Emails are a key component of most dealerships’ marketing strategies, but measuring the success of your email marketing initiatives may not be as simple as you think. 
Email marketing is a diverse marketing channel that can facilitate a wide variety of functions. In some cases, email marketing can be used to generate leads and heighten awareness of your brand, in other instances emails can be used to strengthen existing bonds.
No matter what your dealership is using email marketing for, it is essential for each email to have a clearly defined objective. For example, you may wish to bolster the number of opens, increase subscriptions to your newsletter, or the number of click-throughs to your social media accounts, your website and/or your landing page.
Once you have established your immediate goal, you need to utilize an effective analytic to determine if your plan is working. These analytics can provide key details about your automotive email marketing strategy, like how many recipients actually read your email or easily segregate responders into subcategories, like Facebook link openers or sales ad click-throughs.
Once you have applied email analytics to your automotive email marketing campaign, you are likely to have a wealth of information. While this is a vast improvement over not having any analytical data, you may still be having trouble seeing the forest through the trees. Taking the data from your automotive email marketing plan and using it to leverage greater sales can be challenging. You may wish to utilize these techniques:
- Use data to determine seasonal shopping patterns—This long term approach requires comparing email responses over several seasons or years. You may discover certain vehicles experience seasonal peaks, e.g. heavy-duty trucks may rise in sales during warm weather or harvest times. Or you may learn that consumers in your area are shifting from sedans to minivans as they age.
- Determine patterns within your customer base—One of the most important benefits of email analytics is the ability to predict behavior among a small group of consumers. Some of these market segments may respond more positively to sales pricing than others, so you can tailor your promotions to these consumers, immediately causing a bump in sales.
- Create more effective emails—Email analytics in combination with automotive email marketing can provide an enormous amount of personal information. This information can be reintroduced in the next round of emails to customize them for even greater effectiveness. You may wish to single out younger recipients for deals regarding used cars, while more established recipients would receive details of luxury models.
- Optimize promotions—Your automotive email marketing should be giving you actionable insights into the desires of consumers. You can share these insights with management and produce sales and events that are likely to draw highly motivated parties. If links to lifetime oil changes receive the most clicks, you should emphasize them in newspaper and paid ads.
Inbound marketing techniques, like email marketing, can be enormously powerful when combined with reliable analytics. The challenge, however, is not gathering the information; it is often about how best to use it to leverage greater business activity.
Knowing who you need to market to doesn’t automatically create the most effective marketing campaign, but bringing this insight to an experienced advertising firm can help initiate a successful campaign.
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