Tag Archives: Car Dealership

Email Marketing Solutions for Car Dealerships

Posted on 08. Mar, 2009 by admin.

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automotive marketing

Email marketing solutions can help your car dealership enhance the number of vehicles that come in for service. Keeping consistent numbers is all well and good, but everyone knows having increasing monthly numbers is better. Email marketing solutions track the campaigns you send out so that you get real time data on the customers who are interested in the promotions you offer them regarding your service centre.

By reminding your customer to bring their cars in for service, you have the opportunity to multiply the amount of vehicles coming in for service. More vehicles for service means higher numbers in sales.

So, how do email marketing solutions help you bring more cars to your service center? Simple, all your customers really need is a reminder: “Hey you know that asset of yours that you paid thousands of dollars for? You need to make sure it’s in tip top shape, and it will only cost you $50.”

Your DMS most likely lists all of your clients’ contact information, such as how many times they have visited, and when their vehicle is due for service. This is vital information for you to use when creating a campaign through automotive email marketing solutions.

You can also use the “number of visits” and the “vehicles due for service” categories, to help you segment your email marketing solutions campaigns into frequent users, sometime users, and seldom users.

Now you are ready to create three different marketing campaigns, for three different target customer groups, while reminding them all how important their investment is to them.

Once you have created your campaigns, the magic happens. Email marketing solutions are equipped to track how many people have opened your email, if they have clicked on the promotions, or if they have sent your email on to friends or family.

The data gets even more in depth than that. You can know exactly who opened the email you sent, who clicked on each link within the email, on what day, and at what time. These insights can help you further segment your email marketing solutions campaign. As an example, let’s say that you are tracking those that “frequently” bring their cars in to your service center: 50% are clicking on their “$10 off preferred customer” promotion on the weekends; and the other 50% are opening and clicking on their emails from Monday to Friday.

You now have two more customer groups to better target your audience: weekend readers and weekday readers. You can then split your future email marketing campaigns into 2, so that your emails arrive into your customers’ inboxes exactly when they’re most likely to read it.

You will also be able to grow your list with a “forward to friends” button that is available on most email marketing solutions. For those customers that are constantly forwarding your email (we love these guys) you can show your appreciation by segmenting yet again.

You can offer them a special promotion for forwarding your email. This will keep them in the business of continuing to spread the good word about your service center.

It’s really easy to take “tracked” information and turn it into another campaign. Email marketing solutions are very user-friendly, so the tracking feature of most email marketing solutions gives you the option to export the data found within any given field.

Email marketing solutions will bring more people to your automotive dealership service center by providing you with the information you need to segment and target your customers. Catering to your audience’s exact needs will bring more of them to your service center and provide you with a better opportunity to grow your sales per month.

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Automotive Advertising Versus Marketing

Posted on 26. Feb, 2009 by admin.

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automotive marketing

Every time we turn on our television sets or computers, we are barraged with an endless stream of automotive commercials or advertisements from an auto dealership online marketing campaign. What many of us don’t realize is that while they are selling the same product the means in which they do so are completely different. Were you aware that there is a difference between automotive advertising and auto dealers marketing?

The majority of auto dealers make the mistake of confusing the two without even realizing they are doing so. Little do they understand of the complexities involved with auto dealership online marketing versus their advertising. Now, think about all of the many billions of dollars they waste every year in automotive advertising and car dealer internet marketing due to their ignorance. The automotive business accounts for the largest spending on local newspapers and local radio stations, for example.

Let me begin with going over the formal definitions of each with a quick explanation of how auto dealership marketing and automotive advertising vary from one another:

Automotive Advertising - Different from car dealership internet marketing in that this is usually defined as a paid, public, and non-personal announcement of some type of persuasive message from a particular sponsor, in this case the car dealership. Automotive advertising tends to be a non-personal presentation or promotion of its products to existing and, more importantly, new potential customers.

Auto Dealership Marketing - Any type of effort that involves the systematic planning, implementation and control of business activities intended to bring together buyers and sellers such as auto dealership online marketing. Auto dealers marketing must be equally advantageous to both parties in regards to the exchange or transfer of products.

As you can see it is easy to confuse advertising as a car dealership internet marketing campaign. The difference can be confusing to the point that people think of them as one-in-the same, so let me break it down a little more for you.

The best way to distinguish the two is to imagine marketing as a pie, inside there is advertising, car dealership internet marketing, market research, auto dealership marketing, media planning, product pricing, distribution, customer support, and sales strategy. Advertising is only one piece of the entire in the marketing strategy as is car dealer internet marketing.

All of these elements not only work independently, such as an auto dealership online marketing campaign, but also together towards a larger and more comprehensive goal. Think of marketing as a process which takes time, often involving many, many hours of research for that marketing plan to be effective. Marketing is everything a business does to assist sales between the business and consumer.

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Automotive Internet Marketing Plan

Posted on 16. Dec, 2008 by admin.

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automotiveinternetmarketingplan

automotiveinternetmarketingplan

Putting an Internet marketing plan of action into effect can help your car dealership or business survive through that hard times and prosper in the good. However, this is one of the most difficult strategies to master. It takes a lot of foresight, planning, and also requires buy-in from everyone from the dealership owner down to Internet Sales managers and staff.

There are many things to manage including the ongoing battle between Internet budget and traditional budget, where the money is spent, and how much will be done by dealership staff versus being outsourced. Obviously all of the media comes into play as well as the message- what is your offering and where do you make the offer- on third party automotive lead sites or on your own site?

Decisions needs to be made on who the Internet marketing plan revolves around- the Internet department, the dealership, or the 3rd party lead provider.

PureDealer can help you through this process. Depending on the size of your dealership, staffing, even location and brands that you sell, we take all of this into account when helping you with your marketing ideas and planning. Contact us for more details on how we can help you with your Automotive Internet Marketing plan.

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