Social Media for Dealers

One of the easiest and most cost effective ways to reach your customers while tracking their response is email marketing.  The cost of email is much lower than direct mail, TV, or radio, AND, email offers amazing tracking possibilities.  You can link to inventory in email and see exactly who clicked on the links (terrific for finding with whom to follow-up).  Email allows for images, video, and linking to just about anything.  It’s a dynamic way to communicate with customers and prospects.

The cornerstone of email marketing is the ability to send/email to your customers or prospects. There are strict spamming laws in place that require that all of your email addresses be “opt-in”, meaning you’ve been given permission by the prospect to email them.

Because of these opt-in rules, it’s important that you are proactive in obtaining customer email addresses.  EVEN if you’re not using them yet, when it comes time at your dealership to do some email marketing, you’ll be glad you’ve been collecting them.  Building and maintaining a customer email list database, in this day and age, is equally if not more important that collecting your customer’s physical location data. It is definitely beneficial to maintain that data, but now you’ll want to make sure obtaining and updating email addresses also takes priority.

Here are few ideas on how you might start grabbing those all-important email addresses:

1.  Run a contest, a drawing/giveaway. Require an email address for all entries and provide a checkbox that says “Check here if you’d like to receive email promotions from our dealership”

2.  Write down the email address of every person who buys an RV at your dealership

3.  Train your sales team to request email addresses from all prospects

4.  Offer truly valuable promotions in an email, entice people to sign up for the email offers on Facebook, Twitter, and your website

Filed under: Email Marketing, Email Marketing, Email Promotions, Obtaining Email Adresses, Spamming Laws, Tracking