Ford and CDJR Auto Dealer Boosts Email and Sales with Follow-Up Strategy
The Challenge
Everyone loves a good deal, especially when it means savings hundreds or thousands of dollars off a new vehicle.
The challenge for Einspahr Auto Plaza, a Ford and CDJR dealership located in Brookings, South Dakota, was to effectively communicate its available new vehicle incentives to shoppers who would be ready to buy in the upcoming weeks and months.
Email for automotive can be an extremely powerful tool to engage the leads and purchasers you already have in your CRM.
Throughout our partnership with Einspahr, 9 Clouds has regularly built email campaigns focusing on the available incentives for a given month. One email a month is dedicated to highlighting the new Ford monthly incentives, while another email is focused on the new CDJR monthly incentives.
Both emails are sent to a list of new Ford or CDJR leads as well as those who had purchased one of these vehicles more than two years ago (and thus may be interested in purchasing a new vehicle again soon).
These incentive emails have always had good engagement, but Einspahr and 9 Clouds decided we could do more to maximize the promotion of the incentives by tweaking our email marketing strategy.
The Solution
We all need a friendly reminder every now and then. That’s why we have calendar reminders and notifications on our phones! This was the same thinking behind our incentive email follow-up strategy.
9 Clouds began building incentive follow-up emails, reminding people about the new vehicle offers that would be ending soon. If, after about two weeks of receiving the initial monthly incentives email, the contact still hadn’t purchased, they would receive a “friendly reminder” in the form of a follow-up email.
While building two brand-new automotive emails every month may sound like a lot of work, we made the process as simple as possible to make the most out of our time and resources.
These follow-up emails look nearly identical to the initial monthly incentive emails. The only differences are an updated subject line and revised email copy to increase a sense of urgency.
This simple strategy allowed us to create the follow-up emails in half the time it takes to build the initial incentive email at the beginning of the month!
The Results
As a result of sending nine follow-up incentive emails over a 14-month period, Einspahr’s email engagement improved and even contributed to more than 150 vehicle sales!
The “friendly reminder” messaging seems to trigger something in the minds of shoppers, as the follow-up emails have seen a higher open rate than the initial incentive emails:
- The Ford follow-up emails had an average 14.03% higher open rate than the initial Ford incentive emails.
- The CDJR follow-up emails had an average 8.56% higher open rate than the initial CDJR incentive emails.
Additionally, these follow-up emails have contributed to a combined 159 vehicle sales between the two emails per month:
- 93 contacts who received a Ford follow-up email later purchased a vehicle from Einspahr.
- 66 contacts who received a CDJR follow-up email later purchased a vehicle from Einspahr.
Ready to Improve Your Email for Auto?
Wish your dealership emails provided results like these? You don’t always need a flashy new campaign to find success with automotive email marketing. It’s the strategy behind the email that will win out in the long run.
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