7:17 am, October 1, 2013
RESPONSE management can be the difference between a sale and a lost head.
To make sure you’re ahead of the game and selling more cars, you need to advertise your stock correctly, understand response and manage leads. If you display your dealership branding within your adverts you build trust with buyers. It is also important to make the most of what you’ve got by advertising all of your stock.
Research has shown that more stock means more responses and more sales. So update your stock regularly and check the status of your adverts every day, so you see what requires urgent attention.
Now you can benefit from Auto Trader’s Package Builder, a new flexible business approach that aims to address dealer needs for today’s market and provides adaptability for the future. It simplifies operating processes with a fairer approach to pricing and provides better responses. And understanding responses is vital to the performance of your business.
You need to know which of your vehicles is performing well and which is attracting the least interest; what effect any changes such as price or increased standout have on the interest in a particular vehicle and how all your vehicles perform in relation to each other
Response Tracker allows you to choose the performance and timeframe you wish to monitor, so you can quickly tailor your report to the information you need.
To help you, we match the information you give us to our search data to identify which leads from Auto Trader are converted into sales.
A positive match means a buyer viewed your advert on Auto Trader before purchasing at your dealership.
This means you can see how many vehicles you sell as a result of advertising on Auto Trader, and understand what return on investment you achieve.
Generating leads is crucial and how you manage those leads can mean the difference between a sale and a lost lead.
Response times may not seem that important but failure to respond in a timely manner is an easy way to deter any potential customer.
For example, a recent survey of dealer groups shows that while 66 per cent did respond to requests for test drives or information within four hours, a further 10 per cent took 24 hours to respond and 24 per cent didn’t respond at all.
Live Chat is a great tool to help you communicate with your customers but you need to make sure that you use it properly.
The survey also shows that while 20 per cent of dealer groups had a live chat facility, a request for a test drive and information resulted in only 10 per cent of those dealers actually responding.
Identifying and adopting best practice will improve efficiency in understanding and managing leads.
If you don’t manage leads effectively and fail to respond in a timely manner, your advertising becomes less cost-effective and you run the risk of undermining your used car operation.
