Less is more.
It’s a saying we’ve all heard applied to so many facets of our lives, from candy consumption to the amount of cologne to apply. But are you embracing this philosophy in your dealership marketing?
When creating dealership marketing campaigns, it is easy to fall into the trap of sending all your emails to all your customers. You’ve already spent the time and money to develop the email, and it doesn’t cost you anymore to send it out to a few more customers, so why not?
What many dealers fail to realize is just how much repeatedly sending customers irrelevant, impersonal messages is costing their business.
More than half of people have been sent information about an irrelevant product, and 36 percent have been sent duplicate communications. Every time a customer receives an irrelevant or inaccurate communication from you, their perception of your dealership is negatively impacted. This is the true cost. If you continue bothering customers with the same, irrelevant message, they are going to churn.
A Proactive Approach
Today’s most successful dealers understand the big impact small actions can have on their bottom line, and they are proactively taking steps to increase revenue despite the down market. We’ve been talking with dealers a lot recently about how taking a proactive approach can positively impact dealerships, from sales to service to customer experience.
One way to Go Pro is to revisiting your email campaigns. By proactively adjusting your email campaign strategy to be more highly targeted, you can reduce the volume of emails your customers receive while increasing the value of those communications.
Segmentation
There’s no question; segmented email campaigns outperform non-segmented campaigns. According to MailChimp, segmented campaigns saw 14 percent higher open rates, 101 percent high click rates and 9 percent lower unsubscribe rates than non-segmented campaigns.
Most dealers know this, but don’t know where to start with customer segmentation. My recommendation is always to take a deeper dive into the resources you’re already using. Connect CRM, for example, offers many of the tools needed to build email campaigns, and every Connect user is assigned a dedicated performance manager to help dealers get campaigns up and running. Our data mining tool TargetPro can make creating campaigns even easier by automating the segmentation and email delivery process.
Service
Speaking of taking advantage of existing resources, your service lane can be a great launch pad for great customer retention campaigns. Service history and recent activity can tell you a lot about a customer’s place in the buy cycle, especially when your service scheduler and CRM are integrated like Connect CRM and Xtime. Proactively providing relevant offers based on that history can put you one step ahead in the mind of your customers.
Customized
For fewer emails to be more effective, the messages must create real value for your customers. Today’s consumers are inundated with ads; some experts estimate we see as many as 4,000 ads a day! So blasting off an email with any old “special offer” won’t cut it.
Did your CRM alert you that a customer is in positive equity? Send the customer an email with the details to let them know. Is a customer overdue on service? Send them a coupon to welcome them back to the dealership’s service lane.
Is your dealership going to fall apart if you don’t take any of these steps? Nope. But remaining reactive is going to give your more proactive competitors a chance to edge you out of the market. Start taking a proactive approach now, and see the results in your bottom line. Don’t wait. Go pro.
A version of this post originally appeared in Dealer Marketing Magazine.
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