At a high level there are 2 types of addresses that your dealership might send to:

Contacts you already have

These are people that have done business with you in the past or have submitted their information on your website. These contacts that already live in your CRM are usually going to perform the best because they already know who you are and that makes them more open to hearing from you.

Contacts you don’t have

In automotive email marketing, these are often called conquest or third party contacts. These are email addresses, in your area, that have opted-in to receiving email communications. Often times these contacts are also sold with extra information related to their interests, ability to buy, and likelihood of being in-market. Here’s the kicker - its difficult for these contacts to ever perform as well as the contacts in your CRM because there is no way to know if they are familiar with your brand or actually interested in your products and services.

Benchmarks for automotive email

What are good results for automotive email marketing?

Dealers usually want a single answer to this question and unfortunately the answer is: it depends. As you’ve probably gathered by now, there are a lot of different ways to send emails, different types of content that could be in en email, and different types of contacts that might receive an email. All of these factors will change what type of performance you should expect from your emails.

Assuming that your email content is high quality and compelling and that your contact list is also high quality (the addresses themselves are valid).

As you can see conquest campaigns will have some of the lowest expected click rates. This makes sense because these are individuals that don’t necessarily know about your brand, since they have never contacted you before and that may not be in market for your products. Generally speaking here, an open rate between 3% - 6% can be expected. But these are just rules of thumbs. Best practice is to maintain benchmarks for each store and work with your respective OEM's to get some guidance on average open rates for conquest campaigns. 

Next, CRM campaigns are expected to perform better than conquest drops because these are individuals that are familiar with your brand and trust you enough to have either bought from you in the past or at least given you their contact information previously. However, you still won’t know if they are definitely in the market for your services.

Depending on the content of your conversion triggered emails, you may see some of your highest click rates here. This is a great place to showcase some trust building content as well as give readers next steps in the buying process. Dealerships that do this well will see very high click rates from this type of campaign. Unfortunately, these are also contacts that have already just converted to a lead, so success here is not going to increase your total number of opportunities with prospects.

Website Activity Triggered email can sit somewhere in the middle, depending on content and execution. We feel like it is a major opportunity for most dealerships to get better performance out of their marketing without significant budget or strategy changes.

This guide would not be complete without mentioning some mistakes you must absolutely avoid, with respect to email marketing

CAN-SPAM act compliance. We have a separate guide on CAN-SPAM compliance for dealerships here. Please read it and make sure your store is compliant. Penalties here can get very expensive very quickly.