I know Im really late to this conversation, but isnt the easiest way to see if your emails are having an impact is if someone replies to them or mentions it when they come into the showroom?

It doesnt look like anyone has answerd the question about "opened email" tracking... I am not sure all that have this feature and those that do not... but Imagic and DealerSocket do for sure.

Welcome aboard Dave,
I am sure you'll enjoy the talent, experience and ideas roaming in these halls. But, I do have a reccomendation.

If ever you see a thread that proposes that "Jeff Kershner is a Booth hottie", consider it SPAM, as Jeff is known to login as an alias and write nice stuff about himself!

Glad to see you made it over here Dave - I think you'll find Dealer Refresh to be an invaluable source!

I am new to Dealer Refresh and found the responses to this question to be very useful and well-written. Alex Snyder told me about this site and I'm pretty impressed.

Thanks,
Dave White
DARCARS Automotive Group

I agree with what Jeff states. Also you must follow up on a regular basis with a mystery shop, use 3 of the majors, a hotmail, Google and yahoo email address and include these in the mail out. This way you know what is going on. You need to have email addresses anyway to Mystery Shop your competitors...Don’t you?? I also always place the name and phone number in the subject line. The majors like this as most spammers do not know the correct name and number combination of the client. Plus as Jeff points out use the CRM tool for communicating important client/ store information, product updates, newsletters, soft sell news releases, community projects etc. There is an old, wise Chinese saying "don’t cook your food in the bathroom" Use an email campaign program for your hard sell if you need to hard sell.

I do not know many consumers swayed by the $500.00 coupon these days, you may find a few. Most Internet shoppers avoid this "gimmick" and are more intelligent. I know BZ Results thinks the sun rises and sets on the program which is an indication of where their thoughts are.

Umer, these are great sources.

True, as Laura points out, "email authentication" has become a necessary step for more successful email campaigns these days. There are two main authentication standards to support called Sender ID and DomainKeys. Problem is, not all email servers support this so depending on how your CRM spools email this may or may not be possible for you.

Email deliverability can be affected by all of these factors:

a) Reputation of sending domain

- Sending emails to bad addresses repeatedly - When the emailer sends repeatedly to bad addresses, ISP’s record this and subsequently block the sender. It looks like the sender is trying a dictionary attack. You must clean your email list, taking out email addresses that bounce.

- Sending emails to spamtraps. These are traps set up by blacklists to catch spammers. The addresses are never given out, so sending to them will immediately land you on a blacklist.

- How quickly/slowly emails are sent (throttling). ISP’s frown upon messages sent in large bunches. It’s also better to have spam complaints trickle in rather than come in large bunches.

- Users hitting the spam button. ISP’s take this very seriously. You can usually sign up for a feedback loop that will send you this information so that you can clean those addresses off your list. Failure to do so will rapidly deteriorate your deliverability.

- Sending architecture (SPF records, DKIM, etc.) that identifies sender properly – without this there is no reputation, and no reputation=bad reputation.

- Challenge-response system responses: the ISP sends a response requiring the sender to reply before the email will be sent on to the recipient.

- Communication between servers (Brightmail). Brightmail servers share info about spammers.

b) Content of the email message

- Criteria varies by filter (SpamAssasin is one example), includes things like verbage in subject line, excessive graphics or scripting, large bright colored fonts, certain keywords, cleanliness of code, etc.

c) Blacklists

- Blacklists are lists kept by independent organizations or internally by ISP, that record IP/domains of known spammers. ISP’s often consult the blacklists of independent organizations. There are many of them. Whitelists are the antithesis of blacklists. There are whitelists managed by independent organizations or managed internally by ISP.

Most important of all these, is the reputation of the sending domain. It used to be that ISP's filtered based on the content of the email. But more and more, ISP's are focusing on the reputation of the sending domain (or IP). Given the complexity involved, and the fact that reputation is the most important factor, if you do any sort of decent volume of outbound mail, you probably SHOULD be outsourcing your email delivery.

Check your computer or CRM provider mail server on RBL blacklists...
Blacklist check can be done at... IP-Address 209.237.238.224

Need to check the email content for spam... send a sample email to spamTest@autojini.com then go to Dealer Website Design, Online Marketing, CRM & Inventory Management | AutoJini
enter your from address and it will tell you the SPAM score and spam rules applied.

something of further interest to read... and to ask questions to CRM provider.

Regards,
Umer Farooq

Great input so far, but besides Jeff's comments, most of it has to do with the state of CRM tools... while that's important to discuss for the future of the Robert's dealership, I imagine his dilemma also needs a bit more immediate attention, and switching CRM tools is probably not a solution he can implement within the next few weeks.

1. Make sure you know what you're doing in regards to sending HTML-based email. If someone in your dealership is creating the emails in-house, then you're probably doing it wrong... even if you've employed a young "web guru" to create the emails, they might not know the ropes of html-based email.

2. Go sign up for the usual webmail accounts (web-based mail is what most of your prospects will have, and the email providers are strict but also predictable, unlike a corporate email system which could either be totally uncontrolled or controlled so specifically that you don't stand a chance of it getting through). Pick up a Yahoo, Hotmail, and Gmail account, and mystery shop yourself. See which of your emails get through, which don't, and which get mauled on their way to the inbox. No better way to gauge what your customers are seeing than to actually become one.

3. As mentioned by many, try not to use your CRM tool to blast out mass emails... and if you must, use discretion. $500 coupons to your entire customer base don't do much for your business besides getting you flagged for spam.

Hopefully others can provide some additional advice on an immediate fix... and at the very least, if you take all these preventative steps and your mail still doesn't come through, you've got a much stronger case for switching CRM tools.

Exactly the same issue we have been having, David, and we are partnering with Exact Target as well. Some of the best solutions for these challenges can be found in companies that may not necessarily be geared towards the automotive industry.

maybe just select the right tools, some crm products can do both deliver and measurement. it's never better to use a third-party delivery system unless your crm is unable to do the job. i guess that's the problem right there, most crm's in our space don't send email as a core value prop of their service. luckily we don't have that issue like many of the legacy systems (autobase, highergear etc). there is a change happening out there and the old tools just can't keep up....

Robert - first thing - at least you caught that your emails were not going through to your customers. Every time I mystery shop our competition, I find that many of their emails go into my spam folder, month after month, and I wonder if they are even aware that their emails never come through. We have a great CRM tool provider, however, I still test our emails myself on a continuous basis to ensure that our correspondence is going through, and, if we send any type of marketing emails, they are small, targeted campaigns that focus on prospects we have been working with in the last 90 days. Sending an email blast to your entire database is asking for trouble (and also asking much of the database to mark your emails as spam)...

I agree with Jeff's remarks regarding email delivery and tracking. There isn't a CRM system in our space that has a best-in-class email delivery system. We decided early on to take the responsibility of quality email delivery into our hands. We use a server -based CRM system (Autobase) so we set up a separate outgoing email server so that blacklisting, etc. wouldn't affect our corporate email setup. All of our images are set up on an FTP site so that our emails aren't "heavy". Then we started working with the ISP's so that our emails wouldn't be sent to SPAM or worse, blacklisting.

We thought that we were in the clear but there was one problem. Our CRM email set-up was incapable of handling the email campaigns. It takes hours to send out our email campaigns. Now, I will admit, we are power users and have a large database of customers and email addresses. Our group sent almost five million emails to customers last year so I am not sure if any system would have been equipped to handle it. What we did learn is that you need to align yourself with a company that specializes in email delivery. Luckily, our CRM company saw this too. We are partnering with a company called Exact Target. Instead of email going out through Autobase and our outgoing email server, the data gets passed through to Exact Target and they send it, report on it, and handle our subscription lists. After testing this for 2 months with random campaigns, we are able to send email in record time, see detail reporting broken out however we want, and still able to keep track of activity through our CRM system.

Don't rely on a vendor to do something that is not in their core competency. Go out and find the best and make your vendors integrate and partner with them. If they don't, switch vendors. I don't agree that you should have a separate system because I believe it is very important to have all of your customer info in one bucket. Just make sure that the one bucket doesn't have holes in it...

Rob,

I wouldn't be particularly surprised if your CRM sent emails were ending up in the trash somewhere. So many dealers use their CRM/ILM systems to send out unsolicited "email blasts" with no unsubscribe links or any other regard to spam law that i'm sure quite a few CRM systems have ended up on blacklists.

Gilbert - I saw you at Race Pace in Owings Mills!! I didn't realize it was you until after you left and the guys at the counter had the iMagic Labs site up. I asked them why and they said - "that guy that just left works there". Small world, huh? I just bought a road bike - let me know if you ever wanna go ride!

Thanks for the refresher Gilbert, and do believe that quality processes with personalization make the difference as in Jennifer's example above.

Just today as I followed up in the morning with a GM BuyPower lead for our evening appt... "Jeff, I just drove the exact truck I want this morning at XYZ Dealership that we talked about yesterday (my heart sank), do you think you could bring that truck into your store?"

Upon further discussion, it was XYZ's dealership sales rep he didn't feel comfortable with (trust, sincerity, lack of information). Him and his wife drove 45 minutes this evening and are taking delivery Saturday.

If I only had time to do that personalization and process with all of the incoming leads (300+ month, contact - appt - demo - close - delivery), one could only ponder the closing ratio!

Im sure many other DealerRefresh IM's reading this can relate with the scenario, yet are not given the resources and time to implement quality processes to maximize every lead coming through the 'e-door'??

First impressions are the biggest key factor of all. When calling a customer that was over 120 + miles away and right off the bat they say " Wow you are way to far away " I get over the objection with them and let them know I want to help them with their research etc and have a great shopping experience. I even had customers call other dealers and ask questions on certain vehicles, it shows that you care! Even pulling Car Fax reports on used cars from another dealer, and low and behold they come walking through the front door after a 120+ mile drive because I was with them the whole way.
Gilbert you are absolutely right! They buy from people they like!

The recent JD Power report which suggests that car buyers are willing to spend more than they originally budgeted provided the salesperson provides a better experience adds a lot of meat to what you have iterated.

It's important to consciously remind yourself (or your staff) to examine your sales process on a regular basis, and ensure you aren't trying to take too many shortcuts. I learned this in a sales job about 7 years ago. I was consistently the top producer every month, but then all of a sudden my sales numbers took a dive and I didn't know why. I had to take a step back and see what was going on, and it was the exact issue you pointed out here...too many shortcuts. I went back to the basics (and even sat in on a sales training class as a refresher) and what do you know, I was back on top again. It's easy to fall into this trap, especially when you're doing the same things day in and day out. Great post - never lose sight of the fundamentals and consistent success is inevitable.

Great post and great comments from Gilbert. Gilbert’s bottom line comment about doing business with people they like is exactly right. Consumers are doing business with you and not the dealership. This is true in almost any sales transaction.

One of the key take-aways from this post was just overall engaging your customers in open dialogue. It can be as simple as gathering requirements with open ended questions, etc. Ultimately this is the foundation to a successful sale.

This was a great read!

Back to Basics. Thanks for the reminder - it is easy to forget them!

Gilbert,

You could not be more correct. Well said!!!!

The fundamentals stay the same, they never change. It is like blocking and tackling. The cars change, the people change, but the fundamentals stay the same. There are nuances to this age we are ever evolving into today, but to build that house of sales you need that fundamental foundation. It is the Vince Lombardi mentality of staying focused and winning the games in practice. Throw away all the technology and comes down to you making the best presentation to your customers for the product you sell. You take short cuts and you lose!

Bottom line: People Buy From People They Like.