Last month I continued the series on marketing and advertising your website by introducing email marketing. We looked at some of the technical, legal, and infrastructure issues that define the playing field. This month I’m going to go into how to actually put together a successful email campaign.
The first thing to keep in mind is that fundamentally your goal should be to keep the relationship with your customers alive. Yes, you may have a sale to announce, or an event, or some other specific actionable item, but in my view it comes down to using email as a way to stay on your customer’s radar. Most guides you’ll come across about how run a successful email campaign all talk about the importance of having a specific “call to action.”" While that’s true for a lot of what you may be trying to do, I think that the nature of our industry, the level of passion shown by our customers for their powersports lifestyle, etc. all necessitate that you show a little more “heart” in your dealings with them. If they are willing to receive emails from you, then there’s a good chance that they are looking for you to demonstrate your commitment and involvement in the lifestyle. Therefore I offer that in addition to the typical “action-oriented” emails that most people think about, having a regular conversational newsletter, that’s more than just advertisements and product placement, is a great way to create and build a relationship with your customers.
When you do send out action oriented emails, make sure that you communicate what the specific call to action actually is. You need to do more than just have a button that says, “Click Here!” While “click here” is a super-specific call to action, it does nothing to tell the reader why they should be clicking there. You need to make it clear what’s in it for them. Offer’s like “Click here to see the new line of custom-fit cruiser seats” or “Click here to increase rear wheel horsepower on your sport bike” offer to satisfy a specific need that your reader may have.
You can often increase the success of your call to action by adding a sense of urgency by making the offer only available for a short time. “Buy Now”, “Quantities are limited”, or “Today Only” may be fairly old-fashioned but they work wonders in increasing your email open rates, as well as the click through rates.
Speaking of click-through (that is, when a reader of your email actually clicks on a link in your email. Your email provider should offer a series of tools or reports that will break down how many people open the email and click specific links), you’ll want to provide custom landing pages for your specific calls to action. It would be fairly silly to have a call to action like, “Click here to see the new XYZ600 body kits!” only to dump them on your home page! You want the links in your email to actually take people to where they want to be!
Next up is the subject line. The subject of your email is very important. It needs to be catchy enough to get the attention of the humans you’re targeting, yet it has to be crafted in such a way to avoid the spam filters. Keep in mind that because of the variety of spam filters out there, there’s no sure-fire way to write a perfect subject, but there are some key things to keep in mind: 1) Don’t use all caps 2) Limit or avoid exclamation marks 3) lead with your subject and make sure that you deliver on it in the body of the email.
When dealing with email, the topic of lists and where they should come from will usually come up. While you can buy lists, I feel that the most effective way to do it is to build your own list from people that subscribe from your website (either from manually signing up, or as part of an opt-in during the checkout process when they make a purchase) or from filling out a subscription card when they come into your dealership or attend one of your events (Yes, that’s right, emails don’t have to be targeted to people thousands of miles away! They can be just as effective for your local walk in customers as well). By building and maintaining your own lists you can retain a higher level of quality control by making sure that the people are actually interested in hearing from you, and so that you can avoid the next major point.
Don’t spam! I know I stressed it last month, but it bears repeating. Don’t send to people that have not explicitly asked to receive your emails. And don’t bury them in a daily torrent of emails either.
Finally, make sure that you are measuring the performance of your emails. Open rate, unsubscribe numbers, click thorough, etc. Change the format of your emails, the tone, or the subject line structure from email to email and monitor the performance changes to come up with a formula that works for your audience.
Next month I’ll introduce the advertising that’s almost entirely unique to the internet, paid-search.
Tags:Column, DealerNews, dealerships, E-Commerce, ecommerce, internet, motorcycle, powersports, selling-online
