Carefully measuring the performance of your email newsletter leads to better content and more engaged customers
As a car dealer who wants to engage customers and nurture loyalty, you probably send a regular e-newsletter (and if you don’t, you really should). But too many customer newsletters are bland, self-serving, and easily ignored. Great dealers set their newsletters apart by using key metrics to continually fine tune everything from core content to the time of day they send them. Customers value their newsletters, which makes them a potent weapon in your marketing mix.
Refining your own newsletter isn’t complicated, and it will never be wasted effort. Email marketing—of which an e-newsletter is an important component—remains an extremely effective marketing channel. According to Campaign Monitor, every $1 spent on email marketing earns $44 in return.
In other words, an effective e-newsletter is a key part of your marketing strategy. But measuring that effectiveness and tweaking it accordingly is vital. Newsletters that offer no value annoy consumers, who are increasingly prepared to report irrelevant emails as spam and unsubscribe from contact lists.
A blueprint for a successful lead follow-up process
The car business attracts all types of buyers: some folks buy cars on impulse, like a bag of chips in the checkout line, while others spend days, weeks, or even months searching for the right car, deal, and dealership. Regardless of the type of buyer though, life can get in the way sometimes, causing car shopping to get put on the back burner.
In my former life as a BDC Director at a six-store dealer group, I found that timing was one of the main reasons why even our most effective lead sources converted at only 10%-12%. It wasn’t because the customers weren’t serious or decided to buy elsewhere—it was because they didn’t have time, and my dealership was giving up too soon.
Why does that matter to you? If you want to drive more sales from existing leads, you need to optimize your lead follow-up strategy.
PCG Research: “CarGurus has become the hottest auto shopping site in the US”
In a market where customer expectations are evolving rapidly and the shopping journey continues to become more disconnected, CarGurus has remained steadfast in its goal: building the world’s most trusted and transparent automotive marketplace—and it’s working. CarGurus is now the most visited and most used car shopping site in the US.*
CG X Virtual Dealer Insights Summit recap
Last week, hundreds of automotive marketers from around the country joined us for CarGurus’ first-ever virtual Dealer Insights Summit. The event featured inspiring keynotes, an engaging dealer panel, and educational presentations focused not only on what’s happening in automotive now, but also what’s ahead. It was packed with actionable takeaways and powerful industry insights—here are some of the highlights:
Dealers who create content ramp up authority, trust, and sales
Good content gives you a trustworthy voice—and makes you stand out from the crowd
Creating your own content can transform you from one dealer among many into a trusted industry voice, helping to reassure potential buyers of your credibility and expertise. Engage your audience with video, graphics and images, as well as words. It’s all a lot easier than you might think.
See how used car prices change over time with CarGurus’ Price Trends tool
Whether you need help pricing your inventory or you’re looking for insight into what cars to stock, CarGurus can help! We track the prices of millions of used cars and make the data available in our Price Trends tool. Use it to identify seasonal trends, look up average used car prices, or find out which makes and models best hold their value over time.
Automation makes digital marketing easy and effective for forward-thinking dealers
Marketing automation turns browsers into potential buyers—while dealers get on with other business
Like other time-pressed small businesses, dealerships naturally worry that running a digital marketing strategy properly might take resources they don’t have, and that doing it badly might be worse than not doing it at all. The answer is to let technology take on the heavy lifting. Marketing automation tools put efficient and effective lead nurturing within easy reach of all dealers, allowing them to boost customer engagement—and ultimately sales—without undermining other areas of business.
CarGurus announces 2018 Top Rated Dealer Awards in the US
It’s that time of year again — time to present the fourth annual CarGurus Top Rated Dealer Awards in the US.
The awards recognize a select group of car dealers with the highest average ratings from shoppers who have submitted reviews through the CarGurus platform. Each of the dealers receiving the award provides exceptional customer service as expressed in their customers’ online reviews.
Using Google Analytics to drive more effective sales
Your data is your most important sales resource
Closing a sale at your dealership is led by knowing your buyer, from preferences to budget, and more. Having those same data points for online shoppers is key to driving leads to your dealership.
Getting to know a potential car buyer in your dealership is easy. Talking, asking, listening, advising—it’s the car salesperson’s mantra.
Getting to know your online shoppers, though, can be an entirely different proposition.
- You can’t really talk to them one-on-one
- You can only ask limited questions
- Listening and advising isn’t as dynamic as a face-to-face conversation in a dealership
This may appear to paint a bleak picture for online lead generation and conversion, but it overlooks a simple yet powerful tool that also happens to be free of charge: Google Analytics.
What’s in a subject line? More than you think
Some absolutely amazing, creative, and engaging emails come from dealerships, but sometimes it’s purely by chance or curiosity that recipients open the messages. It’s often overlooked, but the subject line is the single most important piece of your email messages. People are bombarded with countless emails and most times, the only thing standing between your email and the “delete” button is the subject line.
According to a HubSpot study, automotive industry emails have an open rate of only 35%. Despite being slightly higher than open rates across all industries, which average 32%, it still means that 65% of your emails are never opened.