Automotive Alchemy
Welcome to 'Automotive Alchemy', a podcast that dwells in the cavernous depths of data, unearthing precious gems of wisdom to illuminate your path to digital marketing success. As alchemists, we understand that each nugget of information is a vital ingredient in our elixir of knowledge. So ready yourselves as we embark on an enlightening journey through the arcane world of data-driven automotive marketing.
Automotive Alchemy
Dissecting Dealership Websites Part 2: New and Used Inventory
In this episode of Automotive Alchemy, we’re joined by Shean Kirin, the visionary founder of Dealer Alchemist, to uncover the strategies that can revolutionize your dealership’s online presence. Together, we tackle the art of optimizing new and used inventory pages, emphasizing how a seamless user experience and smart design can drive higher conversion rates and customer satisfaction.
Shean shares practical insights into creating intuitive, mobile-first websites inspired by tech leaders like Apple and Tesla. We explore six essential steps to refine inventory pages, from understanding your audience and streamlining navigation to implementing transparent pricing and leveraging tools like Penny Perfect Payments to build trust.
Discover how simplifying digital retailing processes and strategic button placement can transform customer interactions into meaningful relationships. Whether it’s ensuring your website performs flawlessly across devices or enhancing lead generation with transparent communication, this episode provides a blueprint for dealership success in the digital age.
Tune in to Automotive Alchemy for actionable advice and strategies to take your dealership’s digital performance to the next level. Don’t miss this deep dive into the power of optimized websites and the future of online automotive sales!
Hello and welcome back to another episode of Automotive Alchemy. This is the official podcast from Dealer Alchemist. I'm your host, sean Rains. Today we are continuing our deep dive, tearing down car dealership websites, by dissecting two more crucial pages new and used inventory pages. These are the pages that play a real pivotal role in conversion with your website visitors, because it's where they spend all their time. It's why they come to your website.
Speaker 1:Of course, the guest today is the premier dealer alchemist, sean Kieran. He is the founder and CEO at Dealer Alchemist. He brings a wealth of experience and knowledge and, as you guys know, we've been cutting up these episodes now for well quite some time, and so you're going to love to hear Sean's perspective, because we're going to actually show you a bunch of live stuff from a website as we go through this episode to help you break down some things that I think will be. I think it'll be one of the most informative things you've seen on websites and, like we said on the last episode, there's not enough people talking about it. So, anyway, welcome back, karen.
Speaker 2:Hey, thanks, Sean. I'm excited to dive into this.
Speaker 1:Yeah, me too, I wanted. Before we get into all of the meat, we were talking before we went live and you were sharing brand new.
Speaker 2:I think maybe today you had this relative terrible website experience and I just wanted you to share that before we get into the meat of it terrible website experience and I just wanted you to share that before we get into the meat of it. So I was going through a demonstration of our products with a new dealership today and he was telling me about how his stores are not performing. They're spending a lot of money on advertising, they're just not getting any leads. And so we started going through the websites and I'm looking at those pages and as I look at those pages, I noticed that the layout of those buttons was not. I mean, it was just not good.
Speaker 1:I'm just going to say it as simply as I can.
Speaker 2:And so my practice is to click on them and say, okay, what happens if I'm a consumer? And so with Sean, with you right on the phone or right on the meeting, we clicked right in and the very first button said explore payments. The first time I clicked on that button it didn't load after 15 seconds. The second time I clicked on that button, it gave me a zip code. I input my zip code, I hit the next button and then there was a gray disclaimer that I could barely read with the next button at the very bottom, and I thought to myself of course you're not getting any leads.
Speaker 2:Your digital retailing experience sucks. Maybe it would be wiser to put a conversion button above that for people to ask a question. Ask a question, confirm availability, unlock price, get my best price At this point, anything right, not scheduled test drive, because that conversion button's hilarious, so it is my pet peeve. So I just figure if I was going to give somebody some pretty generic advice, it would be. I know you think your homepage matters and all these banners and party look on the website matters, but the data proves that they're going to be on that homepage for less than 10 seconds and then they're going to spend all their time on inventory pages and from there, less is more. Four, five, six buttons on an inventory page is ruining your experience. Four, five, six buttons on an inventory page is ruining your experience. Two or three, that's the max on a search results page, and then next, on the vehicle details page, no more than four. Pick and choose those wisely, because the more buttons you have, the less you convert.
Speaker 2:So that general best practice on my search results page is probably going to be a conversion button such as confirm availability, unlock price, get my best price, get today's price. Probably a trade button such as value my trade, what's my trade worth? And then next a digital retailing button, explore payments yeah, something like that, that. And then on the actual details page I would add a button for a credit application or getting approved, get approved now, no credit score, something along those lines. And then on mobile, of course, on both of those I would have a call button.
Speaker 2:And so those are the best practice period when it comes to website buttons, with that top button being changed out depending on the area, the dealership and the brand, and we'll talk about that brand here in a minute and why that brand matters. So thanks. I just I couldn't believe. I saw that experience. So if you're a dealer, please go click on your own buttons on your own website and ask yourself if I was a consumer, did this make my job easier? It didn't make it harder, because, I promise you, if it made it harder, you lost that lead.
Speaker 1:That advice alone is so it's priceless because there are so many dealers that and listen, I I'm not going to tell every general manager. You're not going to tell every general manager or dealer principal or even you know sales managers that they have to go and do the updated website inspection and click all the buttons, although if you have time and there is oftentimes time when you can go do that maybe somebody else does that. But the point being that that ownership of maintenance, of making sure all that stuff works right, you're paying a lot of money for the center point of your digital assets, all this traffic you pay to get there. You want to make sure that it's working, and it's not really the right move to say, well, we just don't ever figure out on our own if it actually works the way we're expecting it to. You're just waiting until there's a catastrophe. So all really really good remarks, and I think it's really also really important because you rattle off a whole bunch of these best practices which also have been largely forgotten over the past several years, because what we have had and I'm so glad we're dedicating some episodes of the podcast to this what we've had for years is website providers basically copying each other right. So somebody comes out with here's the next big aesthetic thing. And I won't name any of the competitors out there because we're not about trying to trash talk people. This is just a true point.
Speaker 1:From the day that automotive websites came out for dealers and every day since then, whoever comes up with a new idea and oftentimes it's something that looks cool, right, and when it looks cool, it's designed to make the dealers say it looks so good that that makes me want to say well, that it must perform as good as it looks, which is not true.
Speaker 1:But oftentimes those are the big things that make all the other providers say, well then, now we've got to do this. Now we have to add video headers. Now we have to do this with our inventory pages. Now we have to do that. And oftentimes it's never based on well, we made those changes because it improves the conversion rates of the sites, so that the dealers get more for that investment, which is where it should be. So I'm really glad we're jumping into this. I want to do the same thing and the audience will perhaps remember, but in the first two pages that we looked at in part one on websites, we looked at homepage and about us page. Today we're looking at the new and used inventory pages and before we get into the steps of that, I do want to ask you why, from your perspective, are new and used inventory pages so critical for the dealership website in terms of optimization?
Speaker 2:Well, there's a couple of points there. Maybe the most important is that most of your traffic doesn't even see your homepage. Most traffic that clicks into the dealership through advertising drives to a search results page or a vehicle details page. And you know service, let's not forget service. But that's not about today, right, yeah? And so, along those lines, if they're going to be on the search results page of the vehicle details page, that's where they're going to spend the lion's share of their time. So these pages need to be designed to help the user find the right vehicle quickly and encouraging conversion. So check availability, start the purchase process, estimate payments, get a value for my trade-in. These things need to be easy to get to, simple and not overwhelming. Think about the Apple website experience and, as much as we all hate them, the Tesla website experience matters. They're the second largest manufacturer in California. As an example, Probably we should pay attention to why people convert on that website, because it's different than what we think it is. It's just easy. You have to make it easy.
Speaker 2:So, it's going to be fun to showcase these. I can't wait to dive in and just show what it looks like when it's done. Well, that's going to be fun.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, listen.
Speaker 1:That's a pretty good segue, because if you want to start to share the, so for the audience, if you are listening to this episode, you're definitely going to want to go and check out the video version of this as well, because we are screen sharing on this episode today and a lot of people are now consuming, even if they aren't looking at the screen.
Speaker 1:A lot of people are now consuming even if they aren't looking at the screen. A lot of people are now consuming video podcasts through both YouTube and Spotify. So just want to let the audience know there are going to be a lot of visuals in this and we're going to break down, like we started in in episode one on websites, in this part two version, we're going to break down six steps for optimizing inventory pages to perform the way that they should. Yes, this has a really large bearing on conversion and it also has a huge impact on the experience that the consumer is having. Kieran just mentioned this one that he just saw today and it's true, he showed it to me before we started this episode and it was atrocious. It's almost unbelievable.
Speaker 2:This is the good one though Not the bad one, this is the one. That's what it should look like. I didn't want to disparage a dealer by telling them how bad their website was in public. That's. That's just a terrible way to do things, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, not what we're, not what we're showing on screen before, but that example was it almost? It's astonishing how many examples are out there that are really not helping dealers, and it's almost 2025. So the six steps that we're going to go through are understanding the target audience, analyzing the website layout and navigation, evaluating visual design and aesthetics, examining messaging and content, reviewing conversion points and finally, testing user experience on different devices. Reviewing conversion points and finally, testing user experience on different devices. I think we're also going to have time to step through some things that are specific to conversion rate optimization, kind of questions you should be asking yourself. But let's start with step one understanding the target audience. What should dealers be asking themselves around? Just understanding their target. It might seem simple, but I guarantee you wait until you hear what Kieran asks you, because not enough people are always thinking about that and it's not one size fits all, by the way.
Speaker 2:People so I think there's a number of questions we should ask ourselves when we look at our dealership, our website, our brand and our performance. That first one is who are we targeting? A Honda dealership, a Kia dealership, a BMW dealership, a Mercedes dealership, a Porsche dealership? These are all different brands and they do handle things differently. Now, budget conscious buyers that are in a subprime area are looking for different conversion than people that are in a higher income area, luxury shoppers versus first time buyers. So all of these things matter. So the first question is who are you targeting and does your website meet these people with what they're looking for? And, along those lines, what actions should those users be encouraged to take? So in this example and we're going to use this example today because this is a website that's done incredibly well it's done well for a number of reasons. Number one everything that we need to be encouraged to act on is above that fold. I can get a hold of inventory here. I can look at getting service, everything I need to do from that homepage. So when they click on that Google business profile, they don't need to scroll and get confused, they can just take action right here. And so, in that action area. If I look at the search results pages, same thing. Is it easy to take If I've got four, five, six buttons on every piece of inventory or I've got horizontal inventory layout? It's really difficult experience for the consumer. Let's make that easy. And let's make those actions easy to take. Let's make sure that those actions are easy to take when they scroll down and they look on the vehicle details page, because having actions easy to take, of course, is key.
Speaker 2:So that second part becomes step two. What is the website layout? What is the navigation? How are those inventory pages structured? So let's go back here On that homepage. You'll notice that there's multiple ways for me to get to that inventory. I can type in and I can search for a white truck. I can misspell it and it still works. I can search new or I can search used, because the inventory search navigation is real Google contextual search. If I'm looking for a red car or a truck, everything is in here. The exact same way. That's what we're looking for.
Speaker 2:So once I get into those inventory pages, there's a number of things that we're looking for. How is this structured? Can I easily sort with one button to look at different pieces of inventory, or do I need to click that button multiple times and load multiple pages when I'm going to filter that inventory? Does it happen the exact same way inside of the mobile navigation? Because that's what people are really looking for.
Speaker 2:Two-thirds of your traffic is on a mobile device. A proper website was built mobile first with the mobile first experience, which also leads to the next question how are they filtering and sorting inventory? If you're the dealer, you need to look on your website and filter and sort your own inventory on a desktop. You need to filter and sort your own inventory on the mobile. And when you click sort, how easy is it? When you click filter, how easy is it? Can I click on multiple cars because I'm curious about a Civic and a Civic hatchback, or a CR-V and a CR-V hybrid, and then when you look at those, you can easily compare and say, okay, which one am I going to go look at? Is the search functionality intuitive? Is it responsive? Because if it isn't and you have to click on multiple buttons, people don't want to click through all kinds of buttons in today's experience. They want a simple experience that navigates with one click, because that's the way every other experience is. That's the way their Amazon experience is, that's the way their Apple experience is, that's the way they shop and, of course, that's the way they're going to shop for a vehicle, I would say, from there.
Speaker 2:The next question is what is the visual design and the aesthetics? Let's look at those. Are the vehicle images high quality? I'm just going to use the used car example over here. In this example it's taken indoors. I've got high quality images all across the board. I don't have a dirty car here. I've got beautiful, easy to scroll images that I can find with ease.
Speaker 2:This is what the consumer wants. Is there a clear use of white space? If your website looks like a party and every place where there's white spaces is filled, what you've really done is you've minimized conversion. I'll give you a hilarious example. Do you know why these buttons are here, sean? It's to make them move their eyeballs. They don't use these buttons, they use these and, as they scroll down, everything that they need to see is really easy for them to view. The description is easy to understand. All of these portions are simple to read. That's the way that it works in today's world.
Speaker 2:And then, of course, does that page design represent the dealership's brand? One of my favorite examples is do you have, whatever your messaging is, on every single one of your VDPs? You can throw Y by messaging on a vehicle details page. And it's really important At this, this dealership, because they've been there forever. They're a pillar of the community, 50 years in operation. It's one of the why buys. That is most important inside of this dealership. And then, of course, what does that messaging and content look like? Look at this as a great example Clean Carfax priced below Kelly Blue Book, fair Trade purchase price Incredible, when the information that matters most is sitting there right Mounted and balanced. Four new tires, did a rear brake job and performed a basic maintenance oil and filter change. These things matter. They tell the consumer that we did the things that matter to them and I really believe that on a well done page, that description matters because the consumer is going to read that.
Speaker 1:Yeah for sure. Just jumping in on this. You know, when you look at design like the one you're showing and you talked about white space utilization of, there are a lot of people and I'd never expect dealers to know this. But from a color psychology, from a design psychology, from a conversion rate optimization standpoint, design like this is very reminiscent of how Apple designs Lots of white space and clean.
Speaker 1:But then the reason why they use even the blue buttons on the left-hand side of this page underneath their price, all of that's designed as well to provide what would be considered contrast to a web developer or designers Like where can we put contrast in the right places? Because we want people. For example, that red button there on special offer that's specifically chosen because of the contrast of drawing people's eyes there, and so these are all. All of these examples you're showing are absolutely like top of the category in terms of visual design, aesthetics, thoughtfulness around, like how you're putting everything together on the page, and absolutely it all adds up to. It matters a lot between whether or not you're going to have acceptable conversion or you're going to be disappointed.
Speaker 2:Well, you know, there was some research that we did in the middle of website design and what we learned is that it looks for people a couple of different ways. What does the imagery look like? Is this the vehicle that I'm looking for? Can I understand the pricing terms? Does it have the equipment I'm looking for? And then, can I trust the dealership is next. Can I trust the car? What are the warranties available on that car? And has this car won any awards and accolades?
Speaker 2:And when all of that is displayable on every single vehicle details page, what you end up with is you end up with a consumer that says I made the right decision, and then you can get to the conversion buttons. And so how we display information matters, and a clean format is everything. Oh and, by the way, a clean format is everything on mobile device. It matters that the consumer can see all of this stuff. It matters that it resizes itself appropriately. It matters that the responsive technology was built for mobile first and then, after mobile first, it was built for desktop second. Those things are the most important elements. It's just like not only am I looking for my descriptions, I'm also looking for little things like is there a balance between detailed content and persuasive messaging, if all.
Speaker 2:I've done is throw buy from me. We're having a party get a $25 coupon, get a $50 coupon, get a $500 discount. What you've done is you've taken them away from the actual vehicle that they were looking for, and so the proper website balances these things and leads the consumer back towards asking a question and converting. It is the act of driving them back to conversion that matters most, and I think that that's really what it's all about. Which brings me to that next part what are the conversion buttons? So if there are multiple conversion buttons on the search results page no more than three I like this one. It's super simple Check availability, view details. It keeps it really easy for that consumer when they click in there.
Speaker 2:I go to that vehicle details page no more than four. I go to that vehicle details page no more than four. And in keeping it simple, what I've really done is I've maximized my conversion and I made it easy for them to call the dealership on a mobile device. Can I call the dealership on a mobile device through click to call from my search results page or from my details page? The more I can click in and call the dealership, the more calls I have. These things seem elementary, but the question is if your website provider hasn't done this already, why not? Do they have your best interest in mind? Did they try to coach you on why these things matter, or do they just let you run rampant with no suggestions, Because these things should be built out of the box this way, because this is the right experience, and then of course that's a good question what's that?
Speaker 1:that's a good question for people, uh, with their existing website provider. If your website provider has basically been sitting on their hands for years which I hate to say it, but most of them have they're not innovating. And that would probably mean that, unless you're specifically asking them and they're not going to do it for free they're probably also not doing their own conversion tests in their environment to figure out how to make sure that the product that they give to you is like what you're describing, where, on one page, there are multiple opportunities for me to call the dealership right, that one-to-one connection. I want that more than I want somebody filling out a form, and I've got that. Depending on the view I'm at within mobile, I've got a button at the top of the page. Hit it right now. I'm ready to talk to somebody If I want to see the one, like you said, call only right there on that kind of black button. I'm right in there.
Speaker 1:Those are really critically well thought design elements for converting traffic and if they get all the way into the srp and or vdp and you don't have all of the best practices there that you're constantly, the provider should always be refining, like this site. There's no way that that isn't already in play all the time, then you're doing yourself a disservice and and instead of just thinking, well, we don't really want to mess with that, you should absolutely be thinking we do want to mess with it because of, again, what I just said a few minutes back Dealers, you spend so much money on all of the things that you try to do to get people to come to your website Not that the website's necessarily cheap either, but that website has a job to do. Its primary job is to usher people into a conversion experience, so you've got an opportunity to serve them.
Speaker 1:That's right, and all of these things that you're breaking down are critical to making that happen.
Speaker 2:One of my favorite on here also, sean, is that the chat is in a great spot. It's easy to see, it doesn't cover up, it doesn't take over, it's just usable. It's usable on a mobile device, it's usable on a desktop device. It's not intrusive, right? I saw one where these buttons take over the entire bottom half of the page and what happens is the consumer can't even view or sort inventory. I saw another one where they scroll down and as they scroll down, they lose the ability and let me go to the search results page ability to filter, sort the inventory, and I thought to myself wow, that's crazy, I should be able to. Just, I don't know, look at white, because I want white or black, because I want black.
Speaker 2:That's what it's supposed to work like, right? So having things like add-on buttons makes sense, as long as they don't get in the way. We have been taught that everything needs to look like a party. Why have we been taught that? Well, because we've lived in automotive our entire lives and when we first launched it, we came off of a non-website experience where the dealership lot was a party. We ballooned cars every Saturday. If you balloon cars every Saturday, great. However, in today's world, you don't balloon the website. Ballooning the website makes it perform worse.
Speaker 2:It is ease of use, speed of use period, and that's why I thought this one was so great, and so I'll tell you. You have to test that on different devices. You've got to look at it on a cell phone, you've got to look at it on a tablet and you've got to look at it on a computer. When you drop to a tablet view, can you look at one piece of inventory or two. It sounds silly, but this is a totally different and better experience, because on a tablet, that's what they should be able to see. It is ideal to be able to get more inventory that's easy to view. Mm, hmm, let's say I get in there and I say, well, you know what? What does that car look like on my mobile device? I can just swipe that inventory, because that's what people do. Blame it on Tinder, I don't know. Maybe don't blame it on Tinder because maybe you had a lot of fun there before you got married. But regardless, it should work like that because that's the experience that people like.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Yep, so so true, and I loved. You said don't balloon your website.
Speaker 2:No ballooning your dealership website. Don't do that. I think that's going to be a new phrase, right? So it kind of makes me think you know what are the best practices for new and used inventory pages, because that's what this is all about. I wanted to showcase these because, in the world of showcases, what I've done is I've shown you how easy the experience can be. So, like we showed before, is that filtering system easy to use? Does it allow us to quickly get to my Carfax one owner vehicles for used cars Because for some people that really does matter a lot and my new car inventory? How easy is it for me to find things like price model? Do I have a special on that car?
Speaker 2:These things need to be easy to view because for the consumer, it changes their entire experience, especially on a mobile device. When you go to click on a mobile device and you click on an accord and you can't click on the civic also, people get really annoyed by that. You have to be able to click on multiple model lines. Could you also just minimize all of that inside of one setting and just show those results? Well, you should be able to, because we live in a today's world where it's simple, or I should be able to do it right inside of there, so I want a white civic with navigation congratulations. Now, their new 2025s look like they don't have the stock photos yet. That's okay, that's something that's easy to fix. What we'll do is we'll get with Evox images and get those plugged in, because that's the right experience.
Speaker 1:Yep, and there's always that embargo of images anyway, where there's that kind of kid where nobody has them yet, or at least the clean versions of them. Yep, totally a normal thing, whereas all these other things yeah.
Speaker 1:These other things you're talking about, though, are not acceptable or normal for a website where you should be able to have multiple vehicle selections, and you, I love the fact that you're also reminding the audience that this is what we all expect, because we are doing it on these other sites Like, if I go to Zappos because I'm looking for sneakers and I want to look at black Adidas, nike, converse, reebok, whatever, like, it'll show me all that stuff, and you're basically doing an almost identical illustration here, and, by the way, it maps exactly to what the consumer's expectations are, and so that's something that I don't think people from the dealer audience don't miss the value of that point, because we talk about it endlessly. The customer experience, the customer experience. The customer experience, that's not just when they walk through your brick and mortar doors. That's when they're approaching your website, mobile version of it. Maybe they're on the tablet, maybe they're in front of the TV with their tablet and their phone Doesn't matter.
Speaker 1:The point is, their expectation is that your site works like all the other ones that they go to, and when it doesn't, depending on how catastrophically bad it is for some, you just lose the opportunity altogether, because, well, we started this episode with you, sharing an actual example of something similar to where you would be like I'm out, you I don't. I think you made it further down that process of a horrible digital retailing experience before I and I was already like I'm already out on this. I'm not. No way am I doing that. This is where the rubber meets the road for people, because the consequences are severe just by not providing the right experience to the consumer on your website.
Speaker 2:Use this car as an example. I'm just going to use this steering wheel, or maybe these seats, as an example. By the way, how many miles do you think this vehicle has on it?
Speaker 1:I don't know. It looks very clean. I can tell that it's not a brand new vehicle. This is probably somewhere. Well, I'm a Toyota guy, so it's probably a 2015 or something, but it's very clean, Very clean. I don't know it has 175,000 miles on it, Wow.
Speaker 2:So think about this as the example. This is the perfect example of why all of these things matter. Think about this as the example. This is the perfect example of why all of these things matter. This car sits there on any player website with 175,000 miles. How many people really click on that car and look at it with 175,000 miles? Probably not many. They see. They click into the search results page See results page, let's see and from that search results page, they see wow, that thing's beautiful. They ignore the price at this point. Yes, the mileage is here, but these pictures look so clean.
Speaker 2:My question to you is what are the chances this dealer gets $18,000 for a truck with 175,000 miles on it? I'm going to say incredibly strong. I'm going to tell you, as a parent of like two kids in college and a third one that's in the middle of his car buying experience right now, this is the exact vehicle I would want to put my kid in, because I know that all that maintenance has been done. Do you pay up for a car like this? Of course you do, and your website showcases it and makes it easy. The only thing that I may add to this website is. I would love to see some sort of 360 degree view, but I got to tell you these pictures are so well done. Their presentation is so strong that in this world I might get around it. I can't tell you how many times I look at a dealership and they've got dirty pictures or pictures outside where they've got 15 cars all around it and they wonder why they're not converting.
Speaker 1:Yeah, do they have a popped hood picture on this truck?
Speaker 2:Oh, let's go see.
Speaker 1:uh, let's let's, let's go see there. It would almost be. It would be that, yeah, see there. Now they're spiking the ball on a. What'd you say?
Speaker 2:it was actually 2013 well 2013, with 175 000 miles yeah, they are get better than that?
Speaker 1:they are, rob gronkowski spiking the ball with power with showing that along with all those interior pics. I know some people like, hey, if you're a good detailer you're going to be able to do this. But oftentimes that's not happening. On a vehicle at this age and at these miles, that's like, yeah, I don't think that vehicle is going to be around for very long, especially I don't think so either. And to be around for very long, especially.
Speaker 2:I don't think so either. And all of these things are done right. The primary call to actions are easily usable on any device. You can see them. There's not too many. They all say something different. I'm just going to throw this out there. It doesn't say schedule a test drive on any one of those conversion buttons, right?
Speaker 1:That pet peeve of yours.
Speaker 2:Now let me move to a couple other things that I think matter quite a bit, right. So pricing transparency. I saw a big article today or yesterday that came out talking about do we price or do we not price? Your competitors have pricing. You may think that you're going to make more money when you don't have pricing.
Speaker 2:No consumer wants to convert on a car that doesn't have a price. Now, on a brand new vehicle, it is 100% acceptable to have the MSRP with a line through it because you do have a retail price on it. But call for price. No one is clicking on that. The more transparent you are no one, no one is clicking on that. The more transparent you are, the better the conversion is period and the more cars that you sell. Some of our clients are some of the top selling dealers in the united states, like in the top five with toyota as one example and in that world. I'll give you a tip they're just incredibly transparent and because they're incredibly transparent, they knock the cover off the ball in finance. Sure, they don't make $6,000 a rattle on the front end, but they sell well over 1,000 cars a month. So who would you rather be right?
Speaker 2:And I heard a rumor that when you sell a lot of cars you get to service a lot of cars, and I heard a rumor that service was kind of profitable, especially on your own vehicles. Maybe we should make sure we maximize that right. Also, what do these lead forms look like? I gave you that example on this mobile device. I click into this vehicle. It's right there. This whole time. Do they come over and make it very simple for me? That's the way it's supposed to be. If it is simple, they are more likely to do it period.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:If it's an elaborate form and it takes three seconds to open, you have minimized your conversion and also do those forms autofill. Your Google setup autofills your information. When they autofill, as possible, it maximizes the number of leads that fill out. Nobody wants to type in all of their information anymore, they just don't want to do it, and your website can be built to allow those to autofill. It's simply a setting On my optimization for mobile. Can I swipe through these things? If I can swipe through my images, everything works better, because every element should be swipable on a mobile device. Is it easy to tap on the mobile device? That's also it, so I would tell you. I mean I kind of got all excited running through this website because I love the way that these guys have laid out this website. My point is really, sean, if it is simple, we're going to use it.
Speaker 2:If it's easy to navigate, we're going to use it. I think that's what it's all about. So sorry for rambling on about that. I got all excited and I'm scrolling the website, thinking I can't wait to scroll some more. I want to look at all these vehicles. They're so easy. I can use this website.
Speaker 1:No, I think it's great. You made some other point. I mean listen, I'll try to unpack a couple of things. One when you talked about pricing, we might have seen the same article where people are like should we be putting pricing on our website? I still believe that the old adage of no price equals highest price. That's what I would still tell dealers. If you think that's your strategy, I'm going to tell you that most consumers are going to think if you have no price on your website, that means you're the highest price, and unless you're the only franchise in town or for a hundred mile radius or beyond what people would be willing to drive, that's probably a dangerous strategy. I think this is just my opinion. I think maybe one of the reasons that drives that pricing consideration, of not showing price now, is affordability has gotten so high for people trying to buy a car, but that doesn't matter. Don't let affordability of vehicles be the reason why you decide to not be transparent.
Speaker 2:Yeah, when you set up pricing and payments on your website don't hold gross. Whatever payment you put on your website should be your absolute lowest price on your lowest payment, on your absolute best tier, every single time, and with some down payment, with right, it's okay if you're 2,000, 3,000, 5,000, 10%, 20% down, because consumers do that. They do put down down payment to get to the car that, to get to the payment that they want. I was talking with a friend of mine and he was hilarious. He was telling me about the majority of his customers, not the minority. The majority of them have a payment in mind and when they work through the buying process, they put down whatever amount of money is required to get to that payment because their budget is their monthly budget, but they do have money put away, right? So when we calculate a digital retailing payment, you always, always, always put the lowest payment you can put on that vehicle and your digital retailing tool should help you put the lowest payment on there. Do you know?
Speaker 2:We're building this new payment tool where I'm about to roll it out. We call it Penny Perfect Payments. The way that it works is on the website. It automatically showcases the lowest payment on every vehicle, no matter what the lease or finance term is according to the bank. So if my Honda Accord is a 36-month lease, my Honda Civic is a 39-month lease and my CRV is an 84-month purchase, it will just automatically put that on there according to the new bank programs and it will update it every single day with the correct penny-perfect payment. You would think that's how it should work, right.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Because that's how it should work right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because that's what consumers want, absolutely. So yeah, don't hold gross there. It was just a tangent I forgot because I clicked on another dealer. He said I don't understand why anybody's looking at this and I laughed at him and I said are you serious? He said yeah and I said well, your first button says explore payments and the payment that you show is $1,000 a month on a Toyota Camry. How in the world did you get to $1,000 a month Camry? He goes well, it's the only one that I have in stock. It happens to be a fully loaded model and he's got two points and products sitting in the back end of that payment. And I'm just like what are you doing, man? Of course you're never going to sell that car, right? No one's. I can't wait to pay $1,000 a month for my Toyota Camry, said no one ever.
Speaker 1:Right, yes, wow, so much good stuff. I think what I'm going to do here is I'm going to recap. I also have an idea that's coming live on the podcast, I think, in production of this episode I should say post-production of this episode I think that we're going to have to make a bit of a check sheet on this because I think, stepping through well, the six steps plus all the stuff in kind of conversion rate optimization tips, I think this will turn into a very nice kind of a check sheet, if you will, or questions to ask your dealership, and we'll make that available in the not too, you know, let's just say near future. We'll create a document like that for people so that they'll remember all of this as almost a companion kind of takeaway to this episode For the audience. I just want to let you guys know we've kind of covered through now on two episodes. We still have yet another episode on websites to get to. We'll talk a bit about fixed ops on the next one, but this one is a recap.
Speaker 1:Six steps on optimizing inventory pages for better conversion Understand that target audience. That's step one. Step two analyze your website layout and navigation. Step three is to evaluate the visual design the aesthetics. What's this thing look like? I love the fact that there was a part in there where you even talked about how you're building trust with the type of content. That's step four examining the messaging and content on your site. You don't want to lose people off of things that are trust building factors with that online experience, even if it's mobile. Probably even more importantly there. Step five was to review conversion points. Step six to test the user experience on different devices. This is, of course, your website provider's responsibility, but it's yours too. So jump in there and play with those things and make sure that your website provider is absolutely doing what you pay them to do. And then the last thing I want to mention in recap is Karen did a really good job of going through very quickly on some of these things that I would consider best practices although not all practices are best, but you certainly ripped off a bunch of them around CRO, which is conversion rate optimization on new and used inventory pages like search and filtering.
Speaker 1:How you're presenting your vehicles. What your primary calls to action are Are there too many, are there too few? How transparent we were just talking about pricing. That is critically important. What's happening on your lead generation forms. Are those actually blocking people from becoming an opportunity for you to work with them? There's a whole lot of nonsense in forms and yet people still clamor for more leads, more leads, more leads, when in fact, that phone call off of the same listing might have actually brought them to your door much, much faster. So there's a lot of things there. And then, lastly, the mobile optimization piece. If you're missing out on that, then you're missing out on probably the larger portion of people that visit your website, which are the ones that are having the mobile experience. So, just a man, what a fantastic episode. I will remind people this is the great episode to view along with when you're listening. So do you have any parting shots, any closing remarks before I close this one down, kieran?
Speaker 2:That's it, my friend. I'm just grateful that we got to run through a website. I think the big lesson from today is let's all please just inspect. If it's your showroom and you had trash on your showroom floor, would you walk by it or would you pick it up? Your website's the same thing. If you've got trash on your website, you're not going to get the result that you want, and it is in every dealer's best interest the dealer principal or the general manager's best interest to click through these things themselves and say what do I think when I go through here with three lenses? Was it quick, Was it easy and could I find what I wanted? If you do those, life is going to be good.
Speaker 1:Agreed. Thanks, as always, for sharing your insights. It's evident that optimizing the new and used imageware pages and we all say we know this, but today I think you did a really good job of dissecting these points of value and practices and tips and things that people should have their eyes on has a significant impact on the dealership's website performance, and we need to get back to making sure that we're holding our vendors accountable and ourselves accountable. So, for the listeners and viewers, hope you guys enjoyed today's episode. Hopefully it's given you some valuable takeaways to improve your own website's conversion rates. If you enjoyed the episode, of course, make sure to subscribe, especially on YouTube, to Automotive Alchemy For more expert advice on digital marketing and conversion optimization. You can go to dealeralchemistcom. Until next time, thanks for listening everyone, have a great day and we'll see you on the next episode. Thank you.