DealerRefresh

Obstacles, Observations and Opinions of an Automotive Internet Sales & Marketing Manager

About the Author

Malinda Terreri

Take one part geek, add a healthy dose of creativity, top it off with an obsession for marketing and you have… Malinda Terreri. Her marketing talents started at a young age when she secured the world record for the most Girl Scout cookies ever sold.* Malinda is President of 1to1 News. which specializes in online newsletters for dealerships.

by -

Are Your Boring Emails Sabotaging Your Sales?

If your follow-up emails read like form letters, it’s hard to get customers to respond. The secret to a higher response rate is simply to add a little personality, warmth, and humor.
Here’s how…

These five easy interventions will give dull copy a little KAPOW. These aren’t touchy-feely exercises, but rather more like structural changes that will humanize your writing. And while these tips won’t win you any gold stars from English teachers, they will help you personalize the tone of your emails. [Read more…]

by -

How My Bad Email Advice Almost Ruined a Friendship

A friend of mine called to pick my brain on email marketing. His company has about 70,000 subscribers and their open rates were getting WORSE with each new campaign.

In his testing, he saw that a lot of their emails were getting delivered to the spam folder. He was looking for changes they could make to improve their deliverability.

I explained that consistently getting into the inbox was based on their email reputation. Their email reputation is based on their subscriber engagement. In a nutshell, when a company sends out an email, the email providers (Yahoo, Gmail, etc.) consider the following behaviors, which negatively affect your reputation: [Read more…]

by -

Can You Find the Terrible Template?

If you had a salesperson who was going through a sales presentation and constantly choking on step four of that presentation process, you’d find a way to fix the issue in step four…

Better presentations lead to more sales, right?

Guess what? There is a point in your automated follow-up process that is choking and affecting not only the remainder of your follow-up campaigns, but possibly your deliverability to your other customers.

Here’s what I mean…
[Read more…]

by -

How to Track Email Campaigns with Google Analytics

Many people don’t realize that there is a lot more to Google Analytics than just tracking your website activity… it’s also a great way to provide you with insights into your email campaigns.

Advanced Segments are GA’s way of dividing up all your visitors into associated groups. You can acquire details telling when visitors were there; what operating system they use on their computer, and so on… You can find the referring URL (what site they came from) or how many times they have visited. However you can do so much better with your data-mining.

GA includes one Advanced Segment (of many) that sorts by referrers or Traffic Sources. This is much more important because these can include Social Media Sites, Direct Traffic, Search Engines (Paid leads, Non-paid Leads, SEO, etc.), as well as email newsletters and email campaigns.

In this instance, the last two are the important ones to us. If you tag an email for a campaign (or within a newsletter), and clients click on links to your site within them, Google Analytics provides you with lots of data. What you need to do is build the URLs that will allow you to code your links with data GA can interpret. It might be complex, but there are automated tools…

[Read more…]

by -

Are You Ignoring this Godzilla-Sized Email Trend?

Mobile continues to take over the world. Here are some recent stats on email marketing and how you can apply them to improve your marketing results.

Litmus.com reported that the percentage of emails opened on a mobile device reached a new high of 51% last year. For webmail users such as Aol, Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail, the mobile open rate bumps to 61%.

Have you looked at how your emails render on a smart phone? How much do people have to manipulate your content to be able to easily read it?

A study from Acxiom last year analyzed what people do if an email doesn’t look good on their phone:

– 70% delete it

– 28% use a computer

– 16% unsubscribe

– 9% try to read it

If you’re not taking advantage of a responsive design that displays your content based on the device it is being viewed on, you’re hurting your results.

Last year we switched our newsletter format to a responsive design. This means if you look at the newsletter on a desktop, you’ll see a two-column version. If you look at it on a smartphone, the left column is automatically suppressed so only the column with the stories displays which makes it much easier to read on a mobile device. Our internal study showed the average click through rate for the non-responsive design was 28.5% versus 31.3% for the responsive design.

How does that number translate into customers?

If you email 5000 newsletters and have a 25% open rate, the responsive design is helping an additional 35 people click through which can add up over time.

Some resources to help you with mobile email design:

1. See how your email looks on different devices

http://litmus.com/

http://emailonacid.com

2. How-To Guide to Responsive Email Design:

The How-To Guide to Responsive Email Design

3. Free email templates:

http://www.emailonacid.com/blog/details/C13/600_free_email_templates

4. Responsive Email Design

http://www.campaignmonitor.com/guides/mobile/

What do you think about these stats?

What have you noticed at your dealership?

by -

Inactive Emails Can Lower Your Results by 40%

Most dealerships are actively trying to collect email addresses from their prospects and customers because email marketing continues to be one of the most cost-effective marketing options there is.

But, as your email list grows, it is important to know that bigger isn’t better.

In Acxiom’s report: “Email Marketing and Mobile Devices: A Survey of Consumer Habits and Perceptions – 2013,” they found:

– Nearly 49% of respondents have email accounts for messages they rarely intend to open.

– 38% have two personal email accounts

– 21% have three accounts [Read more…]

by -

5 Ways to Personalize Your Emails

Relevance is one of the key reasons people subscribe to emails from you or your dealership.

People want information that is going to be specific to them and their situation. If you are sending mass email blasts to everyone about the same thing, then check out these 5 ways to get a little more personal:

1. Personalize subject lines with their name

This is an easy one. Personalized subject lines generally deliver higher open rates.

2. Personalize based on their vehicle

Truck month tips can go to truck owners. Summer traveling tips with kids could go to minivan owners. You probably won’t have time to come up with custom content for each type of vehicle, each month – but even if you do it once or twice a year, it can make a nice impression. [Read more…]

by -

4 Ways You Can Instantly Increase Your Dealerships Email List

Are you using these 4 ways to capture more customer email addresses?

As you may know, I’m a big proponent of dealership newsletters as a way to maintain long term relationships with customers, promote front-of-mind awareness and add value to your messages.

I often get questions from dealer clients about using email append services to grow their email marketing list.

Append services are fine but can be expensive. Sometimes, the easiest way to get more prospects and customers to join your dealership newsletter list, is simply to ask them. I thought it might be worth reviewing a few options (4) you can use to collect more email addresses from potential customers…
[Read more…]

by -

5 Ways to Get Your Email Ready for the Holidays

Are Your Dealers Holiday Email Campaigns READY?

Yep, it’s soon going to be that time of year when online retailers start flooding your customers’ inboxes with messages of good tidings and special savings. Here are some tips you can implement NOW, to help your dealer’s email marketing be more successful in December.

1. Beat the Rush

Does your dealership normally send out a Happy Holidays email?

Why not get ahead of the inbox stampede and send a Happy Thanksgiving email instead. You might want to mention that a gift card to your service department makes a great gift by helping the recipient maintain one of their most expensive investments.

[Read more…]

by -

A Critical Email Marketing Update for Yahoo!

What Are You Doing With All Those Yahoo Email Addresses?

In looking at the percentage of Yahoo! email addresses dealers obtain, Yahoo is always in the top three and usually at the top. When Yahoo! makes a change it can have a big impact.

Yahoo recently announced that they will be releasing user IDs that haven’t been accessed in over 12 months and making those user IDs available for someone else to register. Additionally, Yahoo announced a policy that user IDs will be released after 12 months of inactivity moving forward. So Yahoo users who don’t log into their accounts in 12 months will lose their user ID.

What this means for Yahoo users:

If your current email is “[email protected]” and you’ve always coveted the address “[email protected]” – this may be your lucky chance to get it.

What this may mean for email marketers:

Once this update goes into effect, a couple of things could happen. Let’s use the example of Bob changing his email from [email protected] to the new [email protected] which becomes available.

1. If you currently have [email protected] in your email database:

A. And a new person registers [email protected], you’ll be sending your email to the wrong Bob. What do people do that get email they didn’t ask for? They hit the spam button which impacts your deliverability to all Yahoo users if your complaint rate gets too high (we like to stay in the range of 1-2 per 1000).

B. And no one re-registers [email protected], you’ll send to a bad email address which will bounce. High bounce rates can impact your deliverability as well.

2. If you currently have [email protected] in your email database – you may or may not get notified of the address change. Sending to the old address may or may not forward to the new address. Details aren’t clear yet.

What do we recommend?

Do a re-engagement campaign to clean out your inactive Yahoo user accounts (we recommend this for all email providers) and continue to purge inactive accounts moving forward since this will affect all Yahoo accounts that become inactive at 12 months. And remind your service advisors how important it is to always ask customers to update their email address.

Questions:

What percentage of Yahoo emails are in your dealers database?

Do you have a process in place for purging inactive email accounts?

What service are you using for your email marketing campaigns?