Social Media for Dealers

A resource from HuebnerPetersen's Dealer Marketing Services

October 25, 2010 • 8:38 am 0

Top 10 dealer email marketing tips.

Time to take email marketing seriously!

You thought you could escape email?  No way!

Email marketing goes hand in hand with social media marketing.  Every email you send out is an opportunity to display the value your dealership offers online, connect with customers at different touch points (i.e. Facebook, Twitter), showcase your best social media content, and track your efforts.

If you haven’t thought about email, you’re way behind in the game.  If you’ve dabbled, it’s time to commit, and if you’re doing email full-force, it’s time to optimize!

We’ve put together a no-brainer list of ten of our favorite email “keys to success”. Does your RV dealership have all of these covered?

1.  Get an email provider.
Look into Constant Contact, MyEmma, Blue Sky Factory, or Campaign Monitor.  Get and idea of pricing, plans, and template offerings.

2.  Collect email addresses.
Get them from all customers (& prospects) that walk into your dealership.  Make sure everyone working in your dealership makes this a priority.

3.  Give customers an incentive.
Make it attractive to join your email list.  Offer valuable tips, offers, coupons, specials, prizes.  Everybody wants something.

4.  Promote your email newsletter everywhere.
Mention it on Facebook, take sign-ups on Twitter, and list it on your printed materials.

5.  Feature your social media activity.
In every email include links to your Facebook page, Twitter feed, blog, or YouTube channel.  If someone is reading an email from you, they’re likely to follow you somewhere else as well!

6.  Think about timing.
If you are sending an email to promote a weekend sale, send it closer to the weekend (rather than on Monday morning). Time your email sends appropriately. Keep in mind, Mondays and Fridays aren’t the best days for sending email campaigns.

7.  House an online version.
Use an online version of your email as a landing page.  Tweet this page, post it to Facebook, feature it on your blog.  Get the most out of your content!

8.  Make it easy to reply.
Solicit questions through your email efforts and encourage recipients to reply to you and to get in touch.  Make it easy to do!

9.  Track email activity.
Who is clicking on what link. What content has been popular? What does your audience care about.  Use that info to grow your social media efforts.

10.  Don’t spam.
Make sure all the email address you use are opt-in. Don’t over email, limit yourself.  Don’t let your dealership’s efforts end up in the junk file!

*Image credit: pareerica

Filed under: Email Marketing, , , , , , , , , ,

July 12, 2010 • 12:48 pm 2

Integrating email & social media.

After posting last week about the importance of collecting addresses and the advantages of email marketing (here), we thought that we’d share a great article, the “7 top tips to integrate email with social media” to help get your brain churning even more!

These two forms of marketing (email and social media) can join forces to help your dealership get the most out of both of them!  Check out this article, “7 top tips to integrate email with social media” (by Tink Taylor) for some great and practical ideas on how to combine social media and email marketing efforts.

Integrating your email campaigns with your social media program

Our favorite tips from the article:

1.  Include ‘share on social network’ links in your email messages.

This makes it easy for your email readers to share the content they find valuable.  If you make it easy for someone to share, they’re more likely to do it (and sharing is what it’s really all about)!  Add “share” buttons to content and links you focus on in your email efforts.  AND, if you don’t already, make sure that you have these same share buttons on your blog.  Make it easy to share every piece of content your dealership creates!

2.  Use blog posts as content for email newsletters.

A lot of people think that having a newsletter and a blog is going to be a lot of extra writing work, but that’s not always the case!  Get the most out of your writing by using it in multiple ways.  Feature your best blog posts in your email campaigns (and conversely highlight newsletter material on your blog).

Filed under: Email Marketing, , , , , , , , , , , ,

July 9, 2010 • 9:56 am 1

Collect those all-important email addresses!

Email marketing and collecting email addresses

For most RV dealers, summer is the busy selling season, the time when customer traffic is at it’s peak and the camping season is underway. It also happens to be a great time to collect your customer’s email addresses and build a list your dealership can use for the rest of the year (and years to come!).

Email marketing is a great way to stay in touch with customers. You’re not only reaching them where they are (on their computer or their phone) but you’re providing them with a dynamic message – giving them links, images, and a way to respond.  Best of all, you’ll save a ton of money doing by utilizing email marketing. In comparison to traditional marketing mediums, email marketing costs only a fraction (it’s way cheaper than print, TV, radio, or outdoor advertising).  To top it all off, email marketing campaigns provide fairly advanced tracking methods.  You can easily see who opened your email, how many times they opened it, what links they clicked on, when they clicked on links, and much more!  Email tracking provides important metrics for follow-up and marketing planning.

Today, we just want to remind you that the first step in being able to use email marketing effectively is to build an up-to-date list of your customer’s email addresses (you should not plan on buying or renting a list).  So, get on it!  Ask every prospect and every customers for their email addresses (We’re sure you can think of a tasteful way to do it)!

For more information on email marketing and the importance of recording all your customer’s and potential customer’s email addresses, click here.

Filed under: Email Marketing, Quick Tips, , , , , , , , , , , ,

May 6, 2010 • 2:24 pm 1

Get started with email marketing.

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, , , , ,

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This information is brought to you by HuebnerPetersen's Dealer Marketing Services and Front Lines Marketing Programs. Please visit http://HuebnerPetersen.com for further information.

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