Email marketing is a valuable tool for dealerships to keep customers and leads engaged. But to truly stand apart from the competition takes creativity and a personal touch.
KateLynn Bregar is Sales Manager and Internet Sales Director for Tynan’s Pre-Owned Superstore and also Internet Sales Director for Tynan’s Volkwagen and Tynan’s Nissan – all in sunny Aurora, Colorado. The dealerships use VinSolutions CRM and VinSolutions Automotive Marketing Platform (AMP) for their email and text programs.
At the outset, KateLynn knew that she wanted their target customers to understand that Tynan’s dealerships are family-owned and operated, a rarity in Colorado and beyond. They’ve been in business for over 60 years and are involved in the local community, so they have made a point of using their marketing campaigns to allow customers to get to know the family and staff members.
But first they had to address some issues with their email deliverability. With the help of Jamie Panton, their VinSolutions Marketing Account Manager, they were able to use AMP to clean up the lists in their database and move forward. Says KateLynn, “AMP has been a great tool for us to reengage our lost customers as well as keep in touch with our previously sold customers. I was particularly impressed with AMP/Jamie’s ability to put a solution together for us to get in front of more customers from our database by filtering out our bad emails/duplicate customers and narrowing down our targeted audience during a time that we were basically blacklisted with Google from our own doing. These measures were taken by AMP/Jamie so that we could reverse what caused us to be irrelevant and it has proven to have worked.”
With these clean, targeted lists, the dealership group has embarked on two new campaigns designed to connect more closely with their community:
Community Food Drive Campaign
During the month of November 2023, the three locations are offering $500 off the price of any vehicle to customers who bring in five cans of food to be donated to Food Bank of the Rockies, a local charity that provides nourishment for people experiencing food insecurity. KateLynn says, “We’re actually going to do an in-person food drive and a virtual food drive, so people can just donate if they like to help their community, even without purchasing a vehicle.”
They’re using AMP to get the word out via multi-touch, multi-channel marketing campaigns, including a partnership with the I’m From Denver video blog. With Thanksgiving right around the corner, they are looking forward for ways to support their local community as well as drive more traffic to their stores and websites.
Spanish Language Campaign
As the demographics of the Aurora area have shifted in recent years, a growing number of dealership customers are Spanish speakers. The City of Aurora website says, “According to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey 2020, Spanish is the second predominant language in Aurora, with 20.5% of the population speaking Spanish at home and 8.3% of residents only communicating in Spanish.”
Each of the Tynan’s locations has at least one fluent Spanish speaker on staff, but the challenge lay in informing the community that they were there to serve everyone. Says KateLynn, “We just really have had no way in the past to market to our Spanish clientele outside of a ‘Se Habla Espanol’ sticker on an entrance door or statement on our websites.”
Using AMP, the dealership group will help Spanish speakers self-identify online as they enter the marketing funnel through a Spanish language landing page. Then they will be tagged in the database to receive future marketing outreach and promotions in Spanish.
The AMP Difference
Using AMP has helped the Tynan dealerships produce more targeted, personalized messaging to their most likely customers based on their prior activity. Says KateLynn, “AMP has been a great tool for us to reengage our lost customers as well as keep in touch with our previously sold customers. I would highly recommend AMP to any dealer that uses VinSolutions as their CRM tool that is looking to grow their sales!”
Want to see how it could work for your dealership? Request a demo now!
Video: Why Tynan’s Relies on VinSolutions
Watch for a full case study on Tynan’s Volkswagen | Nissan | Pre-Owned Superstore coming soon!