The popularity of e-mail newsletters is booming in the automotive industry, and this growth shows no sign of slowing down in 2007. Why are e-newsletters so popular? Because they work! Dealers who are using e-newsletters to build relationships and increase leads are seeing a big jump in their bottom-line.

The efficiency, ease, and ability to “layer” information in an e-newsletter makes e-mail marketing the perfect medium to communicate with your customers and prospects and pull in additional leads, but effective e-mail marketing is an art. A common mistake that many companies make is firing off multiple messages per month detailing their latest special or savings offer and assuming the offers alone will bring in customers. Think about it: What do you do when you receive offers that you can’t use or have no need for? You probably just delete the e-mail without even opening it, and if you receive enough messages, you may ask to be removed from the company’s database. This outcome is the exact opposite of what the company intended: Their e-mail marketing is not pulling in leads and customers; it’s actually driving customers away.

In order to help dealerships avoid this scenario, and instead develop relationships with their customers that will bring in multiple leads over months and years, IMN (iMakeNews, Inc.) has developed IMN Loyalty Driver, a customized e-newsletter service specifically for the automotive industry. This popular service helps dealers strengthen customer relationships, drive massive spikes in web traffic, and pull people into their dealerships for test drives.

Content customized to your brand
The genius of IMN Loyalty Driver is that although it is sent only once a month, it’s packed full of interesting product and ‘lifestyle articles’– not just your dealership news and specials. It’s also customized to your dealership’s brand, it makes it very easy for subscribers to get information on the deals and products that appeal to them, and the actions of every recipient are fully trackable. Because you’re not bombarding your customers and prospects with ‘hard-sell’ offers that may not apply to them, but instead are offering robust content along with dealership news, they want to read your e-newsletter and stay on your subscriber list. For instance, let’s say you send a customer who just purchased a new vehicle an e-mail that details your service specials and promotions. Chances are good she does not need service coupons or additional content on how to select the car that is right for her. If your e-mail only carries these tips, the customer will opt-out because the content you are providing is not applicable to her.

Now let’s look at this same scenario using a Loyalty Driver e-newsletter. Because the Loyalty Driver e-newsletter is filled with both product and lifestyle articles beyond the dealership, such as how to plan a trip to wine country or tips for winter fun, the reader will most likely want to continue receiving the e-newsletter, even though she has just purchased a vehicle. A few months down the road when she’s ready for her first oil change, she’s more likely to open the service coupon in your e-newsletter and come back to you for the service. In addition, when her husband’s pickup finally goes to the salvage yard in the sky, she’s more likely to think of your dealership first when he needs to go shopping for a truck. That is the beauty of an ongoing e-newsletter campaign with your customers -- it keeps you front and center in the customer’s mind until she is ready for additional services or new vehicles, without being overly pushy. In other words, you develop a relationship that enables you to pull in leads over the life of the sale.

With Loyalty Driver, you can use lifestyle articles provided by IMN, like tips on health, home improvement, and finance issues, as well as your own dealership articles. IMN does the “heavy lifting” by providing professionally written product and lifestyle content that keeps you engaged with your customers and prospects and make it easy for them to let you know when they are ready to buy; you can add as much or as little customized content as you’d like. The net effect is you continue to have an ongoing, highly engaged dialogue with your customers and prospects. With most inbound leads taking up to six months to actually buy a vehicle, it is critical that dealerships have a way to stay in front of those prospects. The concept behind Loyalty Driver that makes it so effective is simple: If you send customers and prospects content they are interested in, they’ll let you keep sending it to them. Why do national advertisers pay top dollar to advertise on hit TV shows? Because they know the way to engage with the widest audience is to sponsor the best content. That’s the philosophy behind Loyalty Driver.

Unlike traditional print advertising, e-newsletters enable you to take a highly effective soft-sell approach and also gauge the level of interest and act immediately should readers show you they want more information about a certain vehicle or product. For instance, they may read an article about a particular vehicle numerous times or drill deeper than the first few paragraphs through weblinks. Each of these activities means your reader is actively interested and seeking out additional information. Loyalty Driver makes it easy to respond to these leads immediately. Buy Signal™ links within articles enable subscribers to request a test drive or service appointment with a single mouse click. Upon clicking the Buy Signal button, a lead is instantly submitted to the dealership. The dealership can then immediately follow up with a call to schedule a test drive or service appointment.

How do you get readers interested enough to engage in a Buy Signal behavior? It’s called layered content and an e-newsletter is the best place to make this type of subtle marketing a success. Using layered content, you draw the reader in with a lifestyle article, such as information about how to enjoy a safari, and place a vehicle picture beside it that would correspond to the interests of the person reading the article. Using this concept, the safari article above may have a photo of a Jeep right beside it with the headline, “It’s a Jungle Out There.” By posting an article about a safari, you’re already pulling together a target audience who may be interested in an adventurous vehicle like a Jeep. This gets you to the next level: presenting the opportunity for the subscriber to read information about the vehicle, in this case a Jeep. Beyond the product-specific information (the soft sell), Loyalty Driver e-newsletters are also equipped with strong calls to action consisting of “schedule my test drive” buttons the reader can click on. If the reader clicks on one of these buttons, you know you have a hot prospect on your hands.

Targeted communication at a fraction of the cost
In addition to the lifetime lead pull an e-newsletter generates, the medium is much less expensive than other forms of marketing. “Dealers are spending massive amounts of money on newspapers, radio and network TV, and we certainly don’t discount those advertising media avenues,” says Brian Epro, Director of IMN’s Automotive Services Group. “But along came online marketing and dealers are starting to discover that they can expand their business, more effectively track their results, and more wisely invest their ad budget at a fraction of the cost.”

The experiences of Loyalty Driver users reinforce Epro’s words. Penske Indianapolis, owner of Honda and Chevrolet dealerships in the area, found that using Loyalty Driver not only saved them money on direct mail, but allowed for more targeted communication with customers. “Within an hour of our first e-newsletter going out, I had 15 test drives scheduled,” said Scott Haynes, Director of Business Development for Penske Indianapolis. “Even before we checked our reports we knew it was working because we received 90 phone calls within the first few days of our initial send – for both vehicles and services.”

 “Choosing IMN Loyalty Driver was a no-brainer. The e-newsletter provides a highly professional look, engaging content, and the ability to track each reader’s interaction for easier, more targeted lead follow-up – all at a surprisingly affordable cost.”

It’s easy to send a value-packed e-newsletter with Loyalty Driver
With Loyalty Driver you can sustain a relationship that continually pulls in leads for services and vehicle sales with your customers and prospects through the communication channel they use the most: the Internet. Each Loyalty Driver e-newsletter contains vehicle information and articles, and you can easily add in your own coupons, specials and articles to drive more leads to your dealership. And without knowing how to write HTML code, or spend any time or money on a content developer, your dealership brand and logo are always included and the message is perfectly designed. Plus, you can track the actions of your customers so you know which messages are being read, and which are being ignored, allowing you to better select from the articles that IMN provides or add unique coupons and articles that appeal to your audience.

Dealers using this e-newsletter service access the web-based Loyalty Driver Portal – which lets them quickly and easily design their monthly e-newsletter, “populate” it with articles, send it to their subscribers, and get instant feedback on Buy Signals and customer interests. The tool provides an interface for review and approval of e-newsletter articles and coupons from one online point of entry. Dealers can access their monthly e-newsletter right from the web and be ready to review the content and add coupons. Each newsletter consists of ten original articles. The dealer can choose to accept them all, delete those that don’t apply to their audience, or create their own.

Within the Portal there are also two tools to help in creation: The Coupon Editor lets the dealer quickly craft unique offers and add a photo, all within one easy template. The Auto Dealer Group feature lets owners of more than one brand or store location enter articles and coupons only once, yet have the content show up in every location’s e-newsletter. Then each manager can insert coupons applicable to just their store. Once a dealer has finished adding content and editing the e-newsletter, they click the ‘approved’ button to send it to IMN. After approval, a dealer simply uploads their subscriber list contained in their CRM system into Loyalty Driver. Once the list is uploaded and the e-newsletter is approved, IMN sends it out to all the contacts on the dealer’s subscriber list. On the back-end, IMN keeps track of how many e-mails were received, opened, or bounced back, in addition to tracking every single action taken by every subscriber who received the e-newsletter – which articles they read, which they printed out, etc.

Hone your marketing and increase leads
Once your e-newsletter is sent, IMN focuses their technology on tracking and reporting results. A dealer has 24-hour access to numerous reports including:

•    Snapshot reports: Know at a glance how many emails were sent, received, and bounced-back. Also get aggregated averages for all the dealerships using Loyalty Driver to benchmark performance against industry averages.

•    Response rates: Each month, keep track of number of subscribers removed, unique click-throughs and opens, total hits, total clicks, and total opened e-mails.

•    Content popularity reports: See which articles subscribers open and read and use this information to send targeted marketing pieces and offers.

•    Buy signal reports: Real-time, customer-specific lead reports that immediately notify you when a customer clicks on purchase-oriented content or requests information on an offer. By detecting purchase intent, a dealer can follow-up with a customer before they head to a competitor.

•    Targeted marketing lists: Easily pull a list of subscribers who have read a particular article to do targeted follow-up marketing.

Once you have all this information, you’re sitting on a goldmine of future marketing opportunities. For example, let’s say your e-newsletter contained a coupon for $500 off a new Camry. Your report tells you that twenty people clicked on that coupon, and it gives you their name and contact information. You can now design a direct mail or e-mail piece specifically for them – for example, offering a $50 gift certificate to a local restaurant if they come in for a test drive. Or perhaps you find through your response rate reports that one customer clicked through to an article, and then clicked from the article directly into your new inventory to search for that vehicle. This reader is showing a high level of interest and is a prime target for follow-up. The likelihood of the person coming in for a test drive increases dramatically because you know they are already interested in the car, and you’ve made a targeted offer intended to get them into your dealership. Plus, Loyalty Driver makes it even easier by allowing you to download into Excel the names and contact information of those people who clicked on a particular coupon or article. The opportunities for more targeted marketing campaigns are endless because of the robust reports IMN Loyalty Driver includes. Loyalty Driver is not just a communication tool or a lead generator, but a comprehensive marketing platform.

Another example of how it can generate leads and increase traffic is a Sweepstakes feature. IMN is currently piloting a Sweepstakes program with dealers and it’s proving to be effective. In the Sweepstakes program, an article in the e-newsletter announces an opportunity to win $50,000 towards a new vehicle. When the subscriber clicks the link to enter the contest, the system takes them to the new vehicle inventory of the individual dealership. They then must pick the vehicle they want and enter its VIN or stock number in a box on the webpage along with their e-mail address. The program then tells them they can double their chances by scheduling a test drive, which they do simply by entering their name and phone number. The pilot program has shown that leads to the dealership website dramatically increase, and there’s the opportunity to do additional marketing to those who entered because you know their vehicle of choice. Plus, if your recipients e-mail your newsletter to friends so they can enter to win, you’ve got a viral marketing program to help you. Now your customers and your e-newsletter are doing the work for you.

The final result? A robust ROI
The advanced and comprehensive reports from IMN give you concrete information to determine your Return on Investment (ROI). You know who’s receiving your marketing, who’s reading it, and what articles and offers are attractive and popular. You can’t say that about direct mail or traditional advertising. In addition, because you’re offering much more than just specials and offers, you’re developing a relationship that will last much longer than one vehicle purchase. When your recipients see your e-newsletter in their inbox, they’ll open it for the interesting articles and information, month after month. Then, when they need a service done or a new vehicle, you are top of mind. With the Loyalty Driver e-newsletter you have customers for the lifecycle of a vehicle, and beyond.

On the horizon
With the Loyalty Driver service up and running in nearly 300 dealers, including some of the nation’s largest dealership groups, IMN is looking to develop new services to help these dealers communicate with their customers.

While IMN’s e-newsletters currently contain some video, they are looking into adding even more, but they are very cognizant of ensuring any added video benefits the customers. “We’re not going to add video just for video’s sake,” says Epro. “We’re creating video that will be truly appropriate for a dealer to show, like a test-drive video of a vehicle from the perspective of the dealer trying to sell the car.”

As more and more people look to the Internet as their primary mode of communication, e-mail marketing will only become more important. The incredible popularity of e-newsletters in 2006 suggests that 2007 will see even more dealerships jumping on the bandwagon. An e-newsletter service like IMN Loyalty Driver can help you develop a relationship with your customers and prospects so that you don’t drive them away with e-mail blasts that may not be applicable, but instead draw them closer with interesting and informative articles and news (and ultimately drive sales). If you want more information on this or would like to see a demonstration, contact Brian Epro at 781-890-4700, ext. 245 or stop by the IMN booth at the 2007 National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA) Convention, booth 3881C, from February 3-6.