Reading Your Customer's Browsing Language

The automotive industry was forced to make big changes due to the pandemic this year to stay afloat. While most auto dealers decided to get digital retailing tools, we found that these tools ended up not being the solution. What really made a difference was the operational changes. Some customers still wanted to negotiate over the phone, submit a lead form, and talk to a human before buying a car. In the end, auto dealers ended up figuring it by listening to what the customers wanted and giving it to them.

The biggest difference between being able to buy a car in person and online for the auto dealer is seeing the body language of a customer when they enter the dealership. Auto dealers need to take a closer look at their online shoppers’ browsing language and listening to what they’re looking for and giving them what they want.

After all, a shopper spends an average of 30,000 seconds, in other words, 8 hours,  on their shopping online.  Not only do shoppers spend an abundance of time online, they also generate an average of 100 GB of data as they browse the web each day. To tap into this goldmine of data, auto dealers need to take a closer look at the hints that these shoppers are dropping as they browse the website and use it to create the best shopping experience from beginning to the end.

Body Language vs. Browsing Language

The Problem

The problem with losing the body language is that dealers are not able to listen to their customers. You need to be in-person to see their body language. Dealers won’t be able to use their ability to read body language as shoppers are browsing online. So what needs to happen is that they need to tap into the online data, tracking the footsteps, and following them to ensure that the shopper is getting what they want.

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My Amazon homepage shows me all the camera equipment I’ve been recently shopping for and some suggestions on what I should buy. What they’re doing is personalizing my experience because they’ve been analyzing what and how I browse. Even Best Buy sends me emails about my shopping cart to remind me that I still have items in my cart. These two examples show how these companies use personalization to get more engagement.

What can you learn from browsing language?

When you take a closer look at what shoppers are doing on your website, you can learn so much about their shopping behavior. Based on what you learn, you can take that data and use it in your advertising efforts. Three items you can learn about these shoppers that are significant to your digital marketing efforts are purchase preference, likelihood to purchase, and transaction requirements.

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With purchase preference, you can tell what kind of vehicle they’re looking for, what color, trim, price range, or if they’re looking for a new or used car. Likelihood to purchase can give you a date range of when they’re ready to purchase and if they’re ready to come into the dealership. Gathering information about transaction requirements can provide you with whether the shopper is looking to lease or finance their vehicle, if they want to trade-in, the importance of credit approval for them, or if they’re concerned about high down payments.

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The first step is to detect what your shoppers are doing on your website. Do you have a first-party data tracking platform? Do you use Google and Facebook Pixels to gather shopper data for you to analyze when you’re on the website? Does your CRM have in-depth information about your shoppers? These are some questions you should be asking yourself, and if any of them is no, you should get into contact with the vendors that are in charge of these platforms and get them to give you access to get you started with analyzing your own shopper data.

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To segment your shoppers based on their behaviors, you need to know what these shoppers are looking at and what they’re doing to determine your next steps. Segments should be created based on your business objectives, whether it be selling more used cars, or selling vehicles that have been on the lot for over 90 days. Once you segment your shoppers, it will help you determine how you will push for your retargeting efforts and ultimately determine how you personalize engagement with shoppers. With this being said, you can learn so much more from a shopper from their browsing language versus their body language.

Action plan for building your browsing language abilities

To build your browsing language abilities, you will need to follow three steps:

1. Detect what your shoppers are doing on your website
2. Segment your shoppers based on their behaviors
3. Personalize your engagement with them everywhere

Detecting what your shoppers are doing on your website with a first-party platform or the Google and Facebook pixels will enable your dealership tracking capabilities to begin segmenting shoppers based on their online shopping behavior. Once you’ve implemented your business objectives and set up segments in your analytics and advertising platforms, you will ultimately be able to better engage with your shoppers through personalized messaging.

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The messaging can come from emails, advertising, or simply using data that has been linked from your analytics to your CRM. With data that has been consolidated from all channels, a simple phone call can bring shoppers into the showroom and experience a shopping experience that is made especially for them.