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technology is changing at such a rapid pace that those traditional forms of communication are quickly becoming outdated.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.

Want to increase your websites performance?

Minimize HTTP Requests:

80% of the end-user response time is spent on the front-end. Most of this time is tied up in downloading all the components in the page: images, stylesheets, scripts, flash, etc. Reducing the number of components in turn reduces the number of HTTP requests required to render the page. This is the key to faster pages.

One way to reduce the number of components in the page is to simplify the page's design. But is there a way to build pages with richer content while also achieving fast response times? Here are some techniques for reducing the number of HTTP requests, while still supporting rich page designs.

Combined files: are a way to reduce the number of HTTP requests by combining all scripts into a single script, and similarly combining all CSS into a single stylesheet. Combining files is more challenging when the scripts and stylesheets vary from page to page, but making this part of your release process improves response times.

CSS Sprites: Is the preferred method for reducing the number of image requests. Combine your background images into a single image and use the CSS background-image and background-position properties to display the desired image segment.

Image maps: combine multiple images into a single image. The overall size is about the same, but reducing the number of HTTP requests speeds up the page. Image maps only work if the images are contiguous in the page, such as a navigation bar. Defining the coordinates of image maps can be tedious and error prone. Using image maps for navigation is not accessible too, so it's not recommended.

Inline images: use the data: URL scheme to embed the image data in the actual page. This can increase the size of your HTML document. Combining inline images into your (cached) stylesheets is a way to reduce HTTP requests and avoid increasing the size of your pages. Inline images are not yet supported across all major browsers.

Reducing the number of HTTP requests in your page is the place to start. This is the most important guideline for improving performance for first time visitors. As described in Tenni Theurer's blog post Browser Cache Usage - Exposed!, 40-60% of daily visitors to your site come in with an empty cache. Making your page fast for these first time visitors is key to a better user experience.

Gzip Components:

tag: server

The time it takes to transfer an HTTP request and response across the network can be significantly reduced by decisions made by front-end engineers. It's true that the end-user's bandwidth speed, Internet service provider, proximity to peering exchange points, etc. are beyond the control of the development team. But there are other variables that affect response times. Compression reduces response times by reducing the size of the HTTP response.

Starting with HTTP/1.1, web clients indicate support for compression with the Accept-Encoding header in the HTTP request.

Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate

If the web server sees this header in the request, it may compress the response using one of the methods listed by the client. The web server notifies the web client of this via the Content-Encoding header in the response.

Content-Encoding: gzip

Gzip is the most popular and effective compression method at this time. It was developed by the GNU project and standardized by RFC 1952. The only other compression format you're likely to see is deflate, but it's less effective and less popular.

Gzipping generally reduces the response size by about 70%. Approximately 90% of today's Internet traffic travels through browsers that claim to support gzip. If you use Apache, the module configuring gzip depends on your version: Apache 1.3 uses mod_gzip while Apache 2.x uses mod_deflate.

There are known issues with browsers and proxies that may cause a mismatch in what the browser expects and what it receives with regard to compressed content. Fortunately, these edge cases are dwindling as the use of older browsers drops off. The Apache modules help out by adding appropriate Vary response headers automatically.

Servers choose what to gzip based on file type, but are typically too limited in what they decide to compress. Most web sites gzip their HTML documents. It's also worthwhile to gzip your scripts and stylesheets, but many web sites miss this opportunity. In fact, it's worthwhile to compress any text response including XML and JSON. Image and PDF files should not be gzipped because they are already compressed. Trying to gzip them not only wastes CPU but can potentially increase file sizes.

Gzipping as many file types as possible is an easy way to reduce page weight and accelerate the user experience.

Put Stylesheets at the Top:

tag: css

While researching performance at Yahoo!, we discovered that moving stylesheets to the document HEAD makes pages appear to be loading faster. This is because putting stylesheets in the HEAD allows the page to render progressively.

Front-end engineers that care about performance want a page to load progressively; that is, we want the browser to display whatever content it has as soon as possible. This is especially important for pages with a lot of content and for users on slower Internet connections. The importance of giving users visual feedback, such as progress indicators, has been well researched and documented. In our case the HTML page is the progress indicator! When the browser loads the page progressively the header, the navigation bar, the logo at the top, etc. all serve as visual feedback for the user who is waiting for the page. This improves the overall user experience.

The problem with putting stylesheets near the bottom of the document is that it prohibits progressive rendering in many browsers, including Internet Explorer. These browsers block rendering to avoid having to redraw elements of the page if their styles change. The user is stuck viewing a blank white page.

The HTML specification clearly states that stylesheets are to be included in the HEAD of the page: "Unlike A, [LINK] may only appear in the HEAD section of a document, although it may appear any number of times." Neither of the alternatives, the blank white screen or flash of unstyled content, are worth the risk. The optimal solution is to follow the HTML specification and load your stylesheets in the document HEAD.

Put Scripts at the Bottom

tag: javascript

The problem caused by scripts is that they block parallel downloads. The HTTP/1.1 specification suggests that browsers download no more than two components in parallel per hostname. If you serve your images from multiple hostnames, you can get more than two downloads to occur in parallel. While a script is downloading, however, the browser won't start any other downloads, even on different hostnames.

Make JavaScript and CSS External

tag: javascript, css

Many of these performance rules deal with how external components are managed. However, before these considerations arise you should ask a more basic question: Should JavaScript and CSS be contained in external files, or inlined in the page itself?

Using external files in the real world generally produces faster pages because the JavaScript and CSS files are cached by the browser. JavaScript and CSS that are inlined in HTML documents get downloaded every time the HTML document is requested. This reduces the number of HTTP requests that are needed, but increases the size of the HTML document. On the other hand, if the JavaScript and CSS are in external files cached by the browser, the size of the HTML document is reduced without increasing the number of HTTP requests.

The key factor, then, is the frequency with which external JavaScript and CSS components are cached relative to the number of HTML documents requested. This factor, although difficult to quantify, can be gauged using various metrics. If users on your site have multiple page views per session and many of your pages re-use the same scripts and stylesheets, there is a greater potential benefit from cached external files.

Many web sites fall in the middle of these metrics. For these sites, the best solution generally is to deploy the JavaScript and CSS as external files. The only exception where inlining is preferable is with home pages, such as Yahoo!'s front page and My Yahoo!. Home pages that have few (perhaps only one) page view per session may find that inlining JavaScript and CSS results in faster end-user response times.

For front pages that are typically the first of many page views, there are techniques that leverage the reduction of HTTP requests that inlining provides, as well as the caching benefits achieved through using external files. One such technique is to inline JavaScript and CSS in the front page, but dynamically download the external files after the page has finished loading. Subsequent pages would reference the external files that should already be in the browser's cache.

In some situations it's not easy to move scripts to the bottom. If, for example, the script uses document.write to insert part of the page's content, it can't be moved lower in the page. There might also be scoping issues. In many cases, there are ways to workaround these situations.

An alternative suggestion that often comes up is to use deferred scripts. The DEFER attribute indicates that the script does not contain document.write, and is a clue to browsers that they can continue rendering. Unfortunately, Firefox doesn't support the DEFER attribute. In Internet Explorer, the script may be deferred, but not as much as desired. If a script can be deferred, it can also be moved to the bottom of the page. That will make your web pages load faster.

Define CSS:

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a stylesheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language. It’s most common application is to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML.

CSS can be used locally by the readers of web pages to define colors, fonts, layout, and other aspects of document presentation. It is designed primarily to enable the separation of document content (written in HTML or a similar markup language) from document presentation (written in CSS). This separation can improve content accessibility, provide more flexibility and control in the specification of presentation characteristics, and reduce complexity and repetition in the structural content (such as by allowing for tableless web design). CSS can also allow the same markup page to be presented in different styles for different rendering methods, such as on-screen, in print, by voice (when read out by a speech-based browser or screen reader) and on Braille-based, tactile devices.

CSS Structure and Rules

Selectors:

Any HTML element is a possible CSS1 selector. The selector is simply the element that is linked to a particular style. For example, the selector in

P {text-indent: 3em}

is P.

Class Selectors:

A simple selector can have different classes, thus allowing the same element to have different styles. For example, an author may wish to display code in a different color depending on its language:

code.html { color: #191970 }
code.css {color: #4b0082}

The above example has created two classes, css and html for use with HTML's CODE element. The CLASS attribute is used in HTML to indicate the class of an element, e.g.,

Only one class is allowed per selector.
For example, code.html.proprietary is invalid.

Classes may also be declared without an associated element:

.note {font-size: small}

ID Selectors:

ID selectors are individually assigned for the purpose of defining on a per-element basis. This selector type should only be used sparingly due to its inherent limitations. An ID selector is assigned by using the indicator "#" to precede a name. For example, an ID selector could be assigned as such:

# {text-indent: 3em}

This would be referenced in HTML by the ID attribute:


Grouping:

In order to decrease repetitious statements within style sheets, grouping of selectors and declarations is allowed. For example, all of the headings in a document could be given identical declarations through a grouping:

H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6 {color: red; font-family: sans-serif}


Inheritance:

Virtually all selectors which are nested within selectors will inherit the property values assigned to the outer selector unless otherwise modified. For example, a color defined for the BODY will also be applied to text in a paragraph.

There are some cases where the inner selector does not inherit the surrounding selector's values, but these should stand out logically. For example, the margin-top property is not inherited; intuitively, a paragraph would not have the same top margin as the document body.

Arunkumar Loganathan

6+ years of experience in the areas of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), HTML Web Design, Banner Design & Web Design which is Search Engine Friendly.

Currently working as a Senior UI Designer in Sulekha.com New Media Pvt. Ltd. Chennai, India