In the automotive industry, like most industries, emails are a consistent part of the marketing landscape. 
As a marketing professional, you are probably sending out emails almost by habit in order to help maintain relationships, provide key information, or offer service deals, but your automotive email marketing initiatives may lack the firepower to really grab people’s attention and drive revenue growth.
If you would like to juice up your automotive email marketing, you should consider includeing the following elements:
- Incentives: Consumers respond to perks. Whether it is an extended warranty, lifetime oil changes, or free drop-off, your customers are more likely to take notice of a deal that benefits them in some substantial way. These incentives may also be tailored to stir up interest among new customers; offering free tablets, movie tickets, or dinners can generate substantial response rates. If you are most interested in boosting car sales, your emails should highlight financial incentives on new or used cars, such as competitive financing, elevated trade-in values, or rebates.
- Tracking URL: While sheer volume of customer response is rewarding, in order to sustain this type of customer activity, you should incorporate methods to measure the success of individual automotive email marketing initiatives. One of the more effective ways of doing this is including a tracking URL, which allows you to determine how many of your email recipients are clicking on a Call To Action embedded in the email. Using analytical tools, you can obtain a full understanding of how effective a particular email or marketing message was and use a similar message in future emails. There are a number of simple tools available to help you design and implement tracking URLs into your automotive email marketing campaigns.
- Closed Loop Analytics: If you want to take your automotive email marketing campaigns one step beyond tracking URLs, you can measure the effectiveness of your email campaigns using closed loop analytics. Instead of merely looking at the response activities of email recipients, you can investigate the behavior of those visitors on your website. Using cookies to track their page views, clicks and lead capture information, you can determine if your emails are producing impulse visits that don’t lead anywhere or if they are generating real enthusiasm for your cars, which are being converted into sales.
- List segmentation: Once you have determined which marketing messages are most effective, you can also begin to refine the characteristics of the consumer groups that readily respond to your automotive email marketing. You may discover that new customers are most responsive to lower interest rate financing, while past customers react most positively to lifetime service plans. Matching market segments with their most effective email message should help you cultivate a dynamic and active customer base.
Every automotive email marketing campaign should be integrating strong incentives with accurate measuring tools like tracking URLs and closed loop analytics. These email initiatives can then be refined until they produce lasting success among your customers.
If you want to learn more about how you can successfully incorporate email marketing into your automotive marketing strategy, download our Auto Marketing eBook:
