Sales are the lifeblood of your dealership’s success. However, it can be challenging to turn prospects into sales. A sales funnel is the most effective way to convert prospects to customers. Streamlining the automotive sales funnel will allow dealerships to identify bottlenecks and more information to convert prospects into customers, increase sales, and boost the dealership’s conversion rate. Additionally, a comprehensive sales funnel that captures prospects and turns them into customers is the key to any successful business. Many successful dealerships have an existing advanced sales funnel with the latest tools to get the maximum ROI. However, some companies cannot take their business to the next level because they lack realization about the sales funnel value.
What is an Automotive Sales Funnel?
An automotive sales funnel is a powerful tool for engaging potential leads in the automotive dealership and converting them into regular customers. A comprehensive funnel can increase the conversion rate tenfold. It also helps you improve product quality, expand your business, or find new channels for new clients. The sales funnel allows the sale of products automatically without human participation. You strategically plan each stage of the visitor’s journey to create a positive experience that converts them into paying customers.
Why You Need a Car Sales Funnel?
The automotive sales funnel helps dealerships engage potential leads and turn them into regular clients. Additionally, it can increase brand awareness, improve automotive customer retention, convert leads into sales, and track performance. Therefore, by implementing a sales funnel, dealerships can achieve better results and streamline their sales process.
1) Increase Brand Awareness
To increase brand awareness, you must create content and targeted ads to attract customers interested in purchasing a car. It will also help you to attract more customers and increase the brand’s visibility.
2) Convert Leads into Sales
It helps to convert leads into paying customers by guiding potential clients. The funnel car sales helps customers by answering their questions and providing valuable information. Therefore, it helps to establish the brand as a reliable source and build trust to sell more cars.
3) Improve Customer Retention
A sales funnel helps you improve automotive customer retention by allowing you to nurture your relations with your clients. By following up after sales and providing excellent customer service, you can increase your chance of retaining your customers.
4) Track Your Sales Performance
It helps dealerships to track their sales performance by monitoring every stage of their sales process. Additionally, dealerships can analyze the data to identify the areas that need to be improved and can change the sales strategy accordingly.
Steps to Setup an Automotive Sales Funnel
Most dealership owners ignore building an auto sales funnel, thinking it will be time-consuming and complex. However, building a sales funnel can increase your dealership profitability. Creating a sales funnel automotive industry helps auto sales succeed. Every sales funnel is unique, and each dealership faces unique challenges in increasing its sales. This process guides potential customers from awareness to action and helps you convert them into loyal clients. We have mentioned how to create and optimize the digital sales funnel for car dealers to get maximum results.
The First Step
The first step in a pipeline is the leads. Therefore, it includes everything from identifying new clients to getting test-drive inquiries.
1) Identify Your Target Market: You must know your ideal customers’ wants, needs, and ways of searching for solutions. Additionally, you can use customer surveys, market research, online tools, and experience to create buyer personas and segment your market.
Buyer personas are fictional representations of your ideal clients based on their behavior, demographics, pain points, and motivations. They help you tailor each segment’s sales and car dealership marketing message.
2) Attract your prospects: You must drive traffic to your showroom or website by generating interest and awareness for your products and services. Therefore, strategies like online advertising, content marketing, social media, referrals, email marketing, and events can help you attract your prospects. The key is to offer relevance and value to your target market and to use compelling and clear calls to action.
3) Engage Your Leads: You must qualify their readiness and needs, capture contact information, and nurture their relationship. Additionally, you can use numerous tools to engage your leads, such as forms, landing pages, automotive CRM systems, chatbots, and follow-up emails. The key is to build rapport and trust and provide valuable, personalized information.
The Next Step
The next step in the automotive sales funnel template is to track prospects. After you confirm customers’ interest in a particular product or service, you can qualify them as clients. Additionally, a qualified customer has a confirmed purchase value or budget. Dealers must monitor quotations, demonstrations, and proposals to eliminate any chance of missing out on any opportunity. Additionally, in this stage, your team must follow up to build trust with prospects and should analyze the presentation, negotiation pitch, and offering test drives.
1) Convert Your Prospects: You must persuade them to take the desired action, like requesting a quote, booking a test drive, or purchasing. Additionally, you can use numerous techniques to convert your prospects, such as addressing concerns and objections, presenting features and benefits, and creating scarcity and urgency. The key is demonstrating differentiation and value and overcoming any friction or barriers.
2) Retain Your Customers: You must ensure their loyalty and satisfaction and encourage them to make referrals and repeat purchases. You can use various tactics, such as delivering excellent customer service, requesting feedback, delivering exceptional service, creating a community, and rewarding referrals and loyalty.
3) Optimize Your Funnel: You must analyze and measure your performance and identify areas for improvement. You can use numerous tools and metrics, such as conversion rates, cost per acquisition, customer lifetime value, A/B testing, and ROI. The key is to learn from your results and tweak and test your strategies.
Stages of the Automotive Sales Funnel
Understanding the stages of the automotive purchase funnel and sales funnel will help you create a marketing strategy that increases your chances of making a sale. Each stage has its own goal and is designed to move prospects closer to making a purchase.
1) Awareness (Showcase You Exist)
This first stage informs prospective clients of your company’s products and services. Remember, this stage is not the time to showcase attractive offers. You can share valuable information, ideas, and solutions on your website to spread awareness about your brand.
2) Interest (Provide Valuable Information)
This stage should involve providing valuable information with blogs, social media content, and engaging videos. Prospectors are aware of your brand and believe they will get a solution to their problems.
3) Evaluation (Build Assurance for your Solutions)
At the evaluation stage of the automotive sales funnel, the prospects look closer at your brand’s products and services and compare them with the competitors in the market. You should build relations with the clients and assure them that your brand and solutions are the answer to their questions.
4) Consideration (Your Solutions are the Best Fit)
Prospects are looking to research, compare, and consider the perfect solution for themselves. Therefore, you can add satisfied customer reviews and free demos. This will help them update their decision-making when choosing your band and solutions for their purchase.
5) Desire (Offers Fit Lead’s Budget)
Prospects can’t conclude to consider your brand and look to make a purchase or take action. However, they are looking to see if your solutions fit their budget. You can help them with attractive offers, discounts, personalized experiences, and a desired quote. Additionally, including consultations and introducing case studies in the pitch can turn out to be beneficial for your brand.
6) Conversion (Prospects take an Action)
Prospects confirm their decision and take action at this stage. Whether to make a purchase, request a quote, or sign up. Dealerships can create an attractive automotive landing page with a (CTA) call to action button, including essential components with a user-friendly experience.
7) Re-engagement (Customer Retention)
Satisfied and loyal customers can be a gem for the business. Dealerships can provide a seamless experience to revisit their dealership for their shopping. Customers won’t just consider your brand for future shopping but might suggest it to their friends and family. You can set up a referral program, up-sell program, and re-engagement campaign to allow customers to make a revisit.
Top Automotive Funnel Tools to be Integrated
We need to excel in the stages and upgrade our dealerships through them. You can integrate the best tools and tech in your automotive sales funnel. This will help you convert prospects into conversions and drive more sales for your car dealership.
1) CRM (Customer Relationship Management): Sales funnel CRM tools help businesses create and manage leads. Dealerships can build their customer base to boost their auto sales. CRM tools also help streamline lead management, provide personalized communication, and track buyer interactions.
2) SEO Tools: Dealerships can use automotive SEO tools to improve their search rankings and optimize their websites. These tools also help dealerships visualize the steps car buyers take before purchasing.
3) Live Chat Software: You can integrate real-time chatbot support on your website to interact with customers and address their concerns. This will help you resolve all your potential customers’ queries and help them make better decisions.
4) Data analytics tools: Dealerships can integrate data analytics to analyze website performance and improve their websites and ads. This will allow them to gain insights about lead generation and website traffic.
5) Social Media Management: You can spread awareness about your brand and new upcoming products through social media management and optimization. Marketers can post consistently to engage with their targeted audience.
6) Content Marketing: You can provide valuable content and information to educate and spread awareness about your solutions. This will help you target a broader audience. One can create blogs, videos, and articles for their websites.
7) Inventory Management: Dealerships can integrate inventory management tools in their software. It will empower them to check the stocks. Therefore, you can fulfill customer demands and orders by tracking available products in your inventory.
8) Website Management: It will help dealerships ensure that their website is well-functioning and up to date. It will also help you secure your online presence and suggest general maintenance. Furthermore, you can organize your website to enhance your marketing strategy and content delivery as per customer requirements.
Tips for Measuring Sales Funnel Success
Measuring your auto sales funnel provides valuable insights into optimizing your sales efforts. Ultimately, this will lead to more sales and revenue for the dealership. We have provided tips for measuring your best automotive sales funnel.
1) Total Leads Generated
Track the number of prospects who entered your automotive marketing lead funnel and segregate your targeted audience. It will help dealerships understand the quantity of qualified sales leads entered at the different stages of the funnel.
2) Conversion Rate
The conversion rate indicates the percentage of auto leads who took a desired action, such as signing up or purchasing, out of the total leads. It helps you understand how effectively your sales funnel converts leads into paying customers.
3) Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
CLV represents the expected revenue dealerships will generate from a particular customer concerning your business. It helps dealerships identify their most valuable client and tailor their sales strategies to a targeted audience. Additionally, the optimization of CLV can reduce customer acquisition costs.
4) Cost Per Acquisaton (CPA)
Understanding the average cost to acquire a new client can help you understand the ROI. It allows you to identify opportunities to increase efficiency and reduce costs. Dealers can calculate CPA by determining the number of conversions and the amount spent on car advertising and marketing.
5) Time Between Purchases
You can calculate the time a customer revisits your dealership to make a re-purchase. Therefore, it will help you tailor your campaigns and retarget clients to encourage repeat business.
6) Funnel Drop-Off Rate
Dealerships should measure the number of visitors who drop off at each stage of the auto sales funnel. Additionally, this will help them examine the stages where prospects lose interest or encounter obstacles. Further, they can optimize the stages to provide a streamlined process for their customers.
7) Total Revenue
You must analyze and monitor the total sales from the car sales funnel to inspect the effectiveness of your sales strategies. Additionally, this allows you to change your funnel and strategy to generate maximum revenue.
Turning Leads into Customers
Many auto dealerships’ potential revenue is falling apart, as 80% of leads do not turn into sales. Dealerships can capture the lost sales leads and convert them into regular customers by optimizing the data and stages in the funnel that are working. Therefore, the automotive sales funnel gets better on each step of optimization, and the more data as per the increase in sales. Dealerships can focus on the particular stage and the sales strategy from where they get the most leads. Therefore, it will help you turn leads into customers and increase sales for the dealership.
Common Mistakes To Avoid When Building an Auto Funnel
An automotive e-sales funnel is built to convert prospects into regular clients. However, a few dealerships make common mistakes, which end up losing the customer for life. Therefore, we have mentioned common errors dealers should avoid and the pro tips to include when working on a sales funnel builder.
1) Wrong Strategy: Avoid offering and pushing new visitors to make a purchase. Therefore, dealers often need to provide valuable information about the solution to their problems to approach a prospect to buy the product.
2) Wrong Sequence of Actions: Dealerships often focus on selling the main product. However, offer buyers additional goods like catalogs, consultation, test drives, etc, before pitching for the main product.
3) Lack of Optimization: Salespeople must monitor their leads’ behavior. Additionally, pitching customers with an understanding of their requirements will ensure the lead is maintained, and you will lose the customer.
4) Technical errors: Avoid layering multiple pop-ups on your website and sending numerous similar messages on different platforms to your customers. Therefore, it makes your prospects lose interest in your product and dealership.
5) Building strategy on assumptions: Dealerships must conduct tests and surveys and track customers’ actions before making a sales strategy decision. Additionally, you can use practical tools to understand the prospects’ loopholes and wants.
6) Delaying in re-marketing: Ensure retargeting for other products to the customer after they purchase a primary product. Additionally, you should approach customers at the correct time for re-marketing before they lose interest.
7) Targeting a narrow audience: Avoid staging limited when approaching the customers. Do not only target the visitors who inquired or visited your website or dealership. Additionally, target a broader customer base with ads and SEO.
8) Different targeting: Avoid approaching every prospect with the same message or car sales pitch. Additionally, dealers should target and pitch audiences based on their requirements and history.
9) Not offering value after an action: Ensure you provide values, information, and gifts based on the customer’s actions, such as purchasing, subscribing, and filling out landing page forms.
10) Applying outdated content: Avoid providing useless information and freebies. Ensure the product or information you provide is valid and of high quality.
Conclusion
The automotive sales funnel is a powerful tool for dealerships to optimize their sales efforts. By understanding the customer journey and strategically addressing each stage, dealerships can convert more prospects into loyal customers. Additionally, a well-designed sales funnel is not just about driving sales; it’s about building lasting customer relationships by creating a seamless customer experience throughout the funnel. Furthermore, dealerships can build trust, address needs, and ultimately guide customers toward a confident buying decision.
