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Who's sending your marketing email campaigns (blasts?)

Oh I wish it was that easy Alex. :rofl:

As I'm sure you know, it's extremely difficult to switch a single store's CRM...now try multiplying that by 46 dealerships and having to train 1,700 employees. Exporting a list from our CRM is a much easier band-aid than blowing the whole thing up :)
Ha ha... unfortunately (for you) you're right. So, you're probably stuck with a CRM that doesn't do the job and a few of them (from the sound of it). Yikes! I don't know how you scale that beast bro, nice work! :bow:
 
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Is it the CRM's job?
Yeah, good question (probably worth its own thread, if it doesn't already exist) and I suppose it could be argued. Plenty of automotive CRMs out there that do a great job at chunks of digital marketing, including E-mail. The list is too long, the usual players. I guess it comes down to being able to maintain your own E-mail marketing strategy internally or allowing a 3rd party to do it for you.
 
Who would you rather have as your email provider for marketing campaigns...

A. Your CRM provider?
B. Website provider?
C. Some 3rd Party (newsletter, mailchimp like provider?)

What unique features/benefits/capabilities do you look for when making this decision?
There is very little to be added to this as Jeff and others answered correctly.

Only segmented collections of targeted customers with specific, relevant offers is recommended through the CRM (think 1-100 prospects).
Full blasts, if performed out of the CRM, (think - all active prospects) would ONLY every be recommended if the CRM provider used an outside provider as a third party to send those blasts to, as it could potentially get you blacklisted otherwise.

I think MailChimp, which we use at DealerKnows, has just about the coolest UX you can get out of an email marketing platform, yet it is not automotive-friendly. For that reason, rely on using your CRM for targeted email approaches, and on outside providers for full blasts. If you're considering going with an agency that buys lists of email addresses in a zip code, just beware as those have very little return, regardless of content.
 
Guys,

Ya know alot of people think that email is diminishing and it's becoming ineffective. I can tell you with 100% certainty that it is very, very alive and well. And, at the drop of a hat can increase call volumes far beyond what you've ever experienced or what you ever remotely thought was possible. It can also create astounding massive short term traffic increases to your website. Whats the secret??? It's simple. It's simply the message your conveying in the email. Let's take for example, the Service Dept. If you want to basically achieve a complete meltdown in your service drive and obliterate and melt every phone in that department? Simply blast out an email campaign like the one below to every customer in the entire database within the DMS. Trust me when I tell you, this will work!!! I speak from recent personal experience. Your service appt schedulers will get booked out for almost a month solid!!!

FYI - No, this wasn't my idea. No, I wasn't the one who sent it either! This email was sent by accident. And finally No, I wasn't the one who approved it!! I was one of the people nominated to help with the clean up process though!!!

PS - We use a Third party marketing firm for DMS marketing!! I haven't seen the reports yet with the stats from this campaign in it. I'm sure that MoFo's gonna be off the charts though!!!!

PSS - If you are or work for a Third party marketing firm and you do send email campaigns to the dealer for approval. Don't put half of the campaigns in the body of the email and the other half in an attachment. Put them all in the same area so they don't get skipped!!!!



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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.
 

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That service recall email blast Rick posted looks fantastic....
Would not be surprised at all to see the phones melting after that one.....

Does anyone have experience with running a blast, locally with what many marketers call "In Market Auto Intenders"
If so, how did it go? ROI, etc??
 
To Me,

I believe that email campaigns should be sent separately from the CRM.

3rd Party email marketing applications tend to have many additional marketing and reporting features to help you automate your marketing.

We see amazing results for our clients when we utilize our email platform over their CRM.
 
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