If you’re serious about taking your dealership to the next level, you need to be focused on all types of marketing whether it be social media, paid advertising, email marketing and more. Email marketing has been a staple in every successful business marketing strategy for the last decade. Pretty much every adult in 2024 has an email and checks that email frequently. That’s why email marketing can be so effective at building a customer base, increasing awareness and getting more sales. One of the best things about email marketing is it’s inexpensive so the potential for a great return on investment (ROI) is high. But remember, just because email marketing may seem intuitive doesn’t mean you should do it without careful thought and consideration. In this article, we’re going to give you 5 tips to create an effective email marketing campaign. 

1. Make Your Emails Mobile Friendly

So many people use their phones for both browsing the web and using their email. Like a website that doesn’t format correctly for mobile users, an email that doesn’t format correctly for mobile will lose you a ton of eyes. So as you’re drafting an email, test it to ensure that it looks good on a mobile device. Doing this ensures that the most amount of people will view the email. 

2. Create a High-Quality Contact List

One of the worst things you can do to your email marketing campaign is to send your emails to anyone and everyone. The contact lists you create should never be randomly selected. Many companies even buy contact emails from third-party companies but oftentimes this backfires as the contacts in these lists aren’t going to be engaged in your content. 

The email lists you create should be of people who are interested in or who have engaged with your dealership. This means past visitors, customers, people who have entered into draws you’ve held, and customers who’ve used your service department. Once you have a large email list, you can begin to segment your lists based on the customer's interests. This will allow you to better target your email campaigns and increase customer engagement. 

3. Add Important Customer Info In Your Contact Records

To go with the second tip, adding detailed customer information for each customer is important to ensure you’re targeting the right audience for each campaign. You should ideally know which vehicles they’re interested in, their price range and anything they want to avoid. This way, when you’re doing an email campaign, you can easily refer to the customer record and determine whether or not they should be included in it. 

4. Use Email Marketing Automation Tools

One of the best things you can do to make your email marketing more efficient is to invest in an email marketing automation tool. These tools make email campaigns so much easier and less time-consuming. Automation tools can help ensure that only the correct people receive your emails, build flows depending on the customer's response to the email, schedule your emails and much more. Using an automation tool is a fantastic way to increase your ROI through email marketing campaigns. 

5. Create Engaging & Thought Provoking Emails

You can’t expect to have any success with your email marketing if the content you're sending out is boring. You need to get creative in how you create your email marketing content. If you’re not offering a great deal, asking your customer a thought provoking question or creating content that your customers will find engaging, you won’t see much success with email marketing. This also means that just because you find a certain type of content that works, it doesn’t mean you should keep rinse and repeating. You need to vary the email content to keep things exciting for your readers.