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Email losers

Alex Snyder

President Skroob
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May 1, 2006
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Alex
Skip to the point if you don't care to read the backstory.

I sit back, this morning, amazed at how unreliable email delivery is. It might be getting worse and worse every year. Due to abusive advertisers we all want to safeguard our inboxes from disgusting amounts of delete button presses. And so, car dealers suffer. Car dealers become email losers.

Sure, dealers' practicing carpet bombing marketing tactics with "free" email campaigns can absolutely be given all the "I told you so's" and "you get what you deserve's" that we care to expound. Anyway, my point is not to get lost in a you reap what you sow scenario.

My point is to reflect on a current purchase experience I am going through for my fiancé. Her lease is up soon and we've been shopping. I'm obviously not your typical car shopper, and that becomes quite apparent to my salesperson when asking about cap costs, residuals, and the money factor. They get quite a bit put back when I can calculate a rough payment in my head with those numbers <Alex, stop tooting your own horn> .... But I like to digest the numbers at home and that requires an email to present the numbers lawfully.

The point

Most dealers I have worked with cannot get an email to me. They claim it has been sent, but I cannot receive their emails in my Hotmail, iCloud/Me.com, or GMail accounts. These dealers have had to forward an email to their own personal accounts and then send from there, instead of their CRM, to get something in my inbox.

Their CRM is blacklisted. And the combined forces of sales people, sales managers, and Internet managers cannot fathom why. And I'm not talking about a single CRM system here. This is across multiple dealerships in multiple states. It seems like every CRM system is plagued by this.

So, dealers, do you have a way to measure your email response rates? I believe this is a key metric that can tell you two things: 1) whether your emails are getting through and 2) how good a particular employee is at composing an engaging email.

Are you aware of how much of an email loser you are?
 
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Their CRM is blacklisted.

I've always wondered why CRMs take the approach they do for email distribution.
Many times they use their own email servers, their own IP address, etc.
I'm sure it's for privacy, cost or some state legislation / something along those lines, but it seems like a big part of the problem.
Most blacklists are on IP addresses since the domains themselves can be spoofed.

Using services like MailGun you can rotate IPs, track delivery, track open rates, track forwards, etc.
It provides plenty of data (in realtime push events) AND offers a much higher delivery rate based on them cycling out blacklisted IPs.

So, dealers, do you have a way to measure your email response rates?

I've been using a few CRMs over the past 9 years (DealerSocket, PBS, DealerMine, Reynolds CM, etc) and I've always been shocked by how bad the reporting is built in. You would think it would be priority #1 for a CRM.
This also needs to be multi-channel - some consumers get an email and reply with a phone call, text message, website visit, in-person visit, etc that often goes untracked. The tracking needs to encompass all channels so that all communications with 1 customer are easily tracked, connected and reported on.

I know I know - asking for miracles.

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Love the Judge Judy. :D

CRM's tend to report on an email campaigns metrics, but most fall way short on daily use metrics. All brag that their reporting is great, but most are so full of holes. Don't even get me started with VinSolutions build it yourself solution that came out a year ago.
Hold the phone. Are you suggesting that Vin's Connect Reporting isn't The Single Greatest Thing In Automotive CRM History?

What, you don't like randomly inaccurate information, and waiting eleven minutes for each screen to load?

Sheesh.
 
This is one of the most annoying, frustrating happenings that plagues our industry CRM's. I used to go through the hassle of forwarding emails to a gmail account and re-sending out from there. Still do from time to time. This reason alone is why I encourage utilizing text and of course the phone. We also use a follow-up program that sends from a different server, something I'm not a fan of but for this purpose alone, it has helped with our email communications.

There's a thread on here somewhere from Malinda @1to1News - she points to few different free services that help you determine whether or not an email server is blacklisted or not. She also provides a step by step instruction post on how to obtain the IP your CRM is using. I'll post it as soon as I find it.
 
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@Alex Snyder We have a communication effectiveness report that we use. It has all the outbound comms (phone, email, text) the rep makes and tallies up all the inbound comms in (phone, email, text). That gives us a good idea of 1) are the emails being delivered and 2) If the rep is actually sending decent info in the email.

As a back up to the emails being sent, the reps can send a text message simultaneously when they sent the email to the customers mobile phone (extremely highly encouraged ) as well simply by checking off a box. The text message doesn't say anything about the email. It simply says, 'This is Joe Salesman from Whatever dealer. I just sent you an email.' A short url is also included in the txt as well so the customer can click the link and view a web version of the email that was sent.

You can see a pic of the report here: https://forum.dealerrefresh.com/thr...-are-you-looking-at-each-day.5187/#post-44894

Email section from CRM below. If customer has multiple phone numbers, you can select the number you want to text at the top. And then click the text icon at the bottom.
upload_2018-1-27_19-24-56.png

The text the customer gets!
upload_2018-1-27_19-26-18.png
upload_2018-1-27_19-26-47.png

And heres the link they can view online!
https://goo.gl/bu6zFo
 
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This begs the question...is the issue the CRM, or is email the issue?

Dealerships want/need CRMs to keep customer communications more organized and streamlined.
ISPs however do not need CRMs. They need to deliver the emails that matter.
Customers also do not need CRMs. They need to receive emails that matter, which are few and far between.

@Rick Buffkin I like the idea of receiving a text alerting me of an email. This prompts me to look for the email, but if it's marked as spam, then it may not matter.

Messaging apps might be a better alternative for one-to-one communications. If I receive a message, say on FB, then I'm more likely to see it. However, if it comes across as a one-to-many message, then I'm more likely to ignore it.

What I'm getting at is that one-to-one communications are of growing importance, and email is losing its effectiveness for that from a B2C standpoint, unless it's to confirm a transaction and no response is required, such as an order having been placed, or a shipment sent.

These issues are not limited to auto retail, and CRM companies need to keep on the up-and-up for sure.
 
Return Path has two tools that will let you check your CRM's Sender Score (Reputation) and if the server is blacklisted or not. You just need the IP address of your mail server. To get it, just send yourself an email from your CRM to your personal email address and view the header to grab the sending IP.

To the topic at hand, most CRMs don't maintain individual mail servers for each of their clients. Typically they have a pool of email servers that all of their clients share. That means even if you are meticulous about segmenting and managing your list, other dealerships who may be more "spammy" in their email marketing efforts can negatively affect you.

That’s right, the dealer down the street who uses the same CRM as you, who repeatedly blasts their email list, can cause YOUR emails to not reach their intended recipients because you share the same mail server. Tell me that's not a little messed up?

Warning, self promotion: I blogged about why CRMs aren't that great for email marketing a while back. If anyone is interested, you can check it out here.
 
Return Path has two tools that will let you check your CRM's Sender Score (Reputation) and if the server is blacklisted or not. You just need the IP address of your mail server. To get it, just send yourself an email from your CRM to your personal email address and view the header to grab the sending IP.

To the topic at hand, most CRMs don't maintain individual mail servers for each of their clients. Typically they have a pool of email servers that all of their clients share. That means even if you are meticulous about segmenting and managing your list, other dealerships who may be more "spammy" in their email marketing efforts can negatively affect you.

That’s right, the dealer down the street who uses the same CRM as you, who repeatedly blasts their email list, can cause YOUR emails to not reach their intended recipients because you share the same mail server. Tell me that's not a little messed up?

Warning, self promotion: I blogged about why CRMs aren't that great for email marketing a while back. If anyone is interested, you can check it out here.
A little relevant self promotion never hurts. I have never considered it spam, when it's relevant to the issue at hand. Nice work!

I haven't been in a dealership CRM for a good bit of time, but I do remember us having issues with our CRM vendors and E-mails getting through to recipients. Might have been partly our fault, but doubt it. Seems like a systemic concern, with no real panacea.
 
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Hold the phone. Are you suggesting that Vin's Connect Reporting isn't The Single Greatest Thing In Automotive CRM History?

What, you don't like randomly inaccurate information, and waiting eleven minutes for each screen to load?

Sheesh.

I like when a manual tally of the desk log gives you different metrics than the reporting does. Even better when a pay plan is tied to it. Thanks database engineers!