In 2021, car dealerships around the nation were hit with an unusual dilemma — consumers wanted to purchase vehicles, but inventory couldn’t keep up with demand. This has been an issue plaguing dealerships for over a year now. While there is optimism that there is an end in sight for the shortage, in the interim, dealerships need to find effective ways to make money and help ensure future sales. One of the best ways to accomplish this is to get foot traffic through your doors via your service center. In fact, if you can gain an active service customer, they will be four to seven times more likely to buy their next vehicle from your dealership. An effective strategy for increasing your active service customers is attracting new customers through personalized offers.
However, beyond simply running an ad online showcasing a service deal, it is essential to ensure that when you run an ad or decide on a promotion, you have a service offer landing page to match every deal. In this guide, we’ll take a deep dive into why service offer landing pages are a valuable tool for your business, the benefits they offer, and what components should be present in a quality landing page. The result is that you can begin driving traffic to your service center today, which will boost your revenue while helping secure future car sales when inventory levels adjust.
Why You Need Service Offer Landing Pages
You have most likely run several promotions for your service center in the past. Whether providing a repeat customer with a discount coupon for an oil change or running an ad online targeting new customers with first-time service deals, most dealerships have experimented with service offers at some point in time. However, often what is lacking from this strategy is the creation of dedicated landing pages for each offer. In worst-case scenarios, dealerships filter their leads to their website, relying on customers to determine where to go next and how to claim the promotion. In better situations, dealerships might build a dedicated landing page where they jettison leads from every promotion into one pool.
This is where there is room for improvement. Building out service offer landing pages for each promotion offers a few key advantages:
- Personalized deals: When someone lands on a service offer page that was specifically designed for the promotion offered to them, they are more likely to convert. For example, let’s say you are providing a free oil change with the purchase of a tune-up for Toyota Camrys. You target customers in your database that own a Toyota Camry with an email ad. The customer clicks on the ad. If you have built a landing page dedicated to this offer, the experience for the customer will be seamless, and they will be more likely to convert. If, however, you simply redirected that customer to a landing page featuring all of your current promotions, they might get distracted or not see the promotion they came there for, and subsequently, you can lose their attention.
- Full integration: Different promotions should trigger different actions. By building a dedicated landing page for each service offer, you can ensure that the page is fully integrated with your scheduling system and that the right promotional discount is applied to the customer’s booking. This helps cut down on confusion when they show up for a service and expect a discount. With a broad, catch-all approach, you rely on the customer to remind your service center about the deal that brought them in.
- Valuable analytics: Not every service offer campaign will be a home run. When you create a separate landing page for each promotion, you can gain far better insights into which campaign is earning you the highest return. This is critical when testing out new promotions and helps you gain valuable data about your customers.
The Anatomy of a Quality Service Offer Landing Page
Understanding the importance of building out dedicated service offer landing pages for each promotion you plan to offer is the first step. From here, it is imperative that the landing pages you create — or work with an agency to have created — meet a basic set of criteria. Use the following as your checklist for the anatomy of a quality service offer landing page.
An Eye-Catching Design
After someone follows a link to your landing page, one of the first things you need to do is capture their attention with a brilliant design. To begin with, ensure that you are using high-quality images that will show up well on any device. Next, make sure that the page matches your brand standards. Keeping consistency will help your customers learn to recognize your brand. Finally, be sure that your design works well on any device. This is particularly important when considering how images and forms will appear on mobile devices. Test across phones and tablets to see how easy it is for a customer to understand the information and convert.
Engaging Copy
Alongside how your page looks, the copy you place on the page will make a big difference in your conversion numbers. To begin with, make sure that the copy matches the promotion that led the customer to the page. For example, if your ad copy stated “15% Off All Oil Changes”, reiterate that promotion right away on the landing page. If you don’t have consistency in the copy, a customer might feel like they landed on the wrong page.
Next, make sure your call to action is clear and concise. This should be easy for a customer to see right away. Think action statements like:
- Schedule Now!
- Call Now
- Save on Your Oil Change
- Clip This Coupon
Any button that will lead to a form or scheduling tool should be easy to read and click or tap. The fewer steps you have between seeing the original ad and converting, the better.
Fast Load Time
How quickly your landing page loads will dictate a lot. For starters, Google tracks this variable when determining which pages to serve up in search results. Additionally, customers have short attention spans. If a page takes too long to load, they will simply abandon the experience. One of the most important ways to improve your landing page’s load time is to directly embed it into the web page via a script rather than using an Iframe. If you are unfamiliar with the difference between these two technical approaches, Iframes are an inline frame that is utilized to embed a landing page within a page. They can also be used to add videos and other components to an existing webpage. The problem with Iframes is that they are not optimized for speed, nor do they allow Google to crawl the content of the page, which can hurt your SEO. Conversely, directly embedding a page with a script allows your landing page to load rapidly and is crawlable by Google, which all helps to boost your page’s rankings and ensures you don’t lose important leads.
Mobile-Friendly
Gone are the days when a phone was simply a device to place calls. Today, smartphone and tablet users rely on their mobile devices to do everything from shopping for groceries to scheduling their next dentist appointment.
Let’s look at a few quick facts:
- Nearly 55% of website traffic now comes from mobile devices
- Over 92% of internet users use their mobile phones to access the internet
When building a service offer landing page, the page must be designed to be mobile-friendly. This is more than simply creating a page that will change sizes based on the size of the device it is being accessed on — a design often referred to as mobile responsive. Rather, this is about thinking through the entire design and flow of a page from the perspective of a mobile user. How easy is it to read the copy? How simple is it to follow a call to action? What do the images and promotions look like on a mobile device? How easy are forms to fill out or schedulers to use? All of this should be prioritized in the design of the page.
Easy Coupon “Clipping”
Integral to your service offer landing page should be the promotion itself. In most cases, you’ll be offering your customer a coupon to use for their service. However, gone are the days when people want to physically print off a coupon, clip it, and bring it in. Instead, people prefer to use coupons digitally. Make it easy for your customers by allowing them to clip the coupon to their Google Pay or Apple Wallet accounts. This is not only convenient, but it helps keep you top of mind. Even if a customer forgets about the deal you offered at the moment, they will see their coupon in their digital wallet and will be reminded about your promotion.
Integrated into Scheduling
Finally, make sure that your service offer landing page is fully integrated into your scheduling tool. This is important for a few reasons. First, you want to make scheduling a service as easy as possible. The more steps you require, such as calling the service center or chatting with an agent online, the more likely you are to lose that customer.
Secondly, you want to ensure that you attribute the right sales to the right campaigns. This will help you immensely as you track and analyze the success of different promotions. By funneling leads to a specific landing page where they can schedule the service, you can easily trace their path from the ad they saw to the revenue your business earned.
Request a Consultation Today
If you are looking to boost your service center business, our team is here to help. At J&L Marketing, we specialize in creating customized service offer landing pages. We will work with you to determine the right promotions for your dealership. From there, we will create customized landing pages for each deal you plan to offer. Additionally, we’ll handle all the heavy lifting on the technical side of things, ensuring that your new landing pages are integrated seamlessly into your scheduling system and your website and that coupons can be quickly clipped into digital wallets.
To learn more about how we can help, reach out for a consultation today. We look forward to becoming your trusted marketing partner as you drive your business forward.
