Tips For Automotive Email Marketing

admin | Automotive Marketing | automotive email marketing, automotive marketing tips

Gaining a competitive edge in marketing can make or break a dealership, so it is important to master the art of automotive marketing. While there are many aspects of automotive marketing worth studying, for this article, we will focus on email marketing.

Specifically, we will go over some tips for ensuring you run your email marketing as efficiently as possible. We will then discuss why outsourcing your email marketing efforts may be best for maximizing your ROI.

Tips for Effective Automotive Email Marketing

While mastering the art of automotive email marketing takes time and sufficient resources, we recommend taking into account the following to ensure you start your dealership off on the right track:

• Understand Your Specific Marketing Goals: Before you begin your campaign, be sure to understand exactly what you are trying to achieve by using email marketing. While this may seem obvious, too many dealerships don’t take the time to set specific goals for their campaigns, which results in low ROI and lots of unnecessary spending. We recommend making sure your goals are specific, measurable, and achievable. In other words, a goal of “increasing service appointments” is too broad. Instead, create goals more along the lines of the following: “Increase service leads for oil changes by 10 percent among customers who purchased from my dealership within the last five years.”

• Become Experts on Your Target Audience: One of the core values of marketing is effective communication. And you must be able to communicate with your customers in a way that works for them. So, before you start your campaign, be sure to learn everything there is to know about your target audience. Learn who they are, how they like to receive their emails, when they like to receive them, whether they read their emails on mobile or desktop devices, and anything else you can find out that may influence how you market your products and services.

• Don’t Send Too Many Emails: One of the worst things that can happen during an email marketing campaign is having your recipients list your emails as “spam.” And one of the best ways to get customers to label your emails as “spam” is to send too many emails. In other words, don’t annoy your customers with a bombardment of messages. The amount of emails you should send depends on what you’re trying to do and who your target audience is. To illustrate, if you’re trying to reach customers who are already active with your dealership, you can probably send them 1-2 emails per month. However, if you’re trying to engage new customers, you may want to limit your communication to one email every 1-2 months. Anything more than that may be taken as annoying and could prompt your customers to unsubscribe or label you as “spam.”

Outsource Your Automotive Email Marketing to Increase ROI

While abiding by the tips listed above will help you enhance your marketing, we recommend outsourcing your email marketing efforts to fully optimize your campaigns and increase your ROI. The following are just some of the benefits your dealership will receive by outsourcing your email marketing campaigns to a third-party automotive BDC:

• Save Money: One of the biggest advantages of outsourcing your email marketing campaigns is the money you will save. If you manage your own campaigns, you must cover all of the costs associated with this operation, including:
  • Finding and hiring marketing experts
  • Conducting exhaustive company and marketing training
  • Salary, benefits, and other overhead costs for employees

On the other hand, if you outsource your email marketing, you only pay one cost. And while this exact cost depends on many factors, it is never as high as the combination of the costs listed above.

• Save Time: In addition to saving money, outsourcing your marketing efforts saves you valuable time. Finding and hiring employees, training them, and overseeing the extensive operations of a full-scale email marketing campaign takes lots of time that could be better spent on selling cars or servicing customers at the dealership. We recommend working with a trained third-party BDC, so you can focus your time and energy on growing your business.

• Work with Email Marketing Experts: We’re guessing that you specialize in selling and servicing cars, not automotive email marketing. So why waste your time and money hiring and training new employees when you can work with professionals who are experts in automotive email marketing? Moreover, working with an outside BDC allows you to run a campaign with experts who can view your goals and needs from a neutral standpoint, which will help eliminate internal biases that can negatively affect marketing efforts.

Enhance Your Dealership by Partnering with Customer Traac

If you would like to improve your dealership’s email marketing, or if you would like to speak with an expert in the field to learn more, please reach out to us to see how we can help. At Customer Traac, we work with you to understand your specific goals and needs, so we can provide a personalized service that optimizes your dealership’s marketing and communication efforts. We offer a full range of automotive marketing services, including a full-charge contact center, appointment scheduling, outbound calling campaigns, and a full-service automotive BDC. Our agents go through extensive training to make sure they provide the best customer service and help your business grow.

We partner with dealerships across the United States. Please call us at 763-553-2989 or fill out our contact form to learn more.