Increase Views on Your Online Car Sale with accessibe
Thanks to the internet, the automotive industry has evolved rapidly over the years, with 59% of car purchasers now spending their time researching for their car online before either solidifying the deal via the world wide web or walking into the actual dealership and signing the papers. In other words, the new goal for dealerships should be to make the digital experience of car shopping just as positive as the actual in-person dealership experience.
With that in mind, unfortunately a forgotten group of individuals are those with disabilities. Nearly 1 in 4 people in the United States has a disability (~61 million adults, roughly 26% of the population of the U.S.). Disabilities can include, but are not limited to:sight impairments, physical impairments, and more. Many companies do not have websites that are truly accessible for disabled individuals, and are therefore missing out on potential buyers.
The Struggle with Website Accessibility for Car Dealership Websites
So why aren’t dealerships making their website accessible? Sounds like an easy win, right? Making a dealership’s (or any business’s website) accessible is the right thing to do and it will also increase sales by including more potential customers. So what’s the holdup?
Since car dealerships webpages are constantly being updated, making sure the website is accessible using the traditional methods such as app plugins, web developers, or only installing certain applications one at a time can reach tens of thousands of dollars and take a lot of time. Therefore, dealerships typically will first try to put this responsibility onto their marketing teams to try and save money.
The downfall of this strategy is that while marketing teams can easily add alt text to images, add call to action buttons, include different font sizes and contrasts, the team usually lacks the knowledge of making a website truly accessible according to complex regulations and the team will eventually lack the time and resources to keep up with the new content.
Having only a partially accessible site can become an expensive problem. If a site is not accessible according to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), your business is at risk of an ADA lawsuit. Your dealership’s website must be compliant at all times, and your marketing team is most likely not capable of ensuring this alone.
How to Utilize accessiBe for Website Accessibility (and Increase Online Car Sales!)
A great investment for car dealership websites is accessiBe, which is a market leader in automated web accessibility. This solution makes the process 100% automatic, using machine-learning and computer vision technologies. Over 113,00 websites currently rely on accessiBe to maintain their website’s accessibility state. Their AI technology scans websites every 24 hours to identify newly uploaded content and perform the necessary remediation. You get round-the-clock accessibility with this simple solution. A non-accessible site can be made fully accessible within just 48 hours.
Investing in AccessiBe Guarantees:
- WCAG and ADA compliance: accessiBe maintains ongoing compliance with web accessibility legislation
- Certification and statement: accessiBe provides an accessibility statement and certification of performance
- Daily compliance monitoring: accessiBe performs 24-hour automatic maintenance scans of new and updated content
- Monthly compliance auditing: accessiBe sends professional compliance audits every month to your inbox
accessiBe is also affordable, coming in at $49 a month and also offering a free trial to ensure you are making the right decision for your site. So why try and get away with either cheap plugins or applications that only address between 5% to 15% of accessibility legislation requirements, or expensive developers? In short, dealerships should invest in accessiBe and start driving up their sales by targeting an additional 20% of the population for success in 2021.