6 Simple Email Marketing Tips To Help You Sell More Cars

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If you’re looking for ways to boost your sales, email marketing is one of the best ways to do it. Here are six tips to help you craft powerful email campaigns that will help you sell more cars.

We’ve put together this guide on how to optimise your email marketing for automotive marketing success. Here are your six tips for email marketing success!

1. Update your email lists regularly

To get started with email marketing, you need to have a list of contacts who have opted in to receive communications from you. Your email list is a valuable resource that can help you grow your sales — if you take care of it properly. Email Cleansing (sometimes referred to as Scrubbing) is the first step of your email marketing strategy, Make sure that you’re always updating your lists with new contacts and deleting those who no longer want to hear from you. You should also keep track of any changes in contact information (such as phone numbers or email addresses).

Email cleansing will help deliver:

• Higher open rates and click rates
• Reduced spam complaints – avoid getting blacklisted
• Lower bounce rates – where your email doesn’t reach the inbox

You will save money on email send costs too!

2. Segment your lists

Segmenting your list is one of the most important things you can do to improve your email marketing. You can segment a list by dividing it into smaller groups based on their responses, interests and actions.

Marketers who use segmented campaigns noted as much as a 760% increase in revenue (Hubspot). However, most dealerships (73%) reported not segmenting their lists and sending out the same content to all subscribers equally. (V12 Data)

You can segment your list using a variety of criteria, such as

• geographic location
• vehicle type
• purchase date
• or whether a customer has responded to previous messages

For example, if someone has just visited your website but hasn’t purchased yet, send them used cars based on their previous purchase or search and send content, offers or discounts related to needs (e.g., tips on buying an electric vehicle).

3. Personalise the subject line and content

We’re all inundated with emails every day. So when you get an email from a friend, family member, or even an old colleague, you probably open it up right away.

Why? Because you know them. You trust them. And if they’ve got something to say, you want to hear it!

So how can car dealers mimic this kind of attention-grabbing approach in their own email marketing campaigns? By personalising their subject lines and content to make customers feel like they’re opening up something from someone they trust—someone who wants to tell them something important.

• Add your customer’s name to the subject line. “Hi [name], check out this new feature on our website”
  
  If you’re sending an email about a sale at your dealership, for example, try including some information about the customer (e.g., “You’re invited!”). This will help ensure that they see it right away instead of getting lost in their inboxes among hundreds of other emails.

• Don’t just use “Dear Customer” as the greeting in an email because it feels impersonal. Personalise the greeting with the customer’s name. For example, “Hi John!” or “Hello Mary!”

• Use a personal tone in every email you send out. Write like you speak – like you would talk directly to someone if they were standing right next to you. This can mean using contractions (like “you’ll” instead of “you will”) and avoid long sentences and paragraphs where possible
  
  “Hi [name], thanks for coming by our dealership! We hope you found what you were looking for today. If not, here are some other vehicles we think might be just right for you…“

4. Design matters

You have a few seconds to grab the attention of your audience. Beautiful design can make all the difference between someone deleting your email or clicking on it! Ensure that your emails look good on every device, including mobile phones and tablets so that they’ll look good no matter where or how they’re viewed.

• Use creative design elements like animated GIFs or video clips to keep them engaged with your message. Images are easier for us to process than text, and they’re more memorable.

Videos can increase click-through rates by as much as 85%.

• Don’t use stock photos or generic images. They don’t tell the story of your brand and can cheapen your message.

• Use high-resolution professional-looking images (minimum 500 pixels wide) so they look good on any device and in email clients — if they look like they were taken on an iPhone then they’ll look amateurish in comparison with your competitors’ car dealer emails.

They’re also great for getting across emotion and conveying information in a fun way. Create an infographic or use an image as part of a call-to-action at the end of your email: “Watch our latest video!”

And don’t forget the alt text for images — this is a line of text that appears when an image doesn’t load properly in a browser (or if someone opens the email on a mobile device).

5. Automate emails and reconnect with lost leads

Many car dealerships are still sending out their emails manually, but with automated tools like email sequences and drip campaigns you can set up campaigns so that certain emails are automatically sent based on what happens at each stage of the buying process.

• You can use automation to send follow-up emails to leads who didn’t convert on their first visit, or to reach out to people who have been inactive for a while.

• After someone submits a contact form on your website, send them an email thanking them for their interest and asking if they’d like more information about financing or vehicle inventory.

• You could automatically send out a survey asking for feedback about your dealership’s service department or a recent showroom event.

Offering something for free is one of the best ways to build trust with new customers and reconnect with past ones. For example, if someone has purchased a vehicle from your dealership but hasn’t come back yet for service work, send them an email offering them 10% off their next visit.

6. Send an email newsletter at least once a month

An email newsletter can be a very effective way of keeping your brand and your dealership at the forefront of your customer’s minds.

• Share news and updates on new inventory, latest models and announcements, upcoming events, tips and explainer videos and other information that might be valuable to your customers and potential customers.

• Send out special offers and discount codes through email. Customers love incentives, and there are plenty of ways to give them what they want in an email newsletter. Offer special incentives for loyal customers.

• Ask questions: People love answering questions — so ask them! Use surveys or polls in your emails to get feedback from subscribers about their favourite products or services.

• Don’t just sell: Try telling stories about how your business and your team, a day-in-the-life and behind-the-scenes videos are particularly popular; all this helps establish rapport with readers and makes them feel like they know you personally.

• Use images and rich media: People have short attention spans and they like to see things. Add a relevant photo to each message and add links to the image as well as call-to-action buttons after the message — it will increase your campaign’s click-through-rates significantly.

Conclusion

We hope these six tips will be of help to you. Email marketing remains a powerful tool for car dealers in 2022, and with the right strategy and approach, dealers will be able to reap the rewards that email can offer. We wish you all the best with your email campaigns!

If you need help with your emails, we’re here to assist at any time. Just schedule a call, contact us today!