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web based email marketing

andwrig

4 Pounder
Apr 11, 2009
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Vinart Dealerships
Anybody using a web based email marketing platform like aweber or Mail Chimp for blast email marketing instead of their CRM email platform? If so how are you finding that process to be from a management standpoint? Are you able to maintain accurate pure lists? Do you find it's worth the extra work?
 
Anybody using a web based email marketing platform like aweber or Mail Chimp for blast email marketing instead of their CRM email platform? If so how are you finding that process to be from a management standpoint? Are you able to maintain accurate pure lists? Do you find it's worth the extra work?

I use mailchimp... not because I want to but because my CRM (ReyRey) is a FAIL.

MailChimp does what a real CRM should do... but can't.
Example: I sent out a large campaign and time warner's system automatically shut me down because they thought I was flooding them with SPAM. It's called email throttling. ReyRey doesn't have it.

MailChip does what a real CRM should do... but can't.
If you send out emails and the email account is dead, MailChimp automatically updates the list and removes the name from the file. Thats just plain Smart. ReyRey doesn't have it (just ignore the 5,320 bounced emails in your inbox!)


That said, mailchimp has many problems.

Maintaining the email list from CRM into MailChimp is a giant time suck.

A real problem for car dealers is our email recipient rejection rate is far higher than other industries AND mailchimp has very high standards and demands very low rejection rates MailChimps very high standards and our above average rejection rates causes MailChimp to suspend our account until we have a "cause and repair" phone meeting with a MailChimp rep. (note: this high email rejection rate is yet another hallmark of car dealer FB fan pages being a LOW ROI time suck).



In the end, MailChimp is a FAIL for me. We've just hired Moore and Scarry for our ad agency and I hand it off to them and it gets done.
 
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I use mailchimp... not because I want to but because my CRM (ReyRey) is a FAIL.

MailChimp does what a real CRM should do... but can't.
Example: I sent out a large campaign and time warner's system automatically shut me down because they thought I was flooding them with SPAM. It's called email throttling. ReyRey doesn't have it.

MailChip does what a real CRM should do... but can't.
If you send out emails and the email account is dead, MailChimp automatically updates the list and removes the name from the file. Thats just plain Smart. ReyRey doesn't have it (just ignore the 5,320 bounced emails in your inbox!)


That said, mailchimp has many problems.

Maintaining the email list from CRM into MailChimp is a giant time suck.

A real problem for car dealers is our email recipient rejection rate is far higher than other industries AND mailchimp has very high standards and demands very low rejection rates MailChimps very high standards and our above average rejection rates causes MailChimp to suspend our account until we have a "cause and repair" phone meeting with a MailChimp rep. (note: this high email rejection rate is yet another hallmark of car dealer FB fan pages being a LOW ROI time suck).

In the end, MailChimp is a FAIL for me. We've just hired Moore and Scarry for our ad agency and I hand it off to them and it gets done.


Interesting Joe - for I've been highly considering tomoving over MailChimp or AWeber for our email marketing. I currently use eLead CRM for most of our prospect email marketing (they use StrongMail to manage their email campaigns) and I some of the same issues...

Bad emails are not scrubbed from the CRM so each month I pull a new lest, we're resending to these bad emails. Managing and deleting the bounces in the CRM is always a time suck. I need to call eLead to see if they can scrub this list from their end. I'll cross my fingers.

Exporting the list from eLead only takes a few seconds BUT once the customer buys and IF we would want to drop them from the list - that would take some time. Although there might be a batch unsubscribe import in MailChimp - something worth checking into.

Something else I like that eLead offers that "the others" do not, is tying the campaign back to a sale. A good CRM will show your vehicles sold within a selected date/time frame of sending your email campaign.

Another PLUS that you get from the others would be Google analytic tracking and possibly better segmentation.

I'm an email marketing machine. I think each dealer is missing out if they're not email strongly marketing to their prospect database.

Joe, how many times did you send your campaigns through Mailchimp before taking a step in another direction?

I ask this because many times it take some time for your list to settle in and normalize when you do your first email address dump.
 
Jeff

You bring up some great points. A robust email marketing platform complete with list segmentation, conversion capture, open rates, click thrus, etc should be a cornerstone of all really good automotive CRM companies. Many claim to have it but often times they are lacking when compared to companies like MailChimp where email marketing is all they do. I'm with Joe in that I have Reynolds CRM (for now) and their email campaign management, delivery, reporting, etc is horrible but this is not uncommon in the automotive CRM space. I'm sure I just opened myself up to 500 comments from vendors about why that's not the case with them but the fact is that not one company does it all which would be difficult to do. I will say that I use Reynolds Managed Marketing Solutions and the email that goes through them is very well done with high delivery rates courtesy of double opt in and it tracks campaign conversions. I just reviewed my reports for March today and it was detailed down to the date, time and campaign that the customer received in the weeks leading up to the sale. That's about as good as it gets but MMS is expensive and it's in addition to my CRM.

I'm with you Jeff about email marketing. I think it's still effective if it's managed properly. Maybe this is a topic for another thread but I'll go ahead and ask the question: What are the must have's of any solid email marketing software?

Biggies for me are:

- segmentation (being able to effectively group people into lists. ex. Truck buyers not getting emails about Ford Focus)
- tracking things like open rates, conversions (people that bought in a defined time frame after receiving the email), click thru's (yes people that use outlook preview pane aren't counted. I'm aware of that)
- double opt in - increases deliverability exponentially
- scrubbing of bad emails, duplicates, etc
- obsessive management when it comes to staying on the white lists or keeping off the black lists
 
... I'm with Joe in that I have Reynolds CRM (for now) and their email campaign management, delivery, reporting, etc is horrible but this is not uncommon in the automotive CRM space... ...I will say that I use Reynolds Managed Marketing Solutions and the email that goes through them is very well done with high delivery rates courtesy of double opt in and it tracks campaign conversions. I just reviewed my reports for March today and it was detailed down to the date, time and campaign that the customer received in the weeks leading up to the sale. That's about as good as it gets but MMS is expensive and it's in addition to my CRM...

MMS was born because ReyRey's platform is un-usable. No... that's incorrect. MMS was born because its subscribers can't figure it out.

Think about where this goes...

Why fix the "core" problem (a useless User Interface) when MMS is a new profit center? MMS is now an anti-incentive to fix the problem they made.

I've said it publicly a hundred times, ReyRey CRM has almost everything anyone would need in a CRM, but, no one uses it because they can't find it.

The FAIL is now permanent.
 
MMS was born because ReyRey's platform is un-usable. No... that's incorrect. MMS was born because its subscribers can't figure it out.

Think about where this goes...

Why fix the "core" problem (a useless User Interface) when MMS is a new profit center? MMS is now an anti-incentive to fix the problem they made.

I've said it publicly a hundred times, ReyRey CRM has almost everything anyone would need in a CRM, but, no one uses it because they can't find it.

The FAIL is now permanent.

Joe - You are so right in so many ways. MMS was actually an acquisition. It was AIM Data before Reynolds acquired it so they didn't even develop it. They just bolted it on. It's actually a pretty good product but your assessment is accurate nonetheless.