Dealer Best Practices: Email Marketing

We all know that our existing customers are our best customers. It is easy to get caught up in the process of seeking new customers and forget the ones that are right in front of us.

NIFDA member, The Flagpole Company, of Brooklyn, MI, found out firsthand the value of revisiting your customer database.

Sheila Norton was exposed to Constant Contact with her work on the NIFDA Board of Directors, and thought, I could do this. She signed up for this email marketing platform, uploaded their 21,000 (YES, 21 THOUSAND) customer emails from their database, designed a simple sale email, and hit send.

What happened next? A couple things. First, Constant Contact stopped the email. They were suspicious of a new customer having so many non-spam emails but they agreed to send 1,000 at a time and monitor the spam reporting. Of course, The Flagpole Company passed with flying colors and the email landed in their previous customers inbox. Next, the orders started flooding in and flags began shipping out to customers, some that had not ordered anything in over a decade.

Stories like this remind us how important it is to engage with our customer base. They know us. They trust us. They want to do business with us.