Inskeep,
This post is
a road map to internet marketing sucess. I hope it helps, so let's get rollin'.
Remember, what can't be measured, can't be paid. You need a base to measure from. Once you set a base, you can ask for $$ and measure it's results from the base.
Get Google Analytis on your current site ASAP.
Create a post sale survey ASAP.
Put together a simple but well thoughtout one page survey to get a picture of your shoppers buying patterns (i.e. time in market, # of competitors visited prior to purch, avg time spent on the net per week, did they visit your home site prior to buying, did they visit "other" car sites like....(ck all that apply), have they bought from you before, etc...)
Have the survey be completed on delivery, with EVERY delivery. Have the office staff key in the data to an online survey site. I HIGHLY reccommned SurveyGizmo.com (they have no peer). I reccomend that you use paper for the survey DO NOT have the shopper complete it online. Reps HATE all this stuff (becuase customers hate it) and they'll fill out the form for their customer.
ALSO, GET THAT EMAIL ADDRESS NOW!! Look into your Contact Management System and see how many email addresses are collected p/buyer. If your email collection rate is low, use this survey to collect email addresses.
Ok, what next?
Time for a drill down. If you do it right, here's what you'll see. I'm gonna plug in some fake numbers to help visualize, Follow along...
- 8 out of 10 shoppers were at your web wite prior to purchace (nice!)
- You get 4,800 unique visitors to you site p/month
- Of those visitors, You sold 250 of them.
- WHERE did the other 4,550 go?
- Woa! WHERE did the other 4,550 go? <--wanted some extra drama here!
- WHAT can you do to "work that existing audience" (get mngt involved)
- What is your lead to traffic ratio? (one lead per 100 visitors?)
- Does your existing vendor have products to help you improve this?
- What "hooks" can mngt create to give shoppers reason to reveal themselves? (get mngt involved)
Get that base of info in. Get to know that your customers are fragmented into 2 groups (those that know you and those that don't). SEO and PPC will bring in new faces and unless you have a gigantic ad budget, you'll need to have your A game on... Which leads us to:
- IF you increase the site traffic by 10% (via PPC or SEO) will that add 10% to sales? (no!!)
I come from the "Crawl, Walk, Run" school. Try to get that base of knowledge in, work with what you have now and try your damnest to improve what you have. After this effort, you'll know what to upgrade and why. Adding in a new site or PPC $$ fishing for sales could have a low ROI.
Hope this helps,
