You send an email, and you notice there is a group of subscribers who are not opening or clicking through. It seems they are unengaged and have lost interest in your automotive email marketing.

Are they holding out on a breakup with your dealership? Why not try to reengage these customers — propose to them, if you will — to keep in contact?

Here’s why some customers are close to breaking up with you — and what you can do to make sure they stick around.

Why Your Email Subscribers Are Breaking Up with You 

First, you need to look at the reasons why your contacts might be on the verge of breaking up with your dealership. How many emails do you send a week, and are they sent to the same people every time?

Over 65% of those disengaged with your emails will unsubscribe because of lack of interest. That means you still have another 35% who are not responding to your emails — but who haven’t broken up with you just yet.

If you have not segmented your dealer email marketing lists, you probably aren’t reaching the right audience. Segmenting lists means you find out the things people want to read about and send only that information to them.

Not only will sending an email about a car when a subscriber is a tried-and-true truck owner turn them off from reading other emails from you, they also won’t notice when you send them the relevant information they would want.

Pushing out relevant information to segmented lists is great, but make sure you are not publishing repetitive content.

Finally, there are a few reasons customers choose not to engage that are simply out of your control. For instance, they may be receiving too many emails in general, or they may be undergoing a change in personal circumstances (such as a move, marriage, birth, or death). Sometimes it is nothing you did wrong that sends a customer to unsubscribe from your emails.

With this group, a breakup is inevitable, but don’t be too sad. These breakups can actually help you clean out your lists and keep your CRM full of more interested email subscribers.

How to Reengage Email Subscribers Who Lost Interest

But what about the contacts you can re-engage?

Take a look in your email marketing mirror, and start finding ways to re-spark your customers’ interest. The process might be simple or a major undertaking, but either way, you’ll reap benefits for your bottom line.

You can equate this to getting ready for your wedding. When prepping for the big day, you might change your beauty routine, eat healthier, and exercise more. When prepping for new dealer email marketing, you can change your look, find healthier ways of sending content and work to trim down the excess.

So, here are a few email reengagement ideas to get you started.

Try a New Look

A simple template change can make your emails more mobile friendly to the majority of recipients who read their emails on their phones. Read up on best practices for beautiful marketing emails, and be ready to take on a new design.

Ask Around

If you haven’t segmented your lists, send out an easy survey with a few questions to help you put the right content on your customers’ screens. Be sure to tell them why you are surveying them.

If you deem your survey needs in-depth responses, give subscribers an incentive for taking the survey. Simple incentives such as discounts, free promotions, (shiny) bling, cash, or gift cards can go a long way to boost the specifics they answer.

The example to the right offers 25% off your next purchase for taking their quick survey. Doesn’t that make you want to click?

Personalize Your Message

Knowing you have an interest in sending contacts the information they want to see garners trust in your company. Automotive email marketing subscribers will feel you are spending time writing emails about their specific wants (regardless of whether their wants are the same as several thousand other subscribers).

Dynamic content plays hand in hand with relevant content. Feel free to personalize your emails by including the contact’s name, their car information, or the last time they stopped by.

If you have engaged with a customer in the past, bring back a reminder. If you service their vehicle, your email could include the last time you rotated their tires and indicate that they should come back soon for another rotation. Reminders give customers a benefit to receiving emails from you.

Make It Social

Offering subscribers ways to interact with you on social media strengthens your relationship with them. Interactive media, social icons to your pages, and shareable content provide a basis for further engagement with the subscriber. When your readers like your social pages, that is the perfect time to bond your relationship even more.

What to Do When All Else Fails

Once you’ve gained insight and improved your email efforts for your subscribers, understand that the process is ever-evolving, just like dating.

There will be ebbs and flows of subscribers who come along and leave. If you’ve tried everything you can think of and a customer still refuses to engage with your emails, don’t be afraid to give them an ultimatum. Send them a final “breakup” email, asking them to either opt in to or opt out of your emails.

That might sound scary, but it’s better to have fewer engaged subscribers than a mass of apathetic email addresses. Keeping readers who are interested in your products is the most important thing, and it is okay to let people go because they have lost interest. 

Learn More about Dealer Email Marketing

Want to learn more ways to improve your automotive email marketing?

Contact 9 Clouds to request your digital audit. You will learn how to quickly improve your dealer email marketing efforts and have the chance to ask questions with us during our personalized digital audit phone call.