Automotive SEO

One of the oldest and most successful forms of online advertising is email marketing. How can you maximize service revenue for your dealership using email?

Email is an effective way to advertise products and services. Typically, you’ve built an email list based on customer interest and contact forms that have been filled out. This means the potential customer has shown some interest in your dealership and what you offer. Typically, email marketing has an amazing return on investment for any business because its one of the most affordable methods of marketing to large audiences.

Here are some steps to get you started.

You need a service to get started

Before you can effectively market your dealership through email, you’ve got to choose a service and platform. This means signing up for a marketing service to help guide you through the process. Thankfully, there are several options available to you, making it easy to find one that will give you the look and content you want in your emails. Your service should have mobile-optimization templates, especially since most customers use their smartphone or other mobile devices to view emails. It should also integrate seamlessly with your current CRM software.

Review and grow your email list

Over the history of your car dealership, you’ve gathered information and created an email list from various customers. You need to collect this information through online forms on your website and can offer several ways and reasons for users to give you their email list and have it added to your mailing list. If you want to personalize messages, gather more information than name and email, this will help when you want to segment the list.

Create a strategy

Your email marketing strategy must have a purpose and specific targets. You want to send them to the right people at the right time. If your dealership has a service center, you’ll want to send emails to your customers with potential reminders that they might be close to the time for scheduled maintenance services. This helps bring customers back to your dealership and can eventually turn customers who have services performed at your location into repeat customers who will buy more vehicles from you.

Choose a design

The email design you choose should present recognizable style and elements for your customers to know it came from you. Don’t go overboard though, you want your design to be simple so that your recipients will be more inclined to utilize the content provided in the emails that you’ve sent. Emails should have a clear call to action message to let them know exactly what they should do next. The design chosen is an important part of your email marketing strategy, which means you should take your time with it.

Great content makes a difference

What does your email say? Have you provided excellent content that entices recipients to visit your dealership to have their vehicle services. This content could be informative and address some customer pain points or it might be part of your current promotion. There could be a lot of content added to one email or you might want to segment emails by customer interests, which would make your emails unique to specific groups. Adding links to some of your video content can also help your emails be more enjoyable to your recipients.

Start with great subject lines

Imagine you’re receiving your emails, would you open them and read the content? If you don’t have a catchy subject line that quickly grabs the viewer’s attention, you aren’t creating an effective strategy. Your emails will end up in the trash much faster than if you use good subject lines that tell the story in a few words. Readers should know what they will find in the email by reading the subject line and it should be done in a friendly, conversational tone.

What’s the right send time?

Experimenting with the right send time can help you figure out when your customers are paying the most attention to your emails. That said, one of the most important aspects of email marketing is the ability of recipients to read emails when they choose, not as soon as they come in. That said, the longer you email sits in the inbox unread, the further down the list it goes and the greater likelihood it will be deleted and unread. This makes send times important.

Use these tips to begin creating a great email marketing strategy for your dealership. Email is one of the cheapest and most powerful forms of marketing for any car dealership.