Digital Marketing Friend or Enemy?

Danny James: When you’ve got all this information, a dealer has a tool in place that collected this information, the natural tendency is, “I’m gonna blast these people with all kinds of emails and they’re gonna hear from me all the time. What a great way! I’m gonna have my name in front of them,” but that can be the death of your process, as well. Implementing Powersports Digital Marketing can be a key to success.

Email Providers

Larry Bruce: It was funny. I hate the term eBlast. Again, that’s another term we created … I for certain in the car business. I assume we created it. We created this term and we called it the eBlast, and in reality, we killed ourselves with it. What’s happened today is Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, these major ISPs, these major email providers, StrongMail, all these others, all these email providers … They’ve gotten smart about how to filter out spam. If you’re eBlasting your customers, if you’re eBlasting 20, 30 thousand people, 10 thousand people, with an ad that’s completely irrelevant, and you just keep doing it, you’re going to eventually not know that you were blocked. You’re just gonna be blocked and you’ll never know, and that’s the worst, right?

Danny James: Yes. 

Larry Bruce: Because I don’t even know I have a problem. 

Danny James: Yes. 

Larry Bruce: I have one. I’m dying, but I don’t know it. 

The Good Ole’ Days with Email!

Danny James: We’ve all gone in to check before and all of a sudden, it’s like, “Wow. I haven’t gotten an email for a whole day- 

Larry Bruce: Right. 

Danny James:… from anyone?” That’s when you realized, “Yeah.”  

Larry Bruce: Right. Google has promotions now. Microsoft Outlook has focused and non-focused. Microsoft Outlook online have focused and non-focused. They’re all starting to look at not just … It used to be they would look at your subject line. If you had, like, dollar signs in your subject line or exclamation points or if it was all in caps, right?

Danny James: Yeah. 

HTML

Larry Bruce: They would start looking at you like you might be spam. Then they got a little more sophisticated. They looked at the body of the email. If there was a lot of HTML in there and a lot of … It’s a pretty email, they would start saying, “You might be spam.” Now they’ve gotten real sophisticated. They’re looking not just at the subject line, not just at the HTML, but they’re looking at how often do you actually open this email? Do you delete it every time you look at it? When you open it, how long do you have it open? Have you ever clicked on anything from this … They’re looking at your behavior with the email on top of how the email was constructed. They’ve gotten it very, very sophisticated with powersports digital marketing

eBlast all customers?

Larry Bruce: If you’re eBlasting and all your customers are doing is deleting every time you do, they know it’s just this thing throwing up on them. There’s all these just basically newspaper ad that you’ve emailed to me. Eventually, the system’s just gonna stop showing your email to the customer. You’ll never know it. It’ll say it was delivered. It was delivered over here in this box that nobody ever looks at. You’re sitting there scratching your head. “I don’t know why. Why was nobody opening my email? Why is there nobody clicking?” Nobody’s seeing it, and you just don’t know it.