Email Marketing - Fundamental For Success

[Mitch Gallant]

I've always seen good success with email marketing and, in my mind, it's a fundamental part of a solid marketing plan for a dealership. We had partnered with AutoRevenue a while back but have since changed CRM's and dropped them. They were a solid company with good ideas and they generated sales for us.

Our current solution is watered down and has very very limited analytics so we need to make a shift. AutoRevenue is in the mix but I'm very curious to hear what has been successful for other dealers.

I'm a step away from signing with BlueSkyFactory which is lights out in my eyes but not automotive based.

[Jerry Thibeau]

Mitch,

With a good CRM tool, you can become your own e-mail marketing factory. Just don't go over board with it. Keep an eye on the opt out and open rates. And "yes" before you tell me, I know how you feel about your CRM. Maybe it's time you do something about that.

How's the new prodigy doing? We'll start coaching on Monday.

[Mitch Gallant]

Hey Jerry, that didn't even dawn on me. I've been looking at CRM's and the good ones have a heavy email component to them. I've got to imagine that most dealers have a decent CRM and don't need to source to email providers. On a side note, if anyone's looking for info on email marketing here's a decent resource.

Webinars and Whitepapers

[Alex Snyder]

Mitch - were you just using AutoRevenue as an idea source? Like Jerry said, you can (and should) be your own marketing machine. What CRM are you on now?

[Jerry Thibeau]

Hey Jerry, that didn't even dawn on me. I've been looking at CRM's and the good ones have a heavy email component to them. I've got to imagine that most dealers have a decent CRM and don't need to source to email providers. On a side note, if anyone's looking for info on email marketing here's a decent resource.

Webinars and Whitepapers

IMN does some really cool stuff with showing you who clicked on what and can provide you with marketing list for follow-up. Last time I got an IMN demo I was impressed. I am sure some of the CRM's are capable of doing this now. Anyone from a CRM company want to chime in here, now would be a good time to do so.

Tom Harsha Or Matt Watson (that should trigger their alerts), what say you?

[Mitch Gallant]

@Alex, no we where using AutoRevenue in the way it was intended. At the time I was the only guy in our internet department and didn't know much about it or how we implemented. Now that I get to strategize and implement a little more it would be nice to have back and put to proper use. As for current CRM, we use DealerMine. It's a beat up old dog that's stiched together and glued up on the edges, kinda like a frankenstein paper mache pinata. We're currently looking at Vin, DealerSocket, CarReasearch and AutoBase. It's a pain in the ass being in Canada for alot of the functionality, which is a big reason we're with our current Canadian CRM.

I'm hoping one of the new CRM's we land with will have a robust email app. Right now I'm fighting to get some lists set up and try out MailChimp just to get the proper functionality.

[Alex Snyder]

I'm sorry to hear things aren't good on the CRM side for you Mitch. What exactly are you lacking in your current email tool that is making it tough to get stuff to MailChimp.....or the bigger question.....what is your current provider lacking to push you to MailChimp?

[JoePistell]

Mail Chimp user here. I use mail chimp ONLY because ReyRey CRM has VERY POOR email management tools.

LOVE mailchimp.com but running 2 vendors SUCKS because keeping the email lists updated is a PIA.

As every day passes, CRM gathers new customers and new prospects.
That info is fed into the "Other" Mail Vendor (MailChimp).
MailChimp system will auto-remove "opt outs" and bounces.
These "Opt Out" people needs to be fed back into the CRM data to keep the core info clean
THIS IS DONE BY HAND.
I have 33k addresses and >2k optouts and 5k bounces.

Someone kill me.

[Jeff Kershner]

Joe -

That's the ONE reason I will not go down that route. I have enough issues keeping up with our IMN newsletters.

Somehow I missed this thread when it was started - sorry Mitch. There was another question that was posted yesterday that was sort of the same How are you communicating with your database of clients?. Here is what I wrote over on that thread...

for service marketing/database communications and last minute very targeted messaging (again, 99% service), my dealers utilize @utoRevenue. I've become somewhat of an advocate of their services. I receive some of the best customer from this outfit. They not only provide my dealers with some strong targeted email retention marketing but also our online service scheduler. And as far as I'm concerned, one of the better ones available.

I use eLead CRM coupled with their GoldDigger service for most of our prospecting email and direct mail campaigns. They outsource their email delivery through Strongmail to increase the delivery rate. I wish there was a tighter integration since Strongmail offers a lot of additional features that would be an added benefit. With that being said I like the fact that their email campaigns and direct mail campaigns tie into their call center and the CRM for increased performance and measurable ROI.

From the Retention/Prospecting side, some of my dealers are using IMN newsletter service. Overall it's a good service. I think it's a little pricey and the customer service has been "average" thus far but I can't complain about the delivery rate. I could take some time and really pick apart their service if I wanted to (sloppy/heavy templates and no consideration for mobile rendering) but overall, a good service.

[Mitch Gallant]

@Alex, I'm only fighting for the same reason Joe is. It's a manual process that I do during our daily 3:33 Internet mashup meeting. The CRM is really old and the functionality for data mining is pretty rudimentary. I actually made a list a page long of what it's lacking.

The opt out, from the 2 weeks I've been at it, has been the biggest sore spot... have to pump all that info back into our ReyRey system to keep the database sterile.

Thanks for the info Jeff, I hadn't heard of eLead, I'll make a call. (and likely get a "oh that's so cute, you're Canadian, sorry can't do business there")