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Understanding Your Automated Email Marketing (AEM) Campaigns & Metrics
Automated email marketing is a software tool for your dealership to effortlessly streamline engagement with your audience and promote products or services. In this article, we will explore the various types of AEM emails and how to understand their performance.
Types of Automated Emails
AEM includes a set of targeted emails to pull your existing audience that interacts with your website through the sales funnel and help convert browsers into buyers.
- Featured Inventory
- Retargeting
- Re-Engagement
- Custom Offer AND Trade/Buyback Retargeting
- "Why Buy" Dealer Value Retargeting
- Service Retargeting
- Parts Retargeting
- Monthly Custom Email
- Post-Sale Follow-Up Sequence
- Unit Alerts: Price Drop Alerts
- Unit Alerts: Inventory Alerts
Some AEM Emails may only be available in certain packages. If you have any questions about available AEM Emails, please reach out to your Account Manager.
Measuring Email Performance
To keep tabs on your dealership’s Automated Email Performance, look for a monthly email that breaks down the activity metrics across each type of audience email.
The monthly report is sent as a PDF attachment via email to the primary contact on each account, highlighting the metrics of the prior month. The report is organized by the following sections:
- Performance Overview – This report includes the total monthly metrics generated from all emails sent the previous calendar month. The report provides you with an overall understanding of the engagement generated by your automated marketing emails.
- Campaign Performance – This section breaks down reporting by email, providing you with performance metrics relative to each type of email sent out in the previous month.
Performance Overview
The performance overview summarizes the performance of all emails sent the previous month. The screenshot below illustrates the metrics that provide you with an overall understanding of audience reach and engagement.
The following results of top dealers across marine, powersports and RV verticals are provided to help you understand and compare your AEM performance to top performing peers.
Vertical | Total Sent | Total Open Rate | Unique Open Rate | Unique Click Rate |
Marine | 40K | 33% | 26% | 16% |
Powersports | 21K | 36% | 29% | 18% |
RV | 16K | 51% | 39% | 30% |
Results reflect the averages for top dealers across email performance indicators. Results may vary depending on a customer’s package level, AEM email type, audience targeting and market conditions.
Campaign Performance Overview
To make the most of email marketing campaigns, it's crucial to understand the performance of each type of AEM email. Each individual results report includes the following for each type of email included in your package.
- Email Name – This is the type of email sent to an audience (i.e. Featured Inventory email or Retargeting email)
- From Address – Dealership Name
- Email Subject – Subject/Topic of the email specific to the content included in that email
- An image of the full AEM Email
- Key AEM Email Performance indicators
Below we explore the email performance indicators and what they signify.
- Total Sent: The sent metric is the total number of emails successfully sent. By knowing the total number of email sends, you can evaluate the overall reach of your email campaigns. It helps you understand the potential audience size and assess the effectiveness of your email list in terms of size and growth.
- Total Opens / Rate: Total opens is a measure of the total count of emails being opened, and ratio is the percentage of email opens against the number of emails sent. It is an essential metric as it indicates how many people you are actually reaching with each email and how engaging your subject line and pre-header text are to your audience. A higher open rate typically suggests that your emails are compelling and relevant, while a lower open rate may indicate the need for improvements in your subject lines or audience targeting.
- Unique Opens / Rate: Unique opens is measuring the count of unique audience members opening emails, and ratio is the percentage of unique audience members opening emails against the total number of emails sent. This metric is important because it illustrates how engaging and relevant your email content is to your audience. High unique open rates typically suggest that your subject lines, preview text and overall content are compelling and enticing enough to capture audience attention.
- Clicks / Click-through-rate (CTR): Clicks is measuring the number of times a link was clicked in an email, and CTR is the percentage of link clicks against the number of opened emails. It shows how effective your email content and calls-to-action (CTA) are in driving engagement. A higher CTR indicates that your content resonates with your audience, while a lower CTR may require optimizing your content, CTA placement or design.
Better understanding the email performance indicators and what they signify is important for maximizing the effectiveness of your campaigns, improving customer engagement and achieving overall marketing objectives.
Examples of Automated Email & Reporting
In this section, we see how these metrics are represented in specific dealer reports that are shared through AEM campaigns.
Featured Inventory Email
- Frequency: Weekly/Bi-Weekly.
- Audience: Customer and Prospects contact list.
- Content: New inventory selected by your dealership and recently viewed Inventory units. You may filter using inventory details such as model year, feature criteria, brand, etc. or by using a dealer curated list. Featured inventory email units change with every email, providing you with the opportunity to highlight inventory you believe people are most interested in.
INSIGHT: This AEM email tends to drive lower engagement, because it’s less personalized, but allows you to showcase preferred units to your audience at scale.
Sales Retargeting
- Frequency: Once, 24 hours after page visit, no more than once in 60 days.
- Audience: Visitors to website sales page who have not converted.
- Content: Personalized retargeting email with links to as many as five previously viewed units.
INSIGHT: The audience for this AEM email is small, but highly valuable and highly engaged. Each reported click is an engaged shopper returning to your website. This increases qualified website traffic, keeping customers near conversion in the sales funnel and moving them toward a sale.
Re-Engagement
- Frequency: Three emails per email trigger, after 30 and 45 days.
- Audience: Shoppers receiving six emails without engagement.
- Content: Customer is invited to re-engage for reentry into the marketing funnel. This email is sent to customers in the Inactive list to get them to engage with a non-sales related message to move them back to the Active list, and thereby start getting automated sequence emails from your dealership again.
INSIGHT: Data hygiene is key to successful email campaigns. Unresponsive audience members impact deliverability and the overall success of your emails and our product.
Note: No report screenshot currently.
Custom Offer AND Trade/Buyback Retargeting
- Frequency: Once, 24 hours after email trigger, no more than once in 60 days.
- Audience: Trade-In, Buy Back, Pre-Order or other offer page visitors.
- Content: Customer is invited to a call to action, or to schedule a sales meeting. This is written as a one-to-one email from your sales manager.
INSIGHT: An opportunity to keep your inventory stocked while giving your audience yet another reason to revisit the dealership.
"Why Buy" Dealer Value Retargeting
- Frequency: Once, 48 hours after session.
- Audience: Visitors who have not triggered any of the other emails.
- Content: Audience is informed about your brand and benefits of working with your dealership.
INSIGHT: Take advantage of what makes your dealership special and look amazing doing so with expert graphics and content formatting.
Service Retargeting
- Frequency: Once, 24 hours after page visit.
- Audience: Service page visitors.
- Content: Call to action and link to your dealership’s services. Content can include coupons or offers at your discretion.
INSIGHT: Only 5% of users visit dealer pages other than unit and home pages. Capture the small, but high-value audience browsing your services page. While these emails are lower in volume, they represent high-margin departments for your dealership.
Parts Retargeting
- Frequency: Once, 24 hours after page visit.
- Audience: Parts page visitors.
- Content: Call to action and link to dealer parts. Content can include coupons or offers at your discretion.
INSIGHT: Only 5% of users visit dealer pages other than unit and home pages. The Parts Retargeting email helps capture these highly engaged customers. While these emails are lower in volume, they represent high-margin departments for your dealership.
Newsletter
- Frequency: Monthly.
- Audience: Customer and Prospects contact list.
- Content: Latest dealership news, promos, and dealer messaging.
INSIGHT: This AEM email drives lower engagement because it’s less personalized but puts your preferred information in front of customers. However, newsletters are an important part of your email marketing program, because only a fraction of your audience is in the market to buy. The typical buying cycle is around 24 months, so sending messages between unit purchases keeps your dealership top of mind and engaged with relevant messages (events, shows, tips, etc.).
Post-Sale Follow-Up Sequence
- Frequency: 10 emails over 24 months after email trigger.
- Audience: Post-Sale customers.
- Content: Timely, relationship building emails to enable further service and sales.
INSIGHT: Opportunity to remind your dealership to keep your audience warmed up for a future purchase – reaching out to them with custom offers and buy-back offers keeps the audience engaged with your dealership and keeps you top of mind for a purchase, helping with retention. Additionally, this email provides messaging that is relevant post-vehicle sale and encourages customers to engage with other departments throughout the dealership, driving sales for high-margin opportunities such as parts, accessories and services departments during the lifecycle of the customer before the typical trade-in messaging begins.
Price Drop Alert
- Frequency: Once the customer opts into this category, the email is triggered and shared out any time a price drops on a unit of interest.
- Audience: Customer and Prospects contact list.
- Content: Inventory and associated new price.
INSIGHT: This email is designed to help you pull customers back into the market by offering them the ability to receive important alerts via email and text message, specifically related to price drops on products of interest.
Note: No report screenshot currently.
Inventory Alert
- Frequency: Once the customer opts into this category, the email is triggered and shared out any time new inventory matching their search criteria is available.
- Audience: Customer and Prospects contact list.
- Content: New inventory that matches consumer’s search criteria.
INSIGHT: This email is designed to help you pull customers back into the market by offering them the ability to receive important alerts via email and text message, specifically related to available inventory that matches their interest.
Note: No report screenshot currently.
Troubleshooting
I am not receiving my monthly AEM Email reports
- Check any spam or quarantine folders in case the reports are flagged as spam.
- Reach out to your Account Manager to confirm the email address(es) on file to receive monthly AEM reporting.
My AEM Emails are coming from the wrong Email address
- Please contact your Account Manager to update the from address for any set of AEM emails.
