In today’s online automotive market, using CRM systems and email marketing software is obligatory. This is due to the sheer amount of sales and revenue potential you can gain from maintaining a database full of your customer and prospect data. CRMs also give the ability to follow leads as they move through the different stages of your sales funnel. This allows you to focus on your hottest prospects, and direct them towards the right sales reps at the right time. This process is essential for closing deals.
You’re collecting leads through your website and assigning them to your sales team. Your sales reps follow up on those leads and then drive engagement by sending a nice intro email and asking for a response or a callback. It’s a simple and effective way to learn more about the prospect’s buying needs and then move them further through your sales cycle.
However, your CRM platform is much more powerful than that. It can be used to follow leads from any channel or source: phones, showrooms, display campaigns, service calls, or even direct mailers and print ads. With this customer data, targeted email marketing campaigns can be launched to reach the most optimal audience.
Personalization and tailored messaging is key with email marketing campaigns. Your dealership’s messaging should be aimed at positioning your dealership to be at the top of the mind’s of your audience. By sending potential customers from your CRM database targeted messaging based on their expressed goal and behavior (based on their activity on your website or in person at your showroom) you can keep your leads warm and continue with the sales conversation.
Types of Automotive Emails That Can Be Sent
Pre-Transactional Emails: Pre-purchased emails that are designed to increase or renew interest in particular models from your lot. These emails should include information like financing options, special pricing deals you are currently offering, and unique feature benefits for these vehicles (MPG, safety features, IIHS awards, etc.)
Post-Transactional Emails: Follow up emails with a customer who has made a recent purchase is also important in solidifying the relationship with your dealership and customers. These emails are an excellent opportunity to turn a one time buyer into a repeat customer by keeping them engaged with your dealership. With the customer data that has been collected, a personalized thank you email should be sent to those customers who have made a purchase from your dealership. A follow-up email should also be sent which contains useful information about their vehicle’s features as well as scheduled maintenance dates. As these customers begin to re-enter the market for a new vehicle purchase as their payoff or lease nears completion, you can begin marketing to them with new car specs, current finance rates, and any other incentives you are currently running.
Best Practices for Email Marketing
Call to Action: Your call to action needs to be strong. This is the hook that draws your customers in. This could be an exclusive offer or rebate, an invitation to an event happening at your dealership, or some kind of educational content about one of your vehicles. The objective is to get people interested in coming to your dealership so they can make a purchase. Adding in deadlines to these deals is an effective technique to grab people’s attention and get them to your showroom. It also keeps your email content relevant and timely.
Subject Line: This is one of the most important parts of the email. It needs to be succinct and attention-grabbing. The objective is to get the recipient to open and read your email. There are certain words that you need to be wary of using, as they will trigger spam filters. Some of these words are things like: free, sale, and clearance. Another important note is that subject lines cannot be misleading.
Design: Dealership contact information and allowing recipients to opt-out of future campaigns are things that are required on any email campaigns. OEM Ad planners contain a variety of free creative content that can be used.
Test: Before sending out the emails to the entire audience in your marketing list, they should be sent to a small group first. This way, they can be inspected and tested to ensure everything is correct before going live to your audience. Allow time for testing as well as for tweaking copy and creative images. Another important thing to test for is that your call to action web forms work correctly. This makes sure that the data submitted on those forms get to your CRM. A conquest campaign is useless if you cannot collect the opt-in permissions of those potential customers.
Send: When all of the testing has been completed and all of your creative is correct, it is time to schedule the campaign to launch. Depending on the size of your marketing list, it can take anywhere from 10 minutes to several hours for all of the messages to be delivered to each contact. Most responses will be received within 48 hours of when they receive your email campaign. After that 48 hour window, responses typically trail off.
By following these practices, your email campaigns will become much more effective. In turn, you will enhance your brand, boost your CRM database, widen your sales pipelines and sell more vehicles.
Using Email for Automotive Dealership Prospecting
Email campaigns are a very effective way for prospecting when done correctly. There are a set of guidelines that must be followed in order to pass through the spam filters of people’s email providers. The automotive team at Bake More Pies ensures that each and every email campaign meets these compliance guidelines allowing them to circumvent these spam filters put into place.
With careful and strategic use of your dealership’s CRM data, effective email marketing campaigns will help earn you earn more leads, close more deals, and boost your bottom line. Bake More Pies’ automotive team utilizes the data stored in your CRM to create specially tailored marketing lists that allow us to target the ideal customers for your messaging.
We create custom email campaigns that feature your latest sales and service deals. All artwork is submitted through and holds up to the standards of each OEM compliance center. This allows for maximum co-op reimbursement.
We put your database and marketing lists through monthly hygiene processes. This hygiene scrubbing ensures that each individual customer fits the precise criteria for the demographic we are targeting with our internal e-blasts. This process gives us the optimal open rate and maximum ROI per e-blast.
Every CRM email blast we send out is trackable. We provide monthly ROI reports that give a breakdown of:
- Emails dropped
- The number and percentage of emails opened
- Inquiries/replies
- Sales appointments set
- Service appointments set
- The total ROI
These ROI reports provide a great baseline to see how effective each CRM e-blast we release performs.
Contact Us
Contact our team at Bake More Pies today for your automotive prospecting and CRM email needs!
