Most dealerships recognize the importance of email marketing as an essential element of their online marketing strategy. After all, today's consumer spends just as much time online – 14 hours – as they do watching TV each week1. Over a third of that time online is spent on email2, which puts email marketing on par with your website as the most important channels for assuring your dealership's share-of-voice online.
In comparison to "traditional" media channels, one of the major advantages inherent to email marketing is the ability to definitively track consumer activity. Data is captured every time an email is opened or action taken by the consumer from within the email message, such as a click-through to your website or an appointment scheduled. This data lets you know, with a great deal of precision, which transactions were the direct result of their email marketing efforts, and easily calculate a highly accurate return rate on their email marketing investment.
Industry-leading owner marketing solutions, such as Cobalt’s OnStation® owner marketing service, consistently return profits to the dealership at the rate of 35-40 times the cost3, or better. What accounts for this impressive ROI? Two factors:
- Low cost messaging. Compared to direct mail marketing, and traditional mass media channels like TV, radio, and newspaper, email marketing costs are much lower — fractions of pennies per delivery of your message, as opposed to the hundreds or thousands of dollars that you will spend on these other channels.
- High margin sales. Because transactions with consumers that have a previous experience with your dealership generate high profits per vehicle sold – 20% higher, on average4 owner marketing solutions drop more money to your bottom line. After all, your best, most productive sales reps aren't taking the fresh-ups, they are selling to repeats and referrals.
With the availability of highly accurate tracking data and profitability measurements, one very interesting concept beginning to resonate with dealerships is the value of an individual customer email address. When a dealership can track the profits earned from their monthly owner marketing campaigns, over time, they can easily establish a dollar value for each additional email address that they collect and add to their database.
Cobalt recently analyzed this data for their customers that utilize the OnStation owner marketing solution, and found that on average, each customer email address represents $12.65 of profit to our dealerships every month!5 Think about that for a moment. If your dealership does 1,000 transactions each month (sales and service combined) and you captured a new customer email address during 50% of those transactions (500 new email addresses), they represent $6,325 of incremental profit to your dealership each month. That’s over $75,000 to your bottom line during the next 12 months. If you accomplish this each month, and factor in the additional transactions that an effective owner marketing solution can generate, you’re talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars!
What if you haven't been collecting email addresses from your customers, and aren't sure how many you even have in your database? Not a problem for solutions like Cobalt's OnStation owner marketing program. Using the data that is already in your DMS, OnStation can match email addresses to your customer accounts from our ten national email database partners. Average results find email addresses for 35-40% of your customer base on the first pass. OnStation will also regularly (about every month) send your account data back through our partners to find additional email addresses for you, at the rate of about 3-5% each pass. Over time OnStation can add thousands of email addresses to your database, which translates into thousands of dollars of profit to your bottom line.
If you haven't previously considered the value of an email address to your dealership, contact Cobalt today for more information about how OnStation owner marketing can help turn your existing customers into low-cost prospects and high-margin business for your dealership.
To learn more about OnStation owner marketing contact 1-800-861-7515.
