The Email Wars

About 3 years back I went and opted in to 12 different automotive manufacturers campaigns. The reason (besides loving cars) was to watch the types of programs they put together, look for best practices and new ideas. I have saved each and everyone that I have received and enjoyed the majority of them. What stuck after reviewing 196 emails so far was the major differences in each program. Now not being clear of the exact goals of each I went into it with an open mind and was interested in getting a few years in before making any observations.

What I found was very interesting to me as the results of these communications were across the board.

Six of the Eleven actually sent me a Welcome or Thank you email within 1 weeks time.

Two emailed me only ONCE in 2 plus years – Porsche and Aptera.

Seven sent me a newsletter either monthly or every other month.

Six sent me actually promotional emails for buying, new models, or a lease.

Three sent me emails with a promotional tie in to a movie, event or cause that they supported.

None of them tied promotions into a local dealer location.

Most striking was that none of them had a solid plan of mixing news, new line ups, offers and welcomes. It showed me that many of them were across the board in building an email marketing program. Odd as you would think with the amount of lists that they might build from so many lead capture places on the sites that they would be a little more aggressive in getting me into a new car or passing on that lead to the local dealer. None of them used local dealer locations and this was the most surprising of all. Isn’t that were the cars get sold? Not many people I know actually buy a car online but instead head into the local dealer location to drive and feel the cars.

Seems that they are all missing the boat here of tying email to the physical location right?

Now Volvo’s first Thank you email did it right sharing local dealer info, but never again did I hear from or about the local groups after the Thank you email. Maybe they figure I am IN MARKET to buy at that point in time. But buying a care often takes a while for me and I assume others. Its not really an impulse purchase.

I think that if they had a lifecycle plan around people that build cars online, review models, work from activity reports in past email campaigns, and ask people more often to build a profile of type of car, what model they drive now, are they a current owner, etc they could start to build a better method besides batch and blast.

Heck maybe it is working for them?

Now since that time eROI has been working on some local area auto campaigns for a large dealer group and been doing it well. We have tied

email to location, used direct mail PIN coded campaigns to those that we do not have email addresses for to convert them to digital and save the dealer group money, and had amazing success in our tests and campaigns. In a recent new model release for a Luxury auto brand we tried the offer tests between direct mail and email. Of the DM we saw a lower response rate, while the email touches drove a much higher response rate for the new auto event. Turnout matched the response from the two and actually sold the new car at that even from someone that was on the email response list. Mission accomplished.

Not sure how these auto groups are running their programs and making them work, but they need to get into supporting and driving the local response business as it is these guys that sell the cars for them.

Are there things that you think might work for the auto industry to help with their email marketing campaigns? Do you have any examples to share of someone doing it right down to the local level? Love to hear/see them.