Email Marketing is an important strategy, which when performed properly and effectively, it will set you above the rest of the competition. Our team has outlined their Best Practices, which formulate and structure our Email Marketing.
BUILD ACCURATE & TARGETED LISTS
This is the most important rule when sending emails for any occasion. Like any other marketing avenue, targeting is the key to increasing efficiency and reducing waste. Start by segmenting your lists. If you send sales and service email blasts, at the very least, you need two separate lists. Optimistically, you should have a list for both new and used sales prospects. Then you can decide if you would like to narrow that list down even further. For service leads, you should have a list of regulars, and a list of prospects. You may also want to segment based on in-market vs. out of market prospects for the more advanced campaigns.
TIMING IS EVERYTHING
When it comes to sending your emails at a given time of day or day of the week. Generally, for automotive marketing, you will want to aim for an email to go out between Tuesday and Thursday before lunch. Unfortunately, every market is different and timing is difficult to measure without past data. What you will want to do is run some tests. Send emails at different time intervals throughout a given week/month to see what your customers respond best to. Then when you have the results from your tests, you’ll be able to determine what days your customers engage most with your emails.
USE BOTH GRAPHIC/VIDEO & TEXT BASED EMAILS
Text based emails give more of a personal touch, and can appear more urgent than graphic/video based emails depending on the subject matter. You can expect to see more email responses as well as phone calls with text-based emails. However, a well-designed graphic/video based email can trigger immediate clicks through to the site if it is visually pleasing, customers will typically click on a graphic/video email, rather than calling or replying via email.
WITHOUT A GOOD SUBJECT LINE, YOUR EMAIL IS USELESS
That’s right, no amount of design skills or clever wording will matter if you don’t get the customer to open your email. Avoid generic subject lines, as these will not stand out and will be lost amongst the hundreds of other emails a customer will receive in just one week. Use personalization when appropriate, first names for example, can draw a customer’s attention. Strong subject lines are those that also demonstrate urgency. For example, “You need to see this,” might spark curiosity for the customer. Experiment with different subject lines by splitting your lists and A/B testing the results.
EMAIL IS ALWAYS CHANGING
No single rule of thumb will increase email effectiveness. You may find that subject lines or creative you’ve used in the past just don’t seem to work anymore. To be truly effective you will need to constantly evaluate your results, determine what works best and what doesn’t in your market area.
If our Best Practices, or, Marketing Strategies are of interest, please contact us today!
