Re-Engage Your Sales Prospects by Integrating Automated Email Marketing with Other Channels

If you’re already leveraging trigger-based email marketing (or thinking about it), you have a significant opportunity to apply that automation to re-engaging your existing sales leads. Automated email marketing is a great way to nurture leads and personalize the shopper's journey, but it's most effective when used as an integral and complementary part of your dealership's overall digital marketing strategy. 

With automated email marketing, you can directly retarget leads you’ve already captured through SEO and SEM. And, you can continue to engage shoppers and synergize your marketing strategies to get the most out of your marketing. 

What is Automated Email Marketing?

Automated email marketing (AEM) automatically communicates relevant information to your audience, based on their actions and interests. When shoppers submit a lead form, the technology tracks their activity and interests to generate personalized marketing messages. This allows you to nurture leads through personalized communications, not just promote your brand. In fact, according to VentureBeat, automated emails drive 180% higher conversion rates than batch emails.

Automated emails drive 180% higher conversion rates than batch emails. (VentureBeat)

In addition to driving higher conversion rates, AEM does a better job of engaging your customers over time with personalized content—the kind of content today’s shoppers expect. In fact, research by Epsilon® shows 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase if a brand offers personalized experiences. AEM also helps you reach potential buyers beyond your immediate audience base (your customers can easily share inventory emails with their social groups) and saves your dealership time, as messages don’t require any manual input from your team.

Make the Most of Your Marketing Spend

If you're already running organic search and paid advertisement campaigns to bring traffic to your website, you want to make sure you're getting your money's worth in qualified leads. AEM can boost the return on investment for your marketing dollars by re-engaging your website visitors and keeping them in your sales funnel.

AEM is a full funnel strategy because once shoppers have provided their email contact, you can reach them anytime, not just when they click on an ad or search online. The automated nature and relevance of these emails bring shoppers back to your website again and again, keeping them them loyal and interested in your content. On top of (and because of) all that, AEM is effective for dealerships of all sizes: It allows smaller dealerships to focus on existing customers, and large dealerships to filter through thousands of leads to find qualified buyers.

A Shopper’s Journey 

Automated email marketing is an effective part of your overall digital marketing strategy, no matter which path to purchase your shoppers take. Maybe a shopper sees and clicks on your online ad for new inventory, starts browsing that inventory on your website and submits a lead form to learn more about a particular listing. You now have that shopper’s information and your email marketing tool can automatically send the shopper emails reminding them to come back and finish the purchase and view similar inventory.

Similarly, let’s say an interested shopper searches for content about a particular unit and finds a relevant blog article and other content on your dealer’s website. After engaging with your site, the shopper submits their information, requesting to learn more about a particular listing. Your automated email marketing tool can now send the shopper additional personalized content specific to their interests or notify them when a unit price has decreased.

Best Practices for Integrating AEM with other Marketing Channels

Automated email marketing is one of the easiest, most efficient and cost-effective ways to engage customers, without having to do a lot of manual work yourself. But there are a few best practices you can implement to integrate your automated emails with your digital marketing to improve performance and target specific qualified leads. 

Integrate AEM with Your Inventory 

Automated emails might require less effort from your team, but that doesn’t mean they have to be impersonal—far from it. Send automated emails to customers at critical times to secure buyer loyalty and make special offers.

Link your automated email tool to your DMS and CRM to feature only the units that are relevant to your dealership and the customer. If a lead has bounced (didn’t convert) or a shopper has engaged with content or a specific unit on your site, send them relevant blog posts via automated email and encourage them to revisit the units that caught their interest. 

Similarly, send a personalized automated email follow-up after a shopper has engaged with a particular unit on your website. Include a special offer and when they’re ready to make a purchase, they’ll remember to come back to you.

Use AEM to Inform Marketing Campaigns & Social Content 

Automated email marketing is a great way to send personalized messages to your customers, but it’s also a great way to generate customer opinions and content that can help to bring in even more customers to your dealership. 

Set up automated emails, inviting customers to share their experience with your dealership immediately after a purchase. These emails will help you gain authentic, reliable feedback about the purchase experience and your customer service. They also demonstrate to shoppers that you’re eager to hear their opinion and will apply their input to your process. 

You can use this feedback, generated from your automated emails, in your marketing campaigns or on social media to drive even more traffic back to your site. It’s an ongoing cycle of integrating marketing emails and marketing content to keep customers coming back.

Monitor Customer Engagement & Marketing Effectiveness

You can use AEM to inform your campaigns and content, but data goes both ways. Use your marketing content from other channels to populate your emails. You can use this data to better understand your customers and deliver more personalized marketing emails. 

AEM gives you unequaled insight into how your emails are performing with your audience. Analyze email data regularly to know which messages are driving the highest conversions and which campaigns and content are triggering the most emails. This will help you know more about your customers to build a richer customer profile and deliver more personalized content. 

You can also apply these strategies to other digital marketing tactics. Are you seeing high conversion rates from your buy-back emails? You could drive even more buy-back business by creating a banner for your website or running a paid ad campaign with a similar message.

While you can predict seasonal demand to a degree and tailor your marketing to match demand levels, AEM gives you even more detailed insights into what your customers want. Email marketing results can highlight consumer interests you may not have previously been aware of (a particular color combination on a unit, for example). Knowing what units are in high demand allows you to increase advertising for these units on other platforms (social media, paid ads, etc.).

Integrate AEM with Your Customer Base to Reengage Previous Buyers

Once a customer, always a customer, at least that’s the goal. Keeping customers for life is equal parts excellent customer service and strategic engagement with smart marketing over time. Automated email marketing can help you keep customers engaged throughout the buying and ownership journey by sending them emails at strategic times throughout the ownership journey. 

Set up timely re-engagement emails so that when existing customers are ready to upgrade or buy a new part, you’re already there with an automated email offer to drive buyers back into your sales funnel. Similarly, send these customers buyback offers or PG&A and maintenance offers to let them know you care, keep your brand top of mind, and convert one-time buyers into long-term, loyal customers. 

Automated email marketing has many benefits—it’s cost-effective and requires less work and manual input from your team than traditional email sends. It’s also highly personalized and allows you to drive stronger engagement and higher conversion rates than other emails. But AEM works best when it’s incorporated into your overall digital marketing strategy. Use automated email marketing in connection with your campaigns to synergize your SEO and SEM, engage customers, improve performance and get the most out of your marketing.