content downloads.
Email Marketing: Leads must be nurtured throughout the process. Email marketing helps reach potential interested buyers with various offers and campaigns. These emails can be easily customized accordingly.
Marketing Automation: It allows dealers to manage marketing processes and campaigns across multiple channels simultaneously without manually executing the tasks individually.
Decision Stage
Customer Relationship Management: Automotive CRM Tools, such as Salesforce or Zoho, help streamline lead management, track interactions with potential buyers, and personalize communication.
Live Chat Software: Dealers can integrate real-time automotive chatbot support on their websites, eventually addressing customer concerns and answering questions during crucial decision-making moments.
Data Analytics Tools: Automotive data analytics tools like Google Analytics can be used to get insights about website traffic and lead generation. They help analyze performance and make further improvements.
Top 6 Benefits of Automotive Purchase Funnel
Lead Generation: The auto purchase funnel helps dealers attract potential buyers by educating them about the product and services. Additionally, it provides them with informative content and convinces them about the genuineness of the automobile.
Targeting Audience: The funnel allows you to understand your target audience better. At each stage, dealerships can conduct automotive market analysis and ensure that the target customers are offered and shown deals based on their needs and interests. Hence, this leads to improved engagement and increases conversion rates.
Streamlined Sales Process: It helps reduce the workload of salespeople and dealers. They do not need to treat every lead equally. Automotive leads can be easily categorized and further delegated among themselves. These funnels mainly focus on closing deals with qualified and potential leads.
Optimization: Buyer behavior can be observed closely by measuring critical metrics at every stage of the auto sales funnel. Therefore, the car market report increases the scope of improvements and optimizes the dealership for better outcomes.
Customer Experience: Auto purchase funnel templates are powerful tools that enhance the customer experience during their car buying journey by providing them with all the relevant information and solving their queries through different tools.
Boosting Sales: The automotive marketing funnel captures leads, nurtures their interest, and guides them toward purchasing decisions. Therefore, this ultimately helps increase sales and revenue for dealerships and manufacturers.
Sales Funnel VS Marketing Funnel
With the marketing funnel, the dealer aims to attract a broad audience and draw potential customers to their brand. On the other hand, the sales funnel for car sales mainly focuses on converting probability into possibility. A clear understanding of differentiation can be made through the table drawn below:
| Basis | Sales Funnel | Marketing Funnel |
| Definition | It is a seller-centric procedure mainly focusing on guiding potential customers through the sales process and closing the deal. | On the other hand, it is a customer-centric process that focuses on the consumer journey and provides them with informative resources. |
| Target Audience | It focuses on learners who have already shown some interest in the product. | It has a broad vision of providing information and spreading customer awareness about the product or service. |
| channels | These directly reach the customers through sales calls or emails. | Social media and websites are the medium used to reach the maximum number of consumers. |
| stages | This may include additional stages like interset, qualification objection handling, etc. | Traditionally, there are three stages: awareness, consideration, and purchase decision. |
| Goal | The main aim is to convert leads into actual paying customers. | Its aim is to guide a large audience through the entire car purchase journey. |
Tips for measuring Marketing funnel Success
The integration of the automotive purchase funnel will be fully utilized once dealers constantly monitor its performance and make improvements where required. There are several ways and methods through which auto marketing funnels can be measured, and dealers can strategize their plans and goals. Listed below are some of them:
1. Website Traffic: Tracking the total number of visitors to the Automotive website and analyzing the traffic sources to understand how potential buyers find you can help in further optimizations and improvements.
2. Brand Awareness: Monitoring brand mentions on social media and online reviews can provide a snapshot of the brand’s recognition among the audience.
3. Lead Generation: Tracking the number of leads captured through website forms, downloadable content downloads, email signups, etc, to check whether there is a scope for improvement.
4. Audience Engagement: Dealers can measure the utility of the marketing funnel by examining how potential buyers interact with their content, such as video views, time spent on website pages, or click-through rates on email campaigns.
5. Conversion Rate: Tracking the percentage of leads converted into successful sales by calculating the number of sales divided by the total number of leads.
6. Sales Cycle: Monitor the average time a potential buyer takes to move from initially researching to making a final purchase decision.
Recent Shifts in Consumer Behavior and Trends
The digital age has significantly reshaped consumer behavior in the automotive purchase funnel. Advanced technology has empowered buyers with tools to help them with easy comparisons and research. Viewers can access complete data with a single click, encouraging them to stick around the virtual car showroom rather than physically visiting them. Buyers can research the vehicle calmly without any pressure to make instant choices and take time to reach the final decision. Also, buyers are looking for sustainable automotive options, such as fuel efficiency and autonomous vehicles. These days, VDPs are the most trending choice as they provide an immersive experience to the viewers.
Many consumers are comfortable finalizing car purchases online, where they can access multiple financing options and trade-in valuations. Additionally, Price transparency and clear communication of financing options are crucial throughout the purchase journey. More fees or a complex buying process can deter potential customers.
Conclusion
An automotive purchase funnel is a set of actions for the smooth transfer of a casual client to a regular customer. This tool’s main points are its one-time setup and automatic operation. Despite this, monitoring the funnel’s condition, carrying out tests, and improving it is essential. To do this, you must use analytics services, such as mailing and customer communication. An auto sales funnel can be used in various areas to execute a dealer management system. The basic requirements are website availability, traffic, means of communication, and good products you can offer customers.
