10 Ways To Make Your Truck or Equipment Dealership Website More User Friendly
It’s not enough anymore for truck and equipment dealerships to simply have a website. Online visitors are demanding, they’re impatient and they can be fickle. If your equipment dealership website isn’t easy to use, they won’t stick around long enough to hunt down what they’re looking for. They will simply go elsewhere.
Prospects that leave your website unsatisfied – or, worse, irritated – are not likely to return. You have lost the lead and perhaps a future sale. Your website is your dealership’s primary marketing tool, but it is essentially a do-it-yourself resource for visitors. You’ve assembled a collection of text and visuals for them, but once they arrive at your site they have to be able to find what they want on their own.
You want visitors to have an easy, excellent experience so they will continue to return. Here are 10 ways you can improve the functional aspects of your equipment dealership website to make it more user-friendly:
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Keep it simple.
Cluttered visual design and information overload are hard on the eyes and confusing. Text should be concise and on-point, without any extraneous information. Visuals should serve a specific purpose.
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Use familiar language.
It’s better to present information in a straight-forward manner, rather than using too much industry jargon. Save the insider abbreviations, etc. for your blog or social media posts.
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Provide visual feedback.
When your visitor performs a task such as submitting a form, tell them it worked with a text box or by changing an icon’s color.
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Be consistent.
Use the same words for the same things throughout, to avoid confusion.
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Put everything right at hand.
Show available actions or options on each page, so visitors don’t have to remember them, or hunt around or guess.
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Make it easy to backtrack.
If your visitor makes a mistake, can they easily return to where they were? Can they always find the home page, from any other page?
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Help them correct mistakes.
We’ve all filled out a form incorrectly or clicked on the wrong box. Use text and/or color to quickly indicate where mistakes occurred and explain how to fix them.
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Offer “help” that helps.
If your equipment dealership website includes a section for help or support, make resource information easy to find and understand, so it is actually valuable. Give visitors multiple options for further contact, such as phone numbers, live chat and email, and respond quickly when someone requests assistance.
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Scalability.
Some of your website visitors may be brand new to your dealership or even brand new to the trucking or the construction industry, whereas others will be long-time veterans who may also be fully conversant with your site. Visitors can also be at any stage in the buying cycle. To positively accommodate everyone, you have to offer a wide range of information with easy, intuitive navigation that enables each visitor to quickly zoom in on what they want.
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Mobile-friendliness.
Today, any successful equipment dealership website has to be optimized for mobile users. No one is more “on the go” than truckers and contractors. If they need something and your website makes that hard to access, or hard to read, people will stop thinking of your dealership as a valuable resource.
