Is Email Marketing Still Effective?

Email marketing is one of the oldest digital strategies out there. With so many shiny new toys in the world of digital marketing – advertising via Instagram stories, voice ads through smart assistants, and more – email marketing may be considered by many to be outdated. But what’s the truth? Is this strategy old and dried up or tried and true?

It may come as a surprise that, even with all sorts of new advertising methods on the table, email marketing isn’t going anywhere. In fact, updates and innovations to the digital landscape have only made email marketing more effective. This is in large part thanks to Marketing Automation software.

Marketing Automation makes it possible to track the people who visit your website, including their contact information as well as a record of the actions they take on your site. Based on the information that Marketing Automation collects, personalizing an email or even an entire email campaign is made simple. Each website visitor who chooses to receive your emails will only receive messages that are relevant to their interests – messages that are automated based on the settings you apply for your dealership’s business goals.

Personalized, automated email is shown to drive engagement levels up, increasing the likelihood that your email recipients will later make a purchase. Open rates for automated messages are 71% higher than regular business emails. Even more impressive, click-through rates (CTR) are 152% higher!* These statistics make sense because consumers are receiving emails that are meaningful to them and their personal interests.

One reason why we may not see email marketing perform well is because email lists are not properly segmented. For example, repeat customers should not be on the same email list as prospects who have never visited your dealership before – it wouldn’t make sense for these opposite portions of your audience to receive the same messages. You wouldn’t want to send a loyalty discount offer email to a prospect, or a “Come Meet Us” message to a repeat customer. Similarly, Marketing Automation can show you what types of units a website visitor has browsed or clicked on throughout their history on your site. Segmenting email lists based on this type of information can prevent you from an oversight such as advertising a sale on used inventory to a prospect who has only browsed your brand-new high-end units.

The beauty of Marketing Automation is that it removes so much guesswork from the email marketing process and in some ways allows you to “set it and forget it” when it comes to your email strategy. With the automated process in place, you don’t need to remember things like which customers are due for a trade-in, and you don’t need to wonder if new prospects are receiving follow-up emails about the units they’ve submitted leads on. You can rest assured that everything is taken care of and the settings you chose to implement are taking leads along the pathway to sale.

It is worth mentioning that email marketing is also a highly cost-effective strategy. Advertising through search engines and social media platforms can easily get expensive, but email marketing is offered at a steady cost depending on how large your audience is and how many email campaigns you want to send. Personalized campaigns bring the best return on investment, and Marketing Automation allows you to achieve a personalized email marketing program for every prospect.

*Emma