Automotive Email Marketing: Complete Guide to Using Email


Automotive Email Marketing - 1
July 18, 2024
Written by
Mary Kate Miller
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Whether you run a car dealership, auto repair shop, or car/truck parts retailer, you should be using email as part of your marketing strategy. Email marketing is a highly effective tool that lets you speak directly to your customers to boost sales, develop brand trust, and build a loyal customer base.

The truth is that you may not learn much from looking at your competitor’s email— because it’s common in the automotive industry for businesses to rely too heavily on busy visuals and discounts. You don’t have to do that, and if you approach email right, you have an enormous opportunity to outshine your competitors. 

That’s why we’re here.

We’ll walk you through everything you need to know about automotive email marketing, so you can build a digital marketing program that helps you hit your sales goals and keep customers happy.

How to get started with automotive email marketing

Build your email list

The first step is to build your email list. Start collecting emails from current and past customers. If you already have customer emails in your CRM, that’s great. We’ll start there. The most important thing to keep in mind—don’t buy an email list. It might seem like a brilliant way to fast-track your email marketing, but you risk low email engagement, which can cause a whole host of other problems (like getting sent to the dreaded spam folder). 

Segment your email list

Segmenting your email list is the process of breaking it down by customer type or demographics so that you can ensure you’re sending each recipient the messages that are most relevant to them. You might want to send a series of emails to customers who purchased a car three years ago, letting them know about the fantastic trade-in offers you have.

You may want to remind car owners under warranty that it’s time for regularly scheduled maintenance (looking at you, oil change). You might want to remind potential customers that if they buy before the end of the month, they can take advantage of [insert spectacular offer].

What you don’t want to do is send the oil change message to a potential car buyer. Segmentation helps you avoid that. You can segment email recipients by:

  • Demographics: Age, gender, location, income, education, occupation

  • Customer information/insights: New/existing customers, service/plan level, how much they spend, etc

  • Email types: Transactional emails, nurture emails, re-engagement campaigns, etc

  • Engagement: Recipients who open all your emails, just some, or hardly any

  • Activity: How often recipients make purchases, get their car serviced, or engage with your product/service

Get the full rundown with The Essential Guide to Email Segmentation

Personalize and automate 

Email marketing software gives you the power to personalize and automate your email marketing. Use it. Personalized emails can generate up to $20 for every $1, so it’s well worth putting in a little extra time and money.

Automated email refers to real-time, one-to-one messages that are sent when a recipient takes a certain action. Here are some different types of automated campaigns you can use to grow your auto business:

  • Welcome series emails

  • Nurture series emails

  • Anniversary emails

  • User verification emails (double-check new email sign-ups)

  • Re-engagement campaigns

  • Feedback requests

  • Application reminders

  • Review requests (like asking customers to leave Google reviews post-purchase)

Focus on quality email content

Content quality drives the success of an email campaign. You want your email design to be eye-catching, yet simple, and your messaging to be clear and to the point. You can build your emails from scratch or start by using a pre-made, customizable email template. Once you get your campaigns up and running, you’ll definitely want to templatize emails to save time when you go to create new marketing materials. 

Email design for automotive businesses

The header and footer of your email are opportunities to reinforce your brand. The header can be something as simple as your logo, and the footer can include your auto business’s social channels, your company’s physical address, and a way for email recipients to unsubscribe. 

You also want to be sure that your emails have some amount of whitespace—the area in your email without content or images—so that the email doesn’t feel busy. Whitespace also helps the eye scan the content more quickly, which helps reader comprehension, and in turn, supports better conversion rates. 

Write enticing email copy

You want your email copy to be written with your target audience in mind. What matters to your target car buyer or owner? Keep their pain-points top of mind as you write so that you can present your product/services as the solution to their problems. 

The best email copy is clear, short, and enticing. You want your subject lines to grab the recipient’s attention, and your preview text to pull them in. Headlines and copy should be conversational and demonstrate your understanding of your target audience. Calls to action (CTAs) should highlight the benefit for the reader. 

Use the right images

The right images will highlight your message and make your offer more compelling. The wrong images can be distracting and deter potential customers from making a purchase. Look for simple, bold images that represent the key message of your email. It can take more time than you expect to find the right images, but it’s worth it. 

Send at the best time (for your audience)

You’ll want to test different email send times to find the most effective one for your auto business. Based on recent data, a good time to try is Tuesday at 11 AM (EST). Emails sent at this time tend to have higher open rates, while emails sent later in the week tend to have lower open rates.

Use the right automotive email marketing tools

Use email marketing software like Twilio SendGrid Marketing Campaigns, which provides robust, easy-to-use automotive email marketing tools. We provide you with access to email templates and tools to segment your lists, personalize email marketing, send automated email campaigns, and track email performance.

SendGrid Marketing Campaigns has an industry-leading 96% inboxing rate, meaning our customers rarely end up in the spam folder.

Send With Confidence

Partner with the email service trusted by developers and marketers for time-savings, scalability, and delivery expertise.