According to Shopify, over 60% of consumers prefer to visit a retail store’s website before they visit them in person. This is the same across all demographics – rural and urban, old and young, men and women, etc. Your website is more often than not the first impression your dealership makes with potential buyers, and you have to make sure it’s a good one.
“You never get a second chance to make a first impression.”
– Will Rogers
How do you know if your website is making a great first impression? Read the 5 tips below to help you know if your website is wowing potential manufactured home buyers, or if it’s time for a refresh.
1. Low Conversion Rate
Marketers throw around the term ‘conversion rate’ all day long, and it’s a term that can mean a whole lot of different things, depending on the context. In the case of website efficacy, we’re looking at the ratio of website users that convert to web leads. In the manufactured home industry, a good conversion rate is between 2 and 5 percent. This means that for every 100 visitors to your site, you should be getting 2 to 5 lead forms in your inbox. If your site is higher than that, you’re rocking it! If it’s lower, you need to look at updating your site so that it’s more optimized for conversions.
2. Not Mobile Responsive
Over 80% of manufactured home buyers are looking at retailer sites on their phones, so your website needs to look just as good on a mobile device as it does on a PC. In fact, according to Toptal, 88% of users will never returns to a site if it has a poor mobile experience. The images, videos, text, and 3-D tours need to be easy to see and navigate from a mobile device, and the site needs to load quickly. A poor user experience on a mobile device will cause potential users to leave your site for your competitors, costing you business.
3. No Space for Videos or 3-D Tours
Bild Media gets hundred of thousands of visits on its dealer network of sites monthly, and the most popular elements on a manufactured home retailer’s site are the videos and 3-D tours. Pictures and floor-plans are great, but they can’t put a buyer inside the home like a video or 3-D tour. Videos and tours can be challenging to make – but fortunately for us, the home manufacturers in our industry provide that media for their retailers. If yours does not, you need to ask them to start providing tours and videos because it’s costing them, and you, business. If your site does not have the capability to show videos and 3-D tours, it’s likely time to upgrade.
4. It’s sloooooow
Your website should be loaded and functioning in 3 seconds or less. According a to a recent poll from Hubspot, over 60% of users will abandon a site if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. That’s a potential loss in 60% of your business if you have a slow site. If your website is taking longer than 3 seconds to load, it needs to be fixed. Assuming you don’t have a slow connection on the device you’re using to browse the site, you need to talk to your web developer and figure out how to speed things up. Some of the common causes of slow websites are large image files, slow hosting servers, too many elements on one page, too many plug-ins on the site, and others.
5. It’s Old
If your website is 5+ years old, it is very likely needs to be updated. Buyers see an old, outdated website, and they assume everything else about the business is old an outdated. If the website is of poor quality, they will question the quality of the product, the quality of the customer experience, and the quality of service after the sale. Don’t lose 10s, or likely 100s, of thousands of dollars in sales because you have an outdated website.
Do you need help creating a modern, customer friendly website that will help you sell a lot more homes? Click here to schedule a FREE consultation to see how you can improve your website and sell more homes.