I truly believe that learning from successful practices of other industries and applying them to your own industry is a very helpful practice. In this article, I would like to draw your attention to the email marketing.
What is email marketing?
According to Wikipedia, email marketing is a commercial message to a group of people using email. Email marketing is still significantly more effective way to acquire customers than social media. According to McKinsey study, email is nearly 40 times more effective than Facebook, Twitter and all other social media combined! In fact, email marketing is second only to organic search, and it delivers the best ROI.
Types of email marketing messages.
We can distinguish the following messages a bodyshop manager can use:
- Newsletters
- Special promotional or seasonal offers
- New service/product release announcement
- Discount coupons
5 Tips for effective message creating
- Keep it short. One or two paragraphs maximum.
- Use pictures and video content.
- Prefer infographics rather than lengthy texts.
- Use email marketing tools like Aweber or MailChimp
- Don’t overwhelm your readers with too many messages
- About 45% of all emails are opened on a mobile device. Make sure your message is mobile friendly.
- Mix useful and interesting information with offers. Mere commercial offers are boring. Higher open rate is guaranteed.
Building email list
In order to launch a successful email marketing campaign, besides useful content, a bodyshop owner or manager should build up an extensive and quality mailing list. This is why collecting email addresses must be a regular and systematic practice. Some tips how to collect email addresses are presented below:
- Always ask email address from your customers, and give your own email. They should be encouraged to contact you if they have questions.
- If you are asked for quotation, send it to the potential customer by email
- Set up a fish bowl to collect business cards
- Include sign-up form in your website
- Include sign-p form to your Facebook page
- Encourage your website visitors to leave their email address by giving something away. For example, special discount for the clearcoat polishing service.
To sum up I would like to stress once again the importance of a systematic approach to customers acquisition for a car body repair workshop. One could be the best ever sprayer, but without proper promotion and smart advertising, customers won’t walk in. Allocate time and resources for the marketing, and email campaign could be a great first step to this direction.
