@skutchhenks, A very interesting thread especially since here at AutoSweet we do Conquest Email Marketing. And by 'do', I mean we have a platform that helps a dealer report on whether a conquest campaign is working for them. How it works:
* Our team prepares the creative for you in-house and works directly with you to meet your marketing objectives
* We also work with the manufacturer brand agencies to build the creative that matches current manufacturer national programs and to get co-op dollars if possible
* We integrate with your DMS and are certified with many DMS partners to get your data securely. We've been in the DMS data aggregation business for many years and this is core to the services that AutoSweet provides
* We use DMS access for three things only:
a) confirm that the geo you want to target is a realistically where you sell, there's no sense in sending 25,000 emails to a zip code where you sell one car a year
b) gather all email addresses from your service and sales transactions to use as a suppression list against our lists -- we know that you are (or should be) marketing to your customers regularly using your CRM, so we don't want to hit them with these Conquest emails
c) as the campaign runs, we match sold transactions in both service and sales to the postal addresses we are marketing to and report on the ROI
* We then send the emails through a variety of data partners including our own affiliate database; our platform is designed to send data through multiple platforms
* We then integrate our platform to Google Analytics and report on the traffic, specifically number of sessions, bounce rates, new users %, time on site, pages viewed, etc.
* We also compile data from the data partners and report on email statistics like Opens and Clicks so that you can use that in creating a true ROI picture
We believe that our reports are the most transparent and real-time in the business and we know that you as a dealership are looking for good traffic, real users and in the end buyers. We vet new partners for consistency, quality, deliverability so that you don't have to. And we report on the matched service and sales transactions that are generated. We built this platform to help our dealerships understand their email traffic.
I'm sorry but that probably sounded like one big sales pitch. By all means call us if you want to try conquest email done right or check out our site:
http://www.autosweet.com/email-marketing/email-marketing/.
I think Chad and Brian in his latest video brings up some great points and honestly I wish we had access to measure some of the things that Chad suggests, but we are limited to Google Analytics and sales & service transactional matches. Our team is going to look for some more opportunities for more transparency based on these posts and add those to future platform releases.
Lastly while the experiences described are troubling, we know that we are generating local non-bot traffic. We can produce postal lists early in the process or even prior to sending the email. We have talked to the real people we are emailing that are buying your services. Our DMS transaction ROI report is a clear indicator of real sales to touched consumers on both your sales and service sides of the house. Our customer testimonials tell compelling stories of traffic at the store, calls, leads and increase in year over year sales. Advertising isn't always about conversion on the first email, it's about branding and building awareness and often times just being top of mind when a consumer decides to start considering a purchase. We feel that conquest email should be a part of that total marketing effort because it provides direct verifiable access to the most consumers at a Killer ROI. We wouldn't be a part of it if we saw otherwise. Reputable email list vendors have real lists that they have worked hard to acquire and the good ones work hard to keep them current by removing bots, adding fresh names, updating addresses as people move and removing emails that don't interact. They also control how often they send and how the email servers see them because their reputation is everything. Make sure you are working with one that is transparent and helpful, take the time to investigate in your own Google Analytics as
@brianpasch suggests or use a platform like AutoSweet that helps you monitor and track your performance.
