By Jon Hedges, Principal, Hedges & Company
Learn how you can significantly improve the results of your email marketing campaign.
Here are three simple tips to make your email marketing program in the automotive aftermarket a success:
1. Relevancy – One of the most important keys to success in any email marketing campaign in the automotive aftermarket is relevancy. Simply put, your message has to be important and on-target to your recipients. This is much more than simple personalization, like “Dear {firstname},” and will improve your open rates and click-through rates. To be relevant, the content of your email should match your customers’ interests.
For example, if you sell parts that fit specific makes or models of vehicles, then tailor the content of the email to match your customer. If you have Mustang and Camaro owners as customers, don’t send offers for Camaro products to Mustang customers.
Customer engagement with your brand is an important measure of relevancy. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) watch email open rates by sender and if your recipients aren’t engaged enough with your brand to open your emails, you could be penalized. The ISPs may flag your emails as suspected spam or may not deliver your email at all.
Brand engagement also means you should be applying good data hygiene practices to your email list. Clean out old email addresses of non-responders even if they aren’t bouncing. If a customer hasn’t opened your last 10 emails, they’re probably not going to open the next one you send, either. By all means clean out email addresses that are getting hard bounces.
2. Test, test, test – Testing is important to the success of any automotive aftermarket email campaign. Experiment with different email subject lines, days of the week, times of day and different email offers. Hedges & Company clients have seen email open rates increase by 15% to 35% through testing.
Here’s why testing is so important: Let’s say you send 100,000 emails over six months to your automotive retail customers. If you improved your open rate from 12% to 18% then an additional 6,000 emails will be opened. Think of it as a way to send advertising to an additional 6,000 customers for free!
3. Timing – There are several high-reward, low-risk opportunities to add to the success of your email marketing program. These include sending a “thank you” email for an order or for asking to subscribe to a newsletter, or sending emails to customers who abandoned their shopping cart. These are known as “trigger” emails and help improve customer engagement with your brand. You can also send special offers for certain customers to attempt to reactivate them.
It’s important to have a regular schedule to communicate with your customers using email. If you only send an email every few months, customers might forget why they’re on your list to begin with and unsubscribe.
Author Bio:
Jon Hedges is a principal of Hedges & Company, a market research, database marketing and strategy firm serving the automotive aftermarket, specializing in managed email marketing. Hedges & Company delivered over 8 million emails in the past year. SEMA Members since 2004. For more information visit http://HedgesCompany.com
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