One of the most frustrating things a salesperson deals with is when a car shopper submits a lead, the salesperson calls and emails and … crickets. The person who submitted the lead never responds. Why submit a lead in the first place?
Perhaps the shopper wants to know a vehicle’s price without talking to a person. Maybe that consumer is not quite ready to buy or fears being pressured. Or perhaps that person submitted leads to several websites and is being bombarded with similar calls and emails from your competitors.
How can you get this car shopper’s attention, assure that person there is nothing to fear, stand out from your competitors and help bring the shopper down funnel by providing the answers or information that consumer needs?
With lead follow-up videos.
To generate a higher response and engagement rate from your leads, incorporate videos into your lead follow-up process.
Live Video Calling
When salespeople get assigned leads, they text those people a URL link. When the customers click on the link, a one-way video call is initiated where the customers can see and hear the salespeople, but the salespeople can only hear the customers. This is to protect the customers’ privacy, but if the customers want to turn these calls into two-way video calls, they can easily do that.
Video calls are much more personal than phone calls, and since the pandemic, most people are comfortable with them. Look for a video calling app that works across all platforms and devices.
Email Autoresponder
Autoresponders aren’t ideal, but receiving an auto-response message with a video attracts more attention than most. Feature a pre-recorded greeting from the GM or a salesperson — whichever the dealership prefers. Thank the callers for their interest and let them know they will be receiving another video soon.
Ideally this auto-responder email will bring car shoppers to a landing page to view the video versus viewing the video inside the email body. On a landing page, you can feature other such videos as customer testimonials, value proposition and inventory videos.
Vehicle Walkaround Videos
These videos can be pre-recorded or done live by salespeople. If car shoppers aren’t responding, send a pre-recorded walkaround video of their vehicles of interest. If you have a process to record all vehicles (which is just as easy as taking photos), the salespeople can simply access the videos, record personalized voice-overs and send them to the customers.
Reengagement Videos
For these videos, you can create personalized lead follow-up videos for each of your shoppers or create a library of generic lead follow-up videos (that don’t say the shoppers’ names) that follow your regular lead follow-up process. These can even be sent out automatically.
No matter which of these processes you choose, make sure these videos mirror your current lead follow-up process. The message for shoppers at each stage will remain the same. The only thing different will be that you are delivering the message as a video and not as an email.
Appointment Confirmation Videos
Managers should always call to confirm the appointment, but I also recommend the salespeople send appointment confirmation videos. The key here is to “make it personal” and use information that you have obtained in your discussions with shoppers to personalize their expectations of the test drive. Always say the date and time of their appointments.
Using videos in your lead follow-up process is a great way to increase the ROI on your current lead spending. Videos will surprise and delight your customers while making you stand out from the competition.
