Email Marketing Value
Email marketing is one of your dealership’s best chances for increasing sales and saving money by minimizing your advertising budget. Many marketing experts will tell you that “the money’s in the list”. Email is a powerful and easy way to build a list and communicate your marketing messages to leads and customers. Studies show that 80% of your customers have email addresses that they use regularly. Email marketing is a valuable tool for dealerships because:
* It’s immediate. With the push of a button, your marketing message is sent to your list. Instead of waiting for a subscriber to visit your site you can get your message to them when it counts. The creation and distribution of the email campaign is much quicker. The majority of your recipients will see your message in the first 24-48 hours. Emails are a great way to get in closer contact with customers. It doesn’t rely on your customer remembering to visit your site, or seeing a print advertisement.
* It’s economic - In fact the email marketing is free. By providing value to readers and thus keeping their permission to e-mail them, you can market your company and services without spending a dime. You save on wages, stationery, faxing, postage, administration, printing, long distance and mobile calls. Each letter that you can replace by e-mail saves you at least $1.00 when you add up the cost of stationery, postage and overheads. This means that 100% of revenue generated from email campaigns is pure profit.
* E-mail saves you time. With a touch of a button you can e-mail your newsletter, price list, sales, update quote, invitation etc. to thousands of people - each one personalized with information from your database. Think about that precious commodity - your valuable time when you eliminate some of the printing, folding, stuffing, mailing, phoning, faxing from the daily routine.
* It’s trackable. Using email marketing, you can track the results of your campaign. This allows you to see for each message if it was received successfully, was opened and read and if the recipient used the links from you message. This information give you the possibility to make changes to a campaign already underway to ameliorate its response rate. Also, sending out follow up messages, you have the possibility to segment your mail list according to the action. This allows you to respond immediately to any issues which arise and to complete the feedback loop quickly and effectively. The experiences taken from the campaign can then be applied to future campaigns with a high degree of accuracy.
* It’s measurable. To make best use of your budget, it is essential to keep track of not only the costs but also the results and the revenue that the campaign specifically generates. This will allow you to focus your activities with the most appropriate methods in future.
* It’s testable. To achieve the best possible response rates, it is common practice to send any intended piece of marketing material to sample groups to test its effectiveness before starting the main campaign. With traditional direct marketing, this process can be time consuming and costly. However, with email marketing, this process is fast and effective with results available almost immediately, thanks to the instant measuring of the results. Additionally, as there is no printed material involved, the turnaround for any changes in layout or wording required as a result can be incorporated into the main mailing quickly and easily.
* It’s automated. Very little manpower is required to create an email campaign. Essentially, the only manual work required is the copy writing of email message itself. Other aspects such as delivery and tracking are done automatically.
Opt-In Email Appending Today, we have to be very attentive on the process of “email appending”. This is a procedure where your existing customer records are matched to a large database of known email addresses to find their e-mail addresses. This will return 15-20% of your client’ email addresses. But before using this service, you have to be sure that it provides only opt-in email addresses from clients, and that they verify the integrity of each email address gathered by emailing some form of an “Exclusive Savings Opportunity” request on behalf of your dealership. This identifies emails that are no longer valid, and establishes your future communications as being “opt-in” to prevent being labeled as spam.
Using in-dealership promotional materials and Internet website “capture pages”, dealerships can continue to add new customer emails to their marketing campaigns by inviting them to register for “exclusive” discounts and savings. These pages can usually be updated for specific dealership events and promotions so that they can be integrated with existing traditional media campaigns – dramatically increasing campaign effectiveness with no increase in advertising expense. This process, with a reputable email “appending” service and a safe email communication and prospect management tool, will give to your dealership a powerful position to take advantage of this exciting marketing opportunity.