Are traditional website form submissions dead?

[BillKVMotorCo]

The other thing you run into with dealers that have switched to CTA buttons that open "chat" is you often just end up with a lead form within the chat window. This isn't any better than a standard lead form folks, in fact it's probably worse...
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Yuck.

 

[Matthew Davis]

As a provider of straight-up "trade us your information for your trade-in value or estimated monthly payment" tools, I can say with certainty that website submission forms aren't dead. The website conversion stats have held roughly constant since TradePending's founding in 2014.

As a marketer, I work hard to ignore my personal biases (chat vs. email vs. form fill vs. phone) to provide as many means as possible for customers / prospects to engage with us in their preferred method, not mine.

 

[RickWillis]

Spot on!

We have all been trained to use the internet for price shopping. The dealership's reputation and brand identity mean NOTHING in this environment. You can't build trust with a picture and a price.

Rick

 

[digital_gangster]

Kevin Frye turned a lot of the CTAs into chat starters within the Wyler Auto Group site. He was speaking very highly about how well this worked for them at Digital Dealer this year.

One major issue occurring today is the dealership staff have become used to playing the "take it or leave it" approach due to such low supply. It isn't translating well to customers.

We moved the Contact Us CTA to open live chat on all sites last fall. I feel pretty good about the reaction so far and have not heard anything negative from our BDC. And believe me, they would certainly speak up. We are still trying to nail down the analytics/ROI on this change, but we'll get there.

 

[mediaforce]

Submitting forms on websites is a process that dates back to the early days of the internet. Although the methods and technologies have changed over time, the basic process of submitting a form has remained largely the same. There are both pros and cons to using website forms, and it ultimately depends on your specific needs and goals.