Marketing

  • Email marketing: Should you build a list, or should you buy?

    Tuesday, February 14, 2017 | Dave Kopf

    WHEN IT COMES TO email marketing, your list is everything. With the right investment of time, expertise and, perhaps, money, you can develop a targeted list of relevant buyers who will be interested in your marketing messages.

    But how do you build your list? Essentially, you have to build it or buy it, or do a combination of both.

    BUYING A LIST
    There are many options for buying a list. Legions of marketing firms collect a variety of lists that they sell online. Those lists can be purchased based on a variety of criteria, including by geography, so that dealers can purchase a list that is somewhat local to their business.

    But is buying the right way to go? While simply paying to buy a list is tempting, the process is not that simple. In fact, there are certain risks. First, you could waste your valuable marketing budget on a list packed with old and bad addresses that does not generate viable results. Second, and more worrisome, you could purchase a list that is so bad that, once you deploy an email to that list, email systems quickly consider your domain as a source of spam.

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  • Email marketing: Subject lines that generate opens

    Tuesday, February 14, 2017 | Dave Kopf

    IN EMAIL MARKETING, your success rides on your subject line. You must write subject lines that practically grab your recipients by the shirt collar and force them to click open the message and read.

    That’s no easy feat, given how much competition you have for each of your recipient’s inbox. Think of it: for every single inbox, you’re trying to rise above a sea of other marketing emails, messages from mom and dad, work-related diatribes, racing and AMA emails, and everything else. You have your work cut out for you when it comes to writing a subject line that stands out from the crowd, gets users to open, and prompts them to click through to the site you specify.

    You don’t have much room. Users of desktop email software and webmail clients typically size their inboxes so that roughly 40 to 50 characters of subject line, including spaces, appear. Moreover, on an smartphone mail app, the figure is more like 25 to 30 characters, including spaces. And given that 66 percent of all U.S. email traffic is opened and read on smartphones or tablets, according to MovableInk, you want to conform to that length.

     

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  • Email marketing: Preheaders (or, what a difference 100 characters can make)

    Tuesday, February 14, 2017 | Dave Kopf

    IT’S A MOBILE WORLD, and your marketing had better respond to it, down to the simplest elements. Case in point: the oft-ignored preheader, a simple tool that can mean the difference between your emails getting read or deleted.

    To demonstrate how prevalent mobile email has become, consider this: 66 percent of all U.S. email traffic is opened and read on smartphones or tablets, according to the “U.S. Consumer Device Preference Report” from MovableInk. The report adds that 49.5 percent of email opens occurred on smartphones and 16.8 on tablets, with the remaining 34 percent occurring on desktops. In terms of operating system, 58 percent of email opens happened on an Apple iOS device and 7 percent happened on Android devices. And every one of those emails can benefit from a preheader.

    What’s a preheader? Well, pick up your smartphone and open your email app. Regardless of your phone’s operating system and the app you’re using, you’ll see essentially the same thing for each email in your inbox: the sender’s name, the message subject, and approximately the first 100 characters of the email message.  However, look closer at those first 100 characters: Some of them look much more like summary text than the first random words of a message. That is preheader copy, and when sending HTML emails, you can modify how that copy reads.

     

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  • Email marketing: Powerful metrics = success

    Tuesday, February 14, 2017 | Dave Kopf

    THE KEY TO SUCCESSFUL email marketing is measurement. Unlike print ads or direct mail, email offers stores and shops a marketing tool that is not only effective, but also measurable.

    For instance, when you snail-mail a brochure to your market, you have no idea whether they chucked it in the trash without reading it, or if they opened it and read the message. But with an email, you can ensure it reaches your intended targets, and find out whether they open your email or not. This lets you identify successful messages and campaigns as well as promotions that could have done better, and get some clues as to why those messages were successful or non-starters.

    Any good email marketing service provider will provide you with a variety of statistics on your email marketing effectiveness. Let’s take a look at some of the key metrics you should be following:

     

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  • Email marketing: Why design for all devices (especially mobile)

    Tuesday, February 14, 2017 | Dave Kopf

    WHEN IT COMES TO EMAIL MARKETING, you have to be all things to all clients. You customers are likely looking at your marketing emails through desktop computers, laptops, smartphones, tablets and webmail services (in computer parlance, these are called “clients”) so are you formatting your emails so that they read well on those clients?

    You should be. According to the “U.S. Consumer Device Preference Report” from MovableInk, 49.5 percent of emails are opened on a smart phone and 16.8 percent are opened on tablets. And it may be more for you (see “Dealer Q&A” below). So that email you designed might look good on Outlook, but does it look good on an iPad? How about if someone is reading that iPad turned on its side?

    Ensuring your emails look good on a variety of devices is a key email marketing challenge for powersports retailers and service providers. You can work overtime to create a great email marketing piece, and follow it up with painstaking efforts to come up with a subject line or pre-header that will get them to click, but if the email is tough to read because its design isn’t well-suited to the recipient’s client device, then they’re going to delete it – without a second thought.

     

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  • Email Marketing: Five requirements for CAN SPAM compliance

    Tuesday, February 14, 2017 | Dave Kopf

    NO ONE LIKES to see a tsunami of spam messages in their inboxes. Back in 2003, spam got to be such a problem that the federal government passed the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing (CAN SPAM) Act. CAN SPAM, as a result, is set of laws that govern how businesses send their marketing emails.

    Businesses large and small must comply with CAN SPAM – including your dealership. That said, you shouldn’t think of CAN SPAM as some kind of hassle or unnecessary set of capricious laws invented to bog down your business. If anything, they outline a set of solid business practices that will help you reinforce your dealership’s reputation for good service and for being a reliable, responsible member of the local community, as opposed to a shady operation. Bottom line? You want your email marketing efforts to conform to CAN SPAM.

    If the positive aspects of CAN SPAM aren’t clear enough, know that there are fines attached to CAN SPAM violations. The Federal Trade Commission, which administers CAN SPAM, can fine each separate email that violates the law up to $16,000 — and that can add up very quickly.

     

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