Dealers: It's 2024, bulk email blast campaigns are long dead.
For the last decade as marketers, we've all been familiar with this recurring request: "We need to drum up some extra business and get the word out to the masses, let's send an email blast!"
While this tactic may still work (for now) for customers with AOL and Yahoo email addresses, it's been largely ineffective for Gmail and Hotmail users for years, you probably just haven't realized that your campaigns have been going straight to spam.
And considering Gmail users constitute 65% of our customer database, that's a huge chunk of your audience to miss out on.
Simply ticking off the email best practice checklist — having a warmed-up IP, dedicated sending domain, DKIM, SPF, DMARC, avoiding spammy content, and including unsubscribe links — isn't enough.
One of the primary signals Gmail and other providers use to determine whether an email should land in the inbox is recipient engagement. Are users opening your emails, clicking on links, etc?
That's a tough signal to succeed with when you're sending email blast campaigns to thousands of customers at once, no matter how "targeted" you believe your list is.
The issues plaguing bulk email blast campaigns are extensive:
- They're not timely, often only sent when you find the time once or twice a month.
- They're not relevant, targeting too broad of audiences with too many recipients.
- They show no creative variation, using too few templates or campaigns, leading to email fatigue.
- They lack contact sunsetting rules, continuing to send to people who have never opened or clicked any of your past emails.
- They fail at tracking engagement by email provider and campaign, not adjusting strategy based on open and click rates.
All these issues lead to low email open rates, which translates to low click rates, and this will ultimately cause all your emails to go straight to spam moving forward. From there, it's a tough road to recovery.
But I get it, sending bulk email campaigns is easy. You export a giant list, throw together a quick email template, and click send. The bigger the audience, the better! And you might even see great initial results from an untapped database. However, email providers catch on quickly, it's not the wild west of email anymore.
So, what's the solution?
Highly targeted and triggered email sequences based on detailed customer behavior.
Platforms like Klaviyo, Braze, ActiveCampaign, and Intuit Mailchimp all offer the sophisticated tools needed for email marketing today.
Here's how they differ:
- They're timely, creating super targeted audience segments with automatic entrance and exit criteria. No more waiting for once a month bulk campaigns.
- They're relevant, allowing you to dynamically personalize each email to truly resonate with the recipient by moving users through targeted audience segments based on their email, website, and CRM activity.
- They offer creative variation, preventing email fatigue with targeted audience segments plus dynamic personalization and email journey sequencing.
- They include contact sunsetting rules, creating engagement tracks to avoid over-sending emails to users who aren't engaging.
- They involve tracking engagement by email provider and campaign, allowing for quick strategy adjustments before you end up in spam forever.
But there are significant challenges to moving towards this strategy in automotive retail.
Syncing your email marketing platform with CRM and DMS data is critical to ensure customers are always in the correct segment for relevant messaging.
And unfortunately that's not easily possible with the majority of automotive vendors currently, which underscores the need for CRM and DMS providers to offer robust API connections so dealers can activate their customer data effectively.
@brianpasch has been helping push the industry in this direction by advocating for customer data platforms, now we just need vendors to continue to make in-roads in this regard.
It's 2024, and we need email marketing strategies that reflect our times.
