Automotive Email Marketing for Car Dealerships

Looking for a way to accelerate your car dealership’s growth? Automotive email marketing is just what you need.

From promoting new models to offering exclusive deals, you can connect with your audience in a way that’s personal, powerful, and cost-effective.

In this guide, we’ll cover:

• The benefits of automotive email marketing
• Different types of email marketing messages and campaigns
• Tips for creating a successful strategy

Ok, let’s roll out.

Why You Should Care About Automotive Email Marketing

If you’re not already convinced that you need an email marketing strategy, the benefits of automotive email marketing discussed below will have you convinced by the end of this section.

Cost-effective marketing channel

Compared to other marketing channels, like social media, email is highly cost-effective. In fact, it’s been shown that the average ROI for email is $36 for every $1 you spend.

There are several reasons for this, such as:

• Low implementation costs: Email marketing is cheaper to implement than other digital marketing channels. To get started, you only need to budget for content creation and software subscriptions.
• Scalability: You can easily scale your automotive email marketing campaigns without greatly increasing costs. For instance, scaling from 100 to 10,000 subscribers comes with little increase in the marginal cost per recipient.
• Integration with existing systems: You can integrate email marketing with your existing CRM and other automotive industry software. This improves operational efficiency and keeps the costs down.

Drives organic traffic

A successful email marketing strategy is a great way to boost organic traffic to your website. You can use your emails to promote new car models, upcoming sales, and special offers.

Additionally, you can use clear and compelling calls-to-actions (CTAs) to prompt users to click your links and explore your site. As a result, you get more organic site traffic, leading to improved rankings in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Increased revenue

If you get your email marketing strategy right, you can significantly increase conversions and revenue. Users respond well to personalized marketing messages and are more likely to convert when they feel a connection to your brand.

Some of the best ways to increase revenue with your email marketing channel are to promote:

• Limited-time deals
• New model launches
• Personalized recommendations
• Seasonal offers
• Service reminders
• Exclusive deals

Enhanced brand awareness

A well-executed email campaign allows for consistent communication with your audience. This is an effective strategy for maintaining and increasing brand awareness.

When your emails regularly appear in recipients’ inboxes, it keeps your brand top-of-mind and improves brand recognition. Plus, by consistently using colors, logos, and design elements across your emails, you strengthen your brand identity, making it more easily recognizable to your audience across other channels. This makes it easier to promote your marketing content across multiple channels simultaneously.

9 Types of Email Marketing Messages and Email Campaigns in the Automotive Industry

Now, it’s time to examine some different email marketing strategies that work well within the automotive industry. All of these marketing messages and campaigns can help enhance user engagement and lead to improved conversions.

Or, if you want to save time and effort in creating your own automotive email marketing strategy, you can turn to InboxArmy instead. Our email campaign management service takes care of your strategy from start to finish. We’ll build a highly targeted program that increases open rates, drives traffic, and boosts your ROI.

1. Newsletter email

Email newsletters are an excellent way to build relationships with your audience. They give recipients an inside look at your business and create a personal connection between your customers and your brand.

When it comes to email marketing for car dealerships, newsletters are particularly useful. They allow you to inform your customers about new arrivals and promotions. Plus, you can include stories about your dealership, the work you do, and the people you employ.

Let’s take a look at a really nice newsletter example from Ford that. It opens with a striking image of one of its cars and an attention-grabbing headline: “Built For America”.

It goes on to emphasize that Ford is a family business and draws attention to the diversity of its workforce. After this, a CTA encourages recipients to read more, which should increase click-through rates (CTRs) and drive organic traffic to Ford’s site.

Further down, there’s another eye-catching image and some information about one of Ford’s podcasts.

By including a link to the podcast, Ford does a good job of increasing user engagement with its brand. It provides readers with additional content that’s both relevant to their interests and highly valuable.

Nice work, Ford!

2. Promotional email

For car dealerships, email marketing provides the perfect opportunity to promote products, offers, and sales. These email types are important for increasing awareness of your offerings and boosting conversions.

The clean aesthetics of this promotional email from Polestar are eye-catching. It keeps the design simple, using a color palette of white, black, and grey. This means the reader’s eye is instantly drawn to the photo of the car.

Then, it lays out its three July offers in numerical order. This enhances user engagement with the content by breaking up walls of text into an easily scannable list.

It ends with another high-quality photo of the vehicle and highlights how quickly users will receive their car once they make a purchase.

The email’s stripped-back design reinforces Polestar’s brand identity and positions it as a sophisticated operator.

3. Anniversary sale email

Another effective email marketing strategy is to send emails promoting sales that mark significant events, like anniversaries. In particular, the anniversaries of certain manufacturers or models, or the anniversaries of purchases made at your car dealership.

For example, in this email, Lamborghini invites its customers to join in with its 60th anniversary celebrations.

It also highlights the record-breaking number of vehicles it has delivered. This demonstrates the prestige and longevity of the brand and is a good way to increase user trust.

The email closes with a CTA promoting the brand’s anniversary sale, which encourages users to convert.

Lamborghini includes buttons that enable readers to follow it on social media. Include this at the end of your email marketing messages too, as it increases engagement with your other marketing channels.

4. Sale ending reminder email

As well as promoting upcoming sales, you should highlight ongoing sales to your subscribers. This is an effective tactic for all types of businesses and should be a core element of your auto dealership email marketing strategy.

In this example, AutoAnything uses time-sensitive language to create a sense of urgency among readers. This prompts them to take action quickly and is a proven way to boost conversions.

Next, it strongly reinforces that there’s not much time left for users to act. It also provides a discount code and a clear, compelling CTA.

This is a prime example of how to nudge users into the final stage of the sales funnel and increase revenue.

5. Reward offer email

Your email marketing campaigns should provide rewards to your customers. This can greatly enhance customer loyalty and provide plenty of repeat business.

It creates a sense of exclusivity among your target audience. They feel like they’re part of a club with access to unique offers and rewards for their continued support of your brand. On top of that, it can lead to FOMO within segments of your audience that are yet to make a purchase.

Here, Infiniti offers a $10,000 cash bonus to its loyal customers.

This is a clever piece of email marketing. By providing these three options, Infiniti offers valuable resources to users while also encouraging them to convert.

6. Event invite email

Whether it’s big sales events, test drive opportunities, or new cars on the lot, event invites can also be a highly successful email marketing strategy. They invite subscribers and customers to experience your brand in a more personal and immersive way. This interaction can help strengthen the relationship between your dealership and your audience.

Plus, as with reward offer emails, these email types foster a sense of exclusivity among your customers.

You can clearly see how Lucid goes about this in this example.

It positions its audience as knowledgeable and sophisticated car enthusiasts. Then, it highlights the exclusive nature of the event invite by assuring the reader they’re the first to know about it.

It ends with a sleek, high-quality photo of one of its vehicles and provides the date and time of the event. Finally, it uses a CTA button to motivate readers to buy tickets.

7. Seasonal email

Seasonal emails should form a part of every automotive email marketing strategy. They allow you to take advantage of the massive increase in spending around festive events like Christmas and Thanksgiving.

By planning the timing of your seasonal email campaigns carefully, you can capitalize on both early shoppers and last-minute buyers.

Here, Lucid uses seasonal language to evoke the holiday spirit while promoting its product.

It then uses clever email copy to establish Lucid Air as the perfect gift for discerning customers.

Notice how Lucid doesn’t use holiday-themed emojis or vibrant color schemes? This is because it would clash with the brand’s identity and would be jarring to its audience. Remember, consistent design and messaging are vital during any email marketing campaign.

8. Social proof email

Let’s face it. Most people do not really enjoy the car buying experience. That’s why social proof is another key element of email marketing for car dealerships. It’s highly effective as users often look to the feedback and actions of others to guide their own decisions.

Often, the best form of social proof is positive reviews of your products or customer service. This could be as simple as including links to reviews on your site, or you could go for an innovative approach like Honda does in this example.

First, it presents a powerful image of its vehicle accompanied by bold graphics that highlight its 5-star review from “What Car”.

Next, it details the expertise of the reviewers and the conditions for the tests of its product.

It ends with enticing language that draws users toward the CTA button. This is certain to increase CTRs, drive organic traffic, and, ultimately, lead to more conversions.

9. Car customization email

One email marketing tactic that’s particularly beneficial for car dealerships is promoting vehicle customization. These emails allow you to create highly personalized messages that appeal to your subscribers’ specific interests and preferences.

They also incorporate an interactive element into your emails which is ideal for increasing user engagement.

Here, we have another example from Lucid. The email gives readers the opportunity to design a bespoke interior for their vehicle. It includes summer-themed language, value statements, and a clear CTA.

Below, it also presents an array of cars with various color options. Clearly, when users design their own interiors and choose a color to match, they feel like they’re getting an intricately customized product.

As a result, they feel a sense of ownership over their designs before they’ve even purchased any products. This makes them more likely to follow through and convert.

4 Tips To Improve Your Email Marketing Strategy

Now that you’ve seen some amazing examples of automotive marketing emails, we’ll give you some tips to help you create your own campaign. We’ll take a look at:

• Segmentation
• Automation
• Optimized subject lines
• Mobile optimization

1. Subscriber list segmentation

Targeted messages are more effective than generic ones, and the best way to create targeted email campaigns is to segment your audience.

This involves dividing your audience into groups based on specific characteristics like:

• Interests
• Demographics
• Purchase history

You can then craft hyper-personalized messages to each segment of your audience. This has been shown to significantly improve user engagement and lead to better conversion rates. Plus, 83% of consumers say that they like to receive personalized emails.

2. Email campaign automation

Automating your email marketing campaigns is an essential part of any successful strategy. This involves creating workflows that are automatically triggered when a user takes a specific action.

For example, an abandoned cart email series would be triggered when a user abandons their cart before making a purchase.

For car dealerships specifically, it can be used to automatically send customers reminders about things like services. This is a good way to increase customer trust as it clearly demonstrates that your brand keeps their needs in mind.

Of course, one of the biggest benefits of automation is that it saves you and your team a huge amount of time and effort. Trust me, you’ll be very thankful for automation as your subscriber list continues to grow.

Don’t fancy handling automation by yourself? Let InboxArmy take care of it for you. Our email marketing automation services will deal with every element of automation, from creating to deploying your workflows.

3. Subject line optimization

Subject line optimization simply can’t be ignored. Here are some tips for crafting personalized and compelling subject lines:

• Keep it concise: Keep your subject lines to a maximum of 50 characters. This means they’re easily scannable and fully visible on mobile devices.
• Create urgency: Use time-sensitive language like “Sale Ends Soon”.
• Avoid spammy phrases: Don’t use spammy words and phrases like “Buy Now” or “Winner”. If you do, your emails may be flagged by spam filters.
• Include action-oriented language: Begin your subject lines with strong verbs like “Join” and “Discover”.
• Demonstrate relevance: Make sure you describe the content of your emails accurately in the subject line. Readers should know what your emails are about before they open them.

4. Optimize for mobile devices

Every successful email marketing campaign has to be optimized for mobile devices. In 2024, this is non-negotiable. If your emails aren’t optimized for mobile, you’ll likely see a big decline in user engagement, CTRs, and conversions.

So, how do you optimize your emails for mobile? Follow these tips:

• Use responsive email designs: Make sure the designs you use for your emails are responsive. This means they’ll automatically adapt to different screen sizes.
• Optimize images: Use small image file sizes and compress larger files. This will reduce loading times when your emails are opened on a mobile device.
• Opt for simple layouts: Choose simpler formats like single-column layouts. It’ll make your emails more easily navigable on smaller screens.
• Use large font sizes: Using larger font sizes makes it easier for users to read your emails on smaller mobile screens. As a general rule, aim for 22+ px for headlines and 17-22 px for body text.
• Test your emails: Before you launch your email marketing campaign, test your emails on multiple mobile devices to ensure they provide an optimal user experience.

Final Thoughts

Clearly, automotive email marketing is an indispensable tool for driving traffic, boosting brand awareness, and increasing revenue.

By utilizing various campaign types, like newsletters, promotional emails, and event invitations, you can significantly enhance user engagement and improve your conversion rates.

If you’re stuck for ideas, use the examples in this guide for inspiration. Just remember to follow the tips laid out above to make sure your strategy is as effective as possible.

FAQs

How often should I send automotive marketing emails?

The frequency with which you send your emails depends on the type of emails you’re sending. For instance, a newsletter should typically be sent once a month or once a week.

For other types of campaigns, it’s generally best to aim for around two to three emails per week. However, there is no one-size-fits-all for this.

It’s best to test out different email frequencies and see which one gets the best response from your audience.

How can I measure the success of my automotive email marketing campaigns?

The best way to measure the success of your automotive email marketing campaigns is to track key performance metrics such as:

• Open rates
• CTR
• Bounce rates
• Unsubscribe rates
• Conversion rates

All reputable email marketing platforms come with built-in analysis tools that allow you to track these metrics easily.

How do I recover inactive subscribers in my email list?

To recover inactive subscribers in your email list, create a win-back email campaign. This involves sending a series of three to five emails over the course of two to four weeks. The emails are designed to reengage inactive subscribers and encourage them to start opening your emails again and purchasing.

Typically, these emails include things like:

• Personalized, dynamic content
• Highlights of new products/features the inactive user has missed
• Incentives like free shipping and discounts
• Time-limited offers that create a sense of urgency