Want to improve your online car sales process? Here are 4 tips to help you maximise every opportunity.
Consumer demand continues to grow for online car sales. Where are your cars being advertised right now? How long would it take you to find out? For many large dealerships and dealer groups, it’s time consuming to manage stock within the ad cycle. There’s also the issue of staff engagement – who draws the short straw and has to manage your stock advertising list?
Most importantly, how do you know if your advertising is working and whether you’re getting a return on your investment? In this blog, we’ll share 4 tips for selling your cars, whether you’re an independent dealer, franchised dealer or dealer group.
1. Define your ROI
The definition of a return on your investment for online car sales really boils down to what matters to you. Whilst the ultimate goal will always be profit, there are other factors to build into your ROI picture.
- How much time are you investing in your advertising?
- Are your employees engaged in managing your stock lists?
- Do you have visibility of where your stock is advertised and how those channels are performing?
It’s worth considering the overall picture of advertising, not just the end goal.
2. Get visible
There are some brilliant new solutions in the market to help you track where every piece of stock is currently advertised.
For example, at Autofinity we’re able to tap into your extensive inventory database and layer your advertising on top. This means you can search for any vehicle and immediately see up-to-date information about it, as well as where it’s currently being advertised.
Critically, you can see how long the advert has been live, so you can make adjustments if you’re not getting the response you’d expect. Another great feature is ‘alerts’ – meaning you’re notified if an advert has been live for a while, so you can take action and make any necessary adjustments.
3. Speed to market
What’s the real cost to you of not getting a car to market as soon as possible? A potentially lost sale? A data headache? More investment in time and resources to get the car advertised and sold?
Often, it takes a while to get your cars to market because they’re so hard to track down in your multiple systems. Delays cost money, cars depreciate and you spend far too much time trying to locate atypical cars, like rentals and those being serviced. Cars can get lost in the system and become lost opportunities in the process.
This is particularly problematic for large dealer groups who operate across multiple locations and franchises. What you need is quick search, instant alerts and API integration with all your systems and advertising sites so you can form an end-to-end picture of your inventory, from source to sale.
4. Seeing is believing
Consumers buy cars from dealers they trust, so it’s vital that every listing includes accurate descriptions, quality images and up-to-date data.
Data accuracy is the most critical piece of your advertising puzzle. And regardless of how good a car looks on your advert, it’s only as good as its description.
At Autofinity, we always suggest you focus on getting the data right first. This means you should use comprehensive data sources to make sure your descriptions are accurate. Quality images are also important – we offer a quality control service to accept/reject images to save you the time.
Ready to sell?
At Autofinity, we have created a data solution that matches comprehensive data sources with an automated back-end platform. This means, we’re able to accept multiple data feeds via APIs, check data accuracy, update records and then push your stock to advertising sites – all from a single platform. We’ve developed our intuitive system based on feedback from real dealers.