Skip to the point if you don’t care to read the backstory.
I sit back, this morning, amazed at how unreliable email delivery is. It might be getting worse and worse every year. Due to abusive advertisers we all want to safeguard our inboxes from disgusting amounts of delete button presses. And so, car dealers suffer. Car dealers become email losers.
Sure, dealers’ practicing carpet bombing marketing tactics with “free” email campaigns can absolutely be given all the “I told you so’s” and “you get what you deserve’s” that we care to expound. Anyway, my point is not to get lost in a you reap what you sow scenario.
My point is to reflect on a current purchase experience I am going through for my fiancé. Her lease is up soon and we’ve been shopping. I’m obviously not your typical car shopper, and that becomes quite apparent to my salesperson when asking about cap costs, residuals, and the money factor. They get quite a bit put back when I can calculate a rough payment in my head with those numbers <Alex, stop tooting your own horn> …. But I like to digest the numbers at home and that requires an email to present the numbers lawfully.
The point
Most dealers I have worked with cannot get an email to me. They claim it has been sent, but I cannot receive their emails in my Hotmail, iCloud/Me.com, or GMail accounts. These dealers have had to forward an email to their own personal accounts and then send from there, instead of their CRM, to get something in my inbox.
Their CRM is blacklisted. And the combined forces of salespeople, sales managers, and Internet managers cannot fathom why. And I’m not talking about a single CRM system here. This is across multiple dealerships in multiple states. It seems like every CRM system is plagued by this.
So, dealers, do you have a way to measure your email response rates? I believe this is a key metric that can tell you two things:
- Whether your emails are getting through
- How good a particular employee is at composing an engaging email.
Are you aware of how much of an email loser you are?
Comment over in the dealer forums
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