What Can Automated Email Marketing Do for Your Dealership? 

Timing is everything when it comes to RV sales. You can give your potential customers all the resources, information and access to skilled sales reps they need to make an informed decision, but if they’re not ready to buy, they’re not ready to buy.  

If you could identify shoppers who are ready to buy right now, you’d have an extremely successful business. You’d probably also have trouble keeping up with inventory demands. But the fact of the matter is that every consumer is different. Each follows a different path to purchase, and each has varying levels of interest in buying now versus waiting for the right moment.  

With automated email marketing, you can continue to nurture leads through the buying journey, so your dealership is top of mind when the time is right. Automated emails can also help you determine potential customers’ readiness to buy, so you can strike while the iron is hot and follow up at the right time to maximize sales success. 

This article will outline how automated email marketing can help your business and give you some benefits and best practices you can implement at your dealership.  

• Automated Email Marketing Basics  
• How Automated Email Marketing Differs from Manual Email Marketing  
• Automated Email Marketing Benefits 
• Automated Email Marketing Best Practices 

 

Automated Email Marketing Basics  

Automated email marketing helps you keep track of your website visitors, so you can send marketing emails that are relevant to their interests and their readiness to buy. Rather than pulling data from your website, trying to decide who’s ready to buy and typing out an email to each individual visitor, automated email marketing does the work for you.  

Automated email marketing automates the marketing process and personalizes the shopping experience for potential customers. It helps you keep consumers engaged and avoid the frustrations that are inherent with impersonal online shopping—a tall task for those dealers who don’t know anything about a site visitor’s interests or browsing habits.  

Still, personalization should be the priority. As much as 71% of consumers feel frustrated when a shopping experience is impersonal, according to Forbes. Automated email marketing can track every lead and keep track of sites they visit to create a shopping experience that’s custom tailored to their liking. Perhaps most importantly, it helps you get the timing right when shoppers indicate they’re ready to buy.  

How Automated Email Marketing Differs from Manual Email Marketing  

While both traditional and automated email marketing can be effective, automating your emails can give your dealership several distinct advantages.  

Manual Email Marketing 

Traditional email marketing involves writing an email that promotes your brand and sending it to a general audience of existing and potential customers. While this kind of email marketing can raise brand awareness, it tends to generate little substantive interest. In fact, conversion rates for manual mass emails are generally very low for a few key reasons. Mainly, manual email are:   

• Impersonal: When you send the same email to everyone, it’s impossible to personalize. Most (perhaps even you) tend to send these kinds of email straight to trash. They may even prompt consumers to unsubscribe from your email list.  
• Manual: In addition to writing emails, your team has to track every response and interaction you receive from your manual email campaigns. This can quickly become overwhelming for any dealership, leading to lost leads.  
• Difficult to Track: Without the ability to track customer data and which emails are most effective, it can be difficult to determine return on your manual marketing spend. It’s also difficult to know what kinds of emails you should use in the future.  
• Less Effective at Keeping Customers Engaged: Manual emails don’t give consumers clear next steps. Consumers may click on your website, but then what? Without follow-up emails that are tailored to their specific shopping journey, it can be difficult to foster leads and keep them progressing toward purchase.  

 

Automated Email Marketing 

What’s the big deal with automated email marketing? On top of saving you time and sparing you the painstaking process of culling through website data and writing individual emails, these campaigns can be highly effective at capturing your customers’ attention. Here are a few examples of personalized automated marketing emails:  

• “You might also be interested in …”  
• “Need to spruce up your travel trailer? Here’s a discount!” 
• “Check out our newsletter …”  

Again, automated email marketing is all about timing. If your shoppers aren’t ready to take the next step right now, automated email marketing can help you keep them engaged until they’re ready to buy.  

As shoppers progress down the purchase path, they won’t receive the same stale email. They’ll get an email that is relevant to their interests and the progress they’ve already made. Even after your customers buy from you, automated email marketing can help you foster relationships that last a lifetime.  

Best of all, automated email marketing manages and tracks these emails, so you don’t have to know which emails are best for each customer. Examples include:  

• “Thanks for your purchase. Here’s a discount on …”  
• “It’s time to winterize your RV …”  
• “RV season is about to begin. Let’s get you ready with …”  
• “Looking for parts or accessories? Here’s a discount …”  
• “Ready to upgrade? We’ll buy your RV …”  

 

Automated Email Marketing Benefits 

Automated email marketing helps you get timing right, so you can maximize your chances of nurturing leads and closing more sales. It helps you create a natural shopping journey for potential customers to follow.  

Maximize Marketing ROI 

When a shopper visits your site and submits contact information, automated email marketing tracks their journey. This allows you to engage with leads right after they visit your site, so you can get the most out of whatever marketing means you used to get them there. In this sense, automated email marketing takes the sales baton from your SEO, SEM and social media marketing efforts to ensure that your marketing spend is most effective.  

 

Maximize Marketing Approach 

Automated marketing emails allow you to see the sites your shoppers visited before they landed on your website and submitted a lead form. This helps you to know what individual shoppers are interested in, so you can give them a personalized shopping journey. It also allows you to reach out to them with timely, relevant offers that influence their purchase decisions, even before they reach out to you (or another dealership).  

 

Maximize Your Resources 

Automated emails are automatic. They’re triggered by existing and potential customers’ actions, so you don’t have to employ an entire team dedicated to marketing email experts. This allows you to maximize your human resources and focus on the person-to-person interactions and sales opportunities in your store. Meanwhile, automated emails will keep sending emails and bringing customers to your business, even if you have a smaller dedicated sales team. 

 

Maximize Revenue 

Automated email marketing is both more cost-effective up front and a better revenue driver than traditional emails. In fact, according to Campaign Monitor, automated emails generate 320% more revenue than non-automated emails. That means more customers are coming to your dealership and your team is closing more sales.  

 

Maximize Customer Retention  

Personalizing marketing emails doesn’t just help your customers have a better shopping experience, they make your emails more effective for your business. Automated email marketing improves lead retention by giving your customers clear next steps. It also improves buyer retention by bringing back lost leads with emails that are relevant to their interests.  

 

Maximize Brand Equity 

At the end of the day, automated marketing emails aren’t just about sales. They help you to introduce and build your brand through a wider audience. By sending regular, relevant emails to shoppers, you can become an authority in your area and in your industry. You become the go-to resource for everything RV.  

While this marketing strategy keeps customers progressing down the path toward purchase, it has a separate, perhaps unintended effect of building up your brand through regular contact and helpful content. In short, automated marketing emails help shoppers develop a deeper interest in what you say and what you sell—building your brand while boosting your sales.  

 

Maximize Lifetime Customer Spend 

Automated email marketing is just as effective post-purchase as it is pre-purchase. With timely, personalized emails, you can bring customers back when they’re ready to come back with emails that remind them it’s time to trade-in or service their RV. By nurturing relationships through regular, relevant emails, you can maximize lifetime customer spend and continue to cultivate lasting relationships with your customers.  

 

Automated Email Marketing Best Practices 

With an automated email marketing tool that personalizes messaging and offers real-time data to analyze the effectiveness of your campaigns, you can grow your RV business.  

 

Time Emails Right  

Automated email marketing allows you to set up key qualifiers for when an email should be sent. This allows you to send emails when they will be most effective at engaging shoppers, nurturing leads and closing sales. For example, when a shopper visits your site and submits a form, you can send an email to leave a lasting first impression. 

 

Mix Up Your Marketing  

Give your audience a good mixture of sales-oriented and interest-oriented marketing emails. Of course, with automated marketing emails, these can be sent at separate times, depending on each shoppers’ readiness to buy. Early on in the shopping process, an email that nurtures interest and gets the recipient excited about the hobby may be more effective than a sales-oriented email that may be more appropriate closer to purchase.  

 

Take a Personal Approach 

Automated emails are a great way to make your customers and potential customers feel valued. You can show them you care with an email that offers discounts, sends birthday or RV anniversary wishes or simply checks in with your customers. These emails go a long way toward building an emotional connection with your brand and keeping customers connected with you.   

 

Follow Up with Customers 

After an interaction or following an important event (say the purchase of a new RV or a service visit), follow up to see how your customers are doing. Ask about their experience and invite them to leave a customer review. This can help you better understand your customers and look for opportunities to improve your processes. It also gives you better connection with your customers and build your brand’s value.  

 

Review Analytics 

Automated emails give you valuable feedback about the effectiveness of your messaging and campaigns. You can use these insights to make changes to your emails and double-down on the most effective ways to communicate with your customers. For example, if your discount emails are effective, you could consider using them in other digital marketing materials to resonate with an even wider audience.  

 

Keep Customers Coming Back 

Track interactions with your customers, even after you’ve closed a sale. With automated marketing emails, you can use this information to send post-purchase offers and service reminders and invite customers to come back for a trade-in or to make their next purchase.  

 

What Can Automated Email Marketing Do for Your RV Dealership?  

Automated email marketing gives you the tools and insights to deliver the right marketing messages at just the right time. You can nurture leads toward purchase and keep them coming back post-purchase with personalized emails that pique interest at the perfect time.  

If the time is right for you to learn more about automated email marketing, or you have specific questions, feel free to contact IRV and connect with our industry experts.