What is Churn Rate and How Can Car Dealer Websites Control it?

An auto dealership’s churn rate is the proportion of customers who leave the car dealer website during any given time period, and it is a very important website metric that needs to be tracked closely. 

Your churn rate basically points to how well your car dealer website is doing in terms of retaining customers. In this article, we will give you a few effective tips that will help your car dealer website improve its churn rate.

Improve Your Training Materials and Service

There is no doubt that a great service experience is one of the biggest contributors to higher customer loyalty and better retention levels. Surveys have clearly shown that incompetent or rude staff and delayed vehicle servicing are two of the biggest factors that cause customers to jump to a rival auto dealership.

In addition to improving the service experience, auto dealerships must also focus on offering its clients more information their vehicles. Doing so can significantly boost dealer engagement with its customer base.

Work On Your Marketing Campaigns

Sometimes, attracting the wrong type of customers can result in a higher than normal churn rate. Re-evaluate your target audience profiles and assess if your website is currently targeting customers who benefit the most from your car dealership. 

Sometimes, your customer acquisition strategies might need some reworking. This is especially true if you’re seeing a lot of new leads pouring in, but not many of them eventually converting into paying customers.

Improve Communication and Customer Onboarding

The way you communicate with prospective and new customers is critical to client satisfaction. Whether it’s someone who came to your showroom floor once and never came back, or a customer who actually bought a car from you, send out a personalized message inviting them back, with an offer.

It could be for a better deal or a free car check-up. The idea here is to provide the dealership experience with a human touch, which has been proven to reduce churn rate, improve client retention, and boost dealership bottom-line.

Identify Clients Who are at Risk of Leaving

Automated marketing tools are very useful for targeting your customers who are at risk of churning. If a customer hasn’t visited your car dealer website for quite a while, it is highly likely that they may churn in the not so distant future.

Create an email that gets automatically triggered when customer activity goes on the decline. Keep in mind that this mail should feature high levels of personalization, as a generic sounding mail has almost no chance of persuading an ‘at risk’ client to return. 

Giving incentives such as a free car wash or interior cleaning is also a great idea, since everybody loves a freebie every now and then.

Do a Cohort Analysis

A cohort analysis examines user behavior over a particular length of time, and it’s easy to obtain from tools like FrogData. The insights from this analysis could show an auto dealer the number of clients that are actually being lost, and if the rate at which you are losing customers is improving or getting worse.

Go Back to Basics

The most obvious way to figure out why your clients are leaving is to simply reach out to them. Ask them for feedback so that you know what your auto dealership is doing wrong and what steps are needed to fix things.

It’s a good idea to keep your clients in the loop when planning for events. Get an understanding of how much your customers are interested in these new plans, so that you don’t end up wasting money without any returns. Doing so has the side benefit of introducing a human touch to your car dealer website, which has the potential to strongly influence clients to stay on with your dealership.

For more tips on optimizing your churn rate, Contact Us.