How Car Showrooms Should Use Technology to Stay Ahead of the Competition

When people want to purchase a car, the usual practice is to visit 2 to 3 showrooms until they find the vehicle that satisfies their whims. This, and the fact that car showrooms are often located close to one another, makes the auto business quite competitive; if you don’t satisfy your customers, they will just walk a few steps down the road and find a dealership that will.

However, there is a way to keep your visitors interested, improve your conversion rate, and stay ahead of your next-door competitors. With visitor analytics technology, you can design your showroom in the most effective way possible, guaranteeing more visits, more engagement, and more sales.

Here is how:

Measure customer dwell time

According to a 2018 report by Autotrader, at the start of their shopping, 60% of car buyers are undecided on which car to buy. As a result, they often require some convincing and are open to considering various options. This is in line with the common belief that the longer a car salesman can keep the visitor in the showroom (and interested), the higher the chances that a purchase will be made.

Therefore, as a car dealership manager, the goal is to improve customer dwell time at your showroom and convert most walk-ins into paying customers. However, you can’t improve your showroom dwell time if you cannot measure it. Visitor analytics technologies make it possible to measure how many minutes every visitor spends in the showroom. This number may then be compared to industry standards, helping managers find out how much more time they need to keep your visitors in the showroom to lock down a sale.

Measure customer engagement

While longer dwell time in the showroom may result in higher sales conversion rates, it is important to keep the visitor engaged throughout the period. Some reports indicate that car buyers do not want to spend over 60 minutes on selecting a car. After selection, the ideal negotiation duration for the average buyer is 45 to 60 minutes. This number will definitely vary for different visitors, but keeping visitors interested is nonnegotiable; once people feel like you don’t have something new to offer them, they lose interest and walk out.

With data from heatmap devices, you can measure customer engagement and tell which areas of the showroom previous visitors spent the most time, and which areas they ignored or walked past quickly. This gives you an idea which sections of your dealership visitors find interesting and which areas are “boring.” You may then overhaul the boring areas by replicating the features of the interesting sections. By doing so, you increase dwell time in your showroom, and at the same time, improve customer engagement. Sales will, undoubtedly, follow.

Test and optimize new marketing strategies

You can only increase dwell time and customer engagement when people visit your dealership, and one way to pull in new customers is via adverts and marketing campaigns. With people counting solutions, dealerships can measure how effective an ad campaign is by counting how many new customers visited after the release of a new advert. With this information, decisions may be made on which adverts are effective and which ones need to be scrapped. Additionally, collected data can be used to optimize the strategies that work and improve their reach and effectiveness.

Visitor analytics can also be used to measure the popularity and influence of newly-unveiled cars. Visitor traffic data tells the manager how many new visitors were recorded and heatmap data shows the percentage of the visitors that spent time inspecting the new car (or taking test drives). Over time, this information may be used to determine the car brands that your dealership will display.

Analyze location-based trends

Location plays a prominent role in a car dealership’s performance and with data from people counting devices; managers can compare their showroom’s visitor traffic to that of their closest competitors. Consequently, the manager may come up with new marketing initiatives to improve footfall and use traffic data to test (and optimize) new ad and marketing campaigns.

Predict customer needs

Data from the demographic analysis technology help dealerships improve customer satisfaction. It tells you how many of your visitors are female, the age range they belong to, and so on. This information may be used to predict customer needs, helping the dealership provide streamlined services. If, for example, your showroom is visited mostly by women over 40, you can use historical heatmap data to find out the car brands that women of this age engage with the most. Combine this with your sales data to figure out the brands that this customer class prefers to purchase. As a result, when customers visit, they find exactly the cars they’re looking for. This will, of course, improve engagement and sales.

Conclusion

When backed by accurate data, it becomes increasingly easier to stay ahead of the competition. Your showroom will be designed to keep customers interested long enough to convince them to make a purchase. Your marketing campaigns will target the exact group of people you want it to, leading to more visitors, more engagement, and more sales.

All these are made possible by visitor analytics technology. V-count is one of the biggest providers of visitor analytics solutions in the world, and in addition to providing the devices, we also help our customers safeguard their data on cloud-based platforms. We also help them collate their data and analyze said data using the latest tools in AI and Machine Learning. As a result, we are able to provide customers with easy-to-understand reports that not only outline the problem but also proffers the most suitable solutions.

Please contact us today for your free trial. You may also give us a call at +1 866 549 9360.