What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is when a company or organization utilizes email as a medium to connect with its target market to start or continue to build a relationship with them. This form of marketing often can result in high conversion rates, but if done incorrectly, it could jeopardize the authenticity of your business.
Email Marketing Experience
With three years of experience in the marketing field, I possess the skills needed to create email content that maintains a professional presence. Without this professional presence emails can easily come across as spammy. Ultimately, this spammy feel will result in your contacts unsubscribing, or worse, reporting as spam.
Why You Don’t Want Your Emails to be Reported as Spam
Have you ever gotten an agonizing email in your inbox that looks messy, unprofessional, and worthless? If you have, there is no doubt that you unsubscribed, or even reported as spam. In doing so, you are communicating to your email provider that it should consider sending all of the emails from the sender to other user’s spam folders. While this may be helpful to other users, it is also devastating to the organization that is sending the email. If emails are landing in spam folders, they are being missed by the user, resulting in missed opportunity to connect with a target audience.
What My Email Experience Provides
Savvy, easy to read, and contemporary design. My email experience provides thoughtful insights on when to be scheduling emails, what to include in those emails, and how those emails should appear. This results in meeting and exceeding industry open and click through rate standards while also minimizing spam reports.
Sharpe Cars – Case Study
The automotive industry email open rate average is 17%. The average click through rate for the automotive industry is 8%.
Prior to and upon starting at Sharpe Cars, their email open rates ranged between 10% – 15%. Upon further analysis of our target audience, email software, and scheduling, l was able to increase our open rates from rarely matching or exceeding industry standards, to almost always matching or exceeding the industry average. Sharpe Cars’ open rates now ranges between 17% to 30%.
How I was Able to Assist in Achieving These Numbers
While I was analyzing the the emails that Sharpe was sending, I noticed a few things we could improve upon to increase open rates: the software we were using, the lists we were sending our emails to, and the times we were sending our emails.
The Software
Prior to my analysis, Sharpe was utilizing DealerSocket’s (Sharpe’s CRM) email software to send emails out to clients. The email creation process we followed included building the email in Constant Contact, exporting that email’s HTML file, and importing the HMTL code into DealerSocket. In completing this process, the formatting of the email often was not compatible with mobile. Additionally, the email would get cut off on desktop versions, preventing contacts from being able to view the entire email.
Having prior knowledge of Constant Contact’s capabilities from my position with the Michigan SBDC, I looked into reversing the process. The new process now involves building the email on Constant Contact, exporting the contact lists from DealerSocket, and uploading it into Constant Contact.
Audience Lists
As I looked further into DealerSocket’s targeting capabilities, I learned that we were able to target clients more specifically by year, make, model, and other factors. This has assisted in creating more detailed audience lists that helped improve our open and response rates.
Timing of Emails
When I started at Sharpe, emails were being deployed at Fridays at noon. With my prior experience at the Michigan SBDC, and extensive research, I implemented the best practice of sending email earlier in the week when individuals were more engaged with their email. This concept has also been able to assist in achieving higher than average open rates.