Email Marketing

Email marketing is quickly becoming one of the most important marketing practices that a dealership can utilize today.

Here’s why:

• It's a highly targeted, extremely cost-effective and timely way to reach customers.
• Its return on investment (ROI) is greater than that of its alternatives - direct mail, print ads, newspapers, etc.
• It’s easier to build lasting relationships with specific segments and individuals within your customer base.
• It integrates well with other marketing tactics that your dealership may be conducting, for instance, to remind customers about a physical mail piece you’ve sent them, or to complement print advertising.
• Email can instantly provide opportunities for interactivity in ways that other types of marketing cannot.
• Furthermore, technology is changing at such a rapid pace that those traditional forms of communication are quickly becoming outdated. Direct mail is at the top of that list. Why pay for printing and postage when you can communicate faster, cheaper, and better through email?

If you're like most dealerships, you've been talking about email for a couple of years now and perhaps you’ve had some serious challenges to overcome. Your customers weren’t ready, your existing technologies inside the dealership weren’t ready, and email was primarily considered to be a business tool.

But today your customers are ready and this is good news for your dealership if you need to reach more of them for less money. According to EmailLabs.com, 78 percent of consumers prefer to be contacted by email.

• Email is the number one reason people turn on their computers.
• Consumers check their email more times daily than they watch TV, read the newspaper or listen to the radio.
• Email has proven to be an essential form of communication in daily life.
• Many consumers now use handheld devices to receive and send emails.
• Email is immediate, allowing real-time, on-going communication - you to your customers and they back to you.
• Email can include a variety of links, to other websites, to CSI surveys, to appointment desks, etc, enabling you to add value to your message.

However, unless you are doing it right, email marketing might not be right for your dealership. You need to spend the time to get the performance out of your customer lists and campaigns. I can’t tell you how many times I see a dealership just sending out emails to everyone hoping that X recipients take an action or visit the website. Think bigger and focus on driving results. And have planned results to measure. In addition, you will want to develop an ongoing program that includes:

• Driving email acquisition at current customer interaction points inside and outside of the dealership.
• Training sales and service staff on the value of collecting email addresses.
• Creating and marketing exclusive email-only coupons and offerings.
• Creating website landing pages that speak to the link, the offer, the creative, the copy and more. (Once I click, give me a reason to engage with your campaign.)
• Make your email program work for all of your dealership profit centers - not just new car sales.
• In conclusion, email marketing is no longer a secondary item in your digital marketing to-do list. It should be a major driver of your online communications, community, marketing, and traffic drivers.

Get to work today to guarantee your dealership capitalizes on the best practices and available technology to make you more efficient and more profitable!

SEM:

SEM (Search Engine Marketing) is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages (SERPS). SEM methods include paid placements, contextual advertising and paid inclusion. It refers mainly to the text advertisements or sponsored listings, which appear on the top or the right hand side of search engine results pages. These advertising links are purchased mainly from Google Ad Words or Yahoo.

Search Marketing advertisements, (formerly known as Overture) or MSN (Live Search) are also called Pay Per Click (PPC) ads. This means you pay every time someone clicks on your ad. The ranking sequence is determined by a variety of factors such as bids CTR (Click through Rate), keyword relevancy to the landing page, and competition for a specific keyword. In many instances the top 2 rankings are not necessarily the best positions, while being ranked between 3 and 5 is the optimal position for lead conversions.

SEM is a very controllable form of marketing, in the sense you have complete control over the budget, keywords and websites you wish to target. However, it must be managed closely or you can easily be outbid and spend your entire budget on ineffective keywords that won’t convert.

We periodically find that some customers base their entire strategy on outbidding their competitors in order to increase the value of the words. We don’t recommend this as it is considered to be a black hat tactic and in the case of keywords such as car models and make, you often end up competing against OEMs and local competitors.

SEM also includes any banner advertising or ad placement advertising that is shown on the right panel of the search results. Google offers a full banner advertising service; however, they limit the call to actions.

SEO:

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) refers to improving a website’s natural and organic ranking in the search engine ranking pages. This method of achieving high ranking often takes time, usually 60-90 days for the search engines to find you, and is based on 2 main components.
• On-page optimization includes factors such as: keyword density, title tag optimization, keyword rich content meta tags, sitemaps, link structure, index ability of the web page and much more.
• Off-page optimization includes the inbound links, the quality of the site that links to your website, relevancy of sites that link to you, and keywords in the anchor texts.
At the end of the day which method is the best? It really depends on your budget, time, and resources. SEM’s short term advantage is that you can get instant qualified traffic to your website. The amount of traffic you want is dependent on the money you want to spend.

Keep in mind that you will run the risk of burning through your marketing budget very fast and have very low conversion rates if you do not closely research and optimize your keywords, and properly optimize your ads as well as the landing pages from where you direct traffic in Google.

SEO on the other hand is a long-term approach and uses many best practices. The best time to think about SEO is when you start building the website. The website architecture is key to SEO, including error pages, redirects, and even website coding. Original content, that is relevant and optimized and a solid “link-building” campaign will result in a website with a good ranking. SEO requires time and patience as well as a commitment to continually improve.

Lastly, be wary of anyone who offers you a guarantee a #1 Ranking. Contact us to learn more about how SEO works and how it can help you get better results without burning through your entire marketing budget.

Optimizing Website Graphics and Images:

So much has been said about content you’d think content was the only important part of website optimization. But that would simply not be true. Each and every image you use on your site should be optimized for Search Engine Results Pages (SERP). When using an image or graphic file on a website, you must be sure to name the file correctly. Naming an image or graphic correctly can be crucial when a site is scanned or ‘crawled’ by search engines. For example, if you have a site dedicated to Ferrari’s, you wouldn’t want an image on the site to be vaguely called ‘car.jpg’, instead, giving it a proper name will add relevancy and credibility to what the specific page or website site is about. The “alt tag” or alt attribute is a simple code you can add to your image/graphic and is meant to be another option for non-visual browsers when they come across images. This means that the text is used when the image is not visible on the page. Instead, the alternative text or tag is what’s read. In the article, “Describing Your Images for Better Web Accessibility”, Jennifer Kyrnin from About.com lists a few tips on how to successfully use “alt” attributes or tags:
• Be Brief - some browsers will break if the alt text is too long.
• Be Clear - don't be so brief that the context is confused.
• Be Contextual - don't describe the image if it's meant to be viewed in context.

Don't display your site's inner workings just describe the image with useful information.

Don't use it only for search engine optimization - Many websites developers think that if they use “alt” text as an SEO tool, they can "fool" the search engines by using a keyword on the alt tag that is not relevant. However, this can backfire. Because if the search engine decides you are trying to fake your results, your website will be completely removed from the search engine results.
XHTML Title Attributes is another key factor that needs to be added to the different elements on your website such as images/graphics, links, forms, etc. This is a very versatile way to provide more information to visitors or readers on your site. To give you a better example of what this means, if you view sites in modern browsers and hover over images/graphics or links, you’ll see a short title or description come up in a small box. This is a very advantageous way to help optimize your site or specific web page as this will also help that particular page or section of the site become more accessible in search results or page ranking.

If the images or graphics on your current website are not optimized, you are missing out on a very valuable component of Search Engine Optimization.