Effective loyalty email campaigns for auto dealers include buyback, service, and referral programs.
These campaigns should build loyalty for life by targeting previous customers. But, many dealerships struggle to capitalize on this success.
Do any of the following resonate with you?
- Are you spending hours building and pushing emails to your list only to wonder if anyone ever reads them?
- Do you look at your email clickthrough rates and feel in your gut that they must be wrong?
- Do you want to get more sales out of existing customers?
If so, you’re not alone. Loyalty email marketing campaigns have a LOT of moving parts that need to work well together.
But, one of the most common ways we see email marketing fail? It’s when dealerships rely on their CRM as an email marketing tool.
CRM software can seem like a good solution for these sorts of email campaigns, but even the best CRM can have limitations.
Here are five problems you may run into when you send loyalty emails from your CRM.
Bad Creative
Nothing gets an email sent to the trash faster than bad design. Too many or too few images, too many different fonts, clashing colors, and poor readability can overwhelm the eye before any content is ever absorbed.
Even though CRMs can come with email templates, they can be frustrating to work with and don’t usually feature agency-quality design with strong creative imagery, clean design structure, and a clear call to action.
Poor Deliverability
Email deliverability means an email can reach an inbox without bouncing or being sent to spam. Many factors influence deliverability, especially authentication.
Email authentication is like a digital signature for a website domain, preventing spammers from sending emails posing as your brand. This increases the chances of legitimate emails making it into your customers’ inboxes.
Poor deliverability can also cause internet service providers to block your future emails in their attempts to curb spammers.
Unfortunately, with a CRM, you’re sharing an IP address with the CRM’s other customers. If one of them is spamming or has low deliverability, your emails may be penalized by ISPs because of it.
Limited Bulk Emails
Does your CRM limit the number of emails you can send in bulk?
The truth is that CRM isn’t built for bulk email, it’s built for one-to-one emails and building relationships with customers. Many CRM companies cap the size of your sends, and that can cap your leads, too.
Lack of Trackability
As you know, a clickthrough rate is one of a campaign’s most important key performance indicators. It measures how many people are interested and engaged with your content.
But more importantly, trackability allows you to prove the success of your email campaign.
If you’re sending loyalty emails from your CRM, you may have limited ability to track the customer path once they open your email. Open and clickthrough rates are just part of the metrics you should be watching to know if your emails are successful.
The KPI that really matters? How many sales were associated with your loyalty email sends…
No Sales Performance Reporting
It’s a waste of resources to keep pushing ineffective marketing to your customers. How do you figure out if what you’re doing is working? You can do it the hard way: Take a list of the cars you sold last week and manually match your customers’ emails to your CRM to see if any of them visited your dealership.
But who has time for that? Wouldn’t it be nice to know for sure if your emails were influencing sales?
Stop Struggling with Emailing From Your CRM
There’s a simple way to clear all of these hurdles. AutoSweet’s responsive, in-house creative team develops compelling, effective emails to drive leads and sales.
And, our email marketing solution measures email sends, opens, and clicks. And, with our certified DMS connection, automatically track authenticated, offline sales, with our 24/7 transparent dashboard.
Problems solved!
Want an email campaign solution that solves all these problems? Contact AutoSweet today for a free 5-minute demo and strategy session!
