Note: Please read through this carefully as it can help prevent spam and negative domain reputation with your email marketing initiatives.
Email is both an art and a science and in order to ensure your dealerships’ emails are not marked as spam please reference this guide Selly has put together with direct links to the top thought leaders in the email space. Small nuances in the way emails are sent can have a major impact on deliverability and domain reputation. We have put together a best practice guide for Selly dealers to show you the tactics to have the greatest level of email deliverability and campaign success using our platform or any other automotive CRM. This guide is high-level and targeted at any level of technical competency.
#1 - Consumer Level Email
One of the biggest mistakes dealers will make is using a consumer-grade email like “@Gmail.com” or “@AOL.com” as their configured campaign sending email address in Selly (or another CRM). This is a bad practice for several reasons:
- Providers like Gmail, Yahoo, and AOL limit the number of emails you can send from your account from 250 to 500 per 24 hour period. Anything more and you can guarantee it will be sent to spam
- There are lesser security/compliance features and there are 0 admin features (i.e. managing a group of users at your store, locking fired sales rep out from email) with consumer-grade email.
Source: https://www.sendinblue.com/blog/what-is-email-marketing/
#2- Make sure your email lists and emails added into your CRM are cleaned
Another major issue dealers encounter with email deliverability is having a poor quality list that is emailed. Before adding an email contact in Selly make sure:
- You have opt-in approval from the customer and they recognize who you are versus marking you as spam
- The email is a valid email and has been run through an email verification tool to determine: domain exists, the email address is valid, amongst other factors
Source: https://sprout24.com/email-list-cleaning-service/
#3 - Domain Reputation
Your domain reputation takes a while to build and can be easily blacklisted for not following best practices when it comes to emails. Consider the following:
- You need to warm up your email sending domain, so do not start sending a large email blast, start small and build up deliverability through following best practices on: subject line, content, usage of photos and links in the email body and other best practices that can be found at https://www.sendinblue.com/blog/email-deliverability-best-practices/
- Before buying a new domain name to send emails from make sure you understand the history of the domain and how it has been used in the past, reference this article https://sendgrid.com/blog/5-ways-check-sending-reputation/
#4 - HTML Formatting
If you are using a template designed in HTML make sure you review the following common mistakes:
- No plain text version was included, so the recipient has to read HTML
- No alternate text was added for graphics
- HTML code was slipshod or incorrectly formatted
- HTML code contained dead links
- HTML code contained scripts that an ISP may consider harmful
Also, whether it's an agency, an internal team member, make sure you have someone who really understands HTML email design as this can cause significant deliverability issues.
Source: https://glockeasymail.com/email-marketing/why-emails-not-delivered/
#5 - Email Conversion Rates
Be realistic in your expectations on conversion rates for emails sent. There is no silver bullet in getting an email with perfect conversion so we wanted to provide industry data to consider:
- The average email open rate in the auto industry ranges from 3-5% (Izmo)
- Average click-through rate: 2.6% (Campaign Monitor)
- Average unsubscribe rate: 0.1% Campaign Monitor)
While these rates may be averages (and your dealership can perform much better), they should be leveraged as benchmarks in setting realistic expectations on campaign results.
Best Practices - https://mailchimp.com/resources/conversion-rate-optimization/
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