Sending branding emails to new prospects is one of the most valuable and important marketing tactics a dealership can use to boost business.
Why? Because this email strategy fulfills a variety of marketing needs.
When your dealership makes conquest email a part of your overall marketing strategy, you’ll realize the following benefits:
- Improved Brand Awareness in Your Local Area
- More New Traffic To Your Website
- Additional Retargeting Opportunities
- Match Back Sales Data to Email Campaigns
- Improved Vehicle and Service Sale
How Do Conquest Emails Work?
The whole idea around conquest email is to reach new potential customers in your local area and create brand awareness for your dealership. Conquest email works similarly to old-school direct mail campaigns but is cheaper, and thanks to technology, includes several other benefits.
At AutoSweet, the conquest email campaigns we run with dealers typically target 20,000 – 100,000 potential customers. For most dealerships, the optimal level for price and performance targets 50,000 prospects.
When putting together a list for email, we start by analyzing the dealer’s DMS sales data to identify top-performing zip codes. We then use market research to target prospects who are currently in-market to purchase a new or used vehicle. For franchises, we can even target prospects who are currently in the “in-market” for a specific brand of vehicle.
Finally, we utilize our DMS connection to remove current customers to ensure the prospect list is a true conquest audience.
The result is a list of brand new prospects in your target market looking to buy vehicles you have on your lot.
How Conquest Email Improves Brand Awareness in Your Local Area
Conquest email campaigns are targeted at people most likely to purchase a vehicle from your dealership.
With email, you’ll be able to reach people directly with great deals and encourage them to visit your website.
Not only are you creating an initial brand touchpoint with new prospects with the initial email, but AutoSweet’s conquest email packages also include Facebook retargeting for everyone who opens your emails.
This results in even more increased brand awareness for your dealership.
How Conquest Email Generates New Traffic to Your Website
When you send emails to a list of prospects you can generally expect a 3-5% clickthrough rate.
This means, if you send to around 50,000 new potential customers, you can guess that 1,500 – 2,500 will end up clicking a link in that email and visiting your website.
And, because you’re sending to a brand new list of prospects, you’re also generating new traffic to your website.
A successful business knows how important it is to fill the top of the funnel with a new audience. This is what keeps your pipelines full and healthy. With conquest email, you’re able to fill the top of your funnel. Then you can rely on your overall digital marketing strategy to stay in front of these new prospects and move them down the funnel.
How Conquest Email Creates Retargeting Opportunities
Dealerships who have properly set up digital marketing campaigns are able to amplify their brand to engaged prospects through retargeting technology.
New site visitors with retargeting campaigns with platforms like Google and Facebook.
You’ll then be able to further benefit from even cheaper branding opportunities on these new prospects.
For instance, we encourage our dealerships to run retargeting campaigns on the Google Display Network. These ads run across +2 billion websites on the Internet, including popular websites like CNN, Fox News, and Weather.com (just to name a few).
Often, you’ll reap the branding benefits of consumers seeing your ads without ever paying a single. And, the average cost per click for automotive ads on the Google Display Network will only cost dealers $.58.
How Conquest Email with AutoSweet Matches Back Sales Data to Email Campaigns & Improves Vehicle and Service Sales
AutoSweet cross-analyzes dealership sales data with email marketing data to determine how many sales are associated with email campaigns. This data is available 24/7 in an easy-to-understand dashboard.
We also existing sales data to distinguish between purchases from new customers and existing customers.
AutoSweet typically sees a match rate of 10-15% for dealerships sending conquest emails with us. This means, 10-15% of sales were influenced by recent conquest email campaigns.
In terms of real numbers, looking at data from the month of September 2021, AutoSweet client Sam Pierce Chevrolet ran a conquest email campaign to 50,000 prospects.
This same month, 17 out of 107 car sales (15.9%) were attributed to conquest email campaigns. These 17 sales accounted for $343,000 in new car sales revenue. Additionally, 54 repair orders were associated with the campaign and accounted for $29,457 in service revenue for the month.
Who Benefits the Most From Conquest Email?
Conquest email is great, but it’s not something AutoSweet recommends for all of our clients.
We typically recommend this strategy for franchise dealerships and/or dealerships that have at least 100 vehicles in their inventory.
Why? You need a certain volume of cars to be able to generate enough data to match back to sales data. And, if you don’t have enough vehicles in your inventory, demand could outpace your vehicle supply.
Or, prospective customers could dismiss the email simply because of your size. These consumers typically don’t know your brand and you are looking to attract their attention from larger dealerships that are competing for their attention.
What Makes AutoSweet’s Conquest Email Package Special?
With AutoSweet as your email partner, you’ll get not only the marketing metrics you’re used to (email sends, opens, and clicks) but with our certified DMS connection we also measure authenticated offline sales.
AutoSweet works with all major DMS providers including PBS, AutoSoft, Frazer, and DealerCenter. We are certified with CDK Global, and, AutoSweet has completed the certification process in the Reynolds Certified Interface (RCI) Program.
You have 24/7 access to AutoSweet’s transparent dashboard where you can view who opened, clicked, and purchased anytime to assess your email return on investment.
Another thing that really sets AutoSweet’s conquest email package apart from the competition is the inclusion of Facebook retargeting.
AutoSweet will automatically retarget everyone who opens your email (typically 20% of your original list size) with Facebook branding ads. This tactic helps to amplify the success of your conquest email campaign even more.
Best Practices for Running Conquest Email Campaigns
If you’re new to conquest email there are a few things to keep in mind before your run your first campaign:
- Work with a partner (like AutoSweet) that has expertise in following OEM compliance guidelines.
- Take advantage of holidays and seasons to capture consumer attention.
- Stagger emails a week or two apart to prevent list fatigue.
- Keep your list clean and healthy. Remove prospects who bounce and/or are “chronic un-openers” from mailing lists and replace them with fresh prospects (AutoSweet does this for all of our clients).
- Analyze any OEM co-op reimbursement opportunities that may be available to your dealership from any franchises you work with.
- Remember that conquest email is a branding opportunity for consumers that aren’t familiar with your brand. Warming a new customer to your brand can easily take 90 days, so be consistent month over month with your email touches.
Interested in learning more about conquest email campaigns with AutoSweet? Fill out the form below to sign-up for a detailed demo of conquest email campaigns.
Within 10-15 minutes you’ll learn what strategies will work best for a dealership of your size, how much a conquest email campaign will cost you, and you’ll get unique ideas for emails your dealership can send.
