Funny timing on this thread, we tried out two different solutions for our dealers this month (this is something we haven't done a lot of over the years). One was a little pricier, used PURLs and kind of a gimmick (not identical to Rick's, but similar concept). Worked amazingly well...in fact, I was just sent an email to update the results of yesterday's send and have attached the graphic. I was the most skeptical person in our office about this, still have questions about the ability to repeat with same data, but as a way to use your data and email to create an event, the results are crazy. This is the second segment of email we did this with for the dealer, they sold 14 cars within 7 days directly attributed to the last. (ETA: We will have call numbers in a few hours, was around 80 day one last time)
The other was a dealer expressing a lot of the same concerns I hear in this Forum. Bad design and limited visibility into results from their CRM deployment. We put something together for under a thousand dollars, used our real design team and certified interface with CDK, and sent it in house. Went really smoothly and the client was thrilled to have a great looking email and know how it works for not much money.
From what I'm seeing in our own clients and hearing from this thread, unless you have a killer in house marketing team and the tools to do the design work, its totally worth outsourcing if the price is right.