Is your car dealership using one of these email marketing tools? You might want to switch.

A recent report into the email deliverability rates of the major Email Service Providers (ESPs) paints a bit of a worrying picture for some.

Your new car sales are down and even the biggest dealer groups are posting losses for 2018.

Your customer database is your most valuable asset in times like these.

But, you are probably still recovering from losing explicit consent to contact large portions of your database nearly a year on from the GDPR coming into force.

Did you know that your dealership’s choice of email service provider can literally double or halve the success rate of your campaigns?

And if you have a large portion of your database using Gmail or Hotmail/Outlook, you should pay close attention to the numbers below.

What is email deliverability?

We’re not talking about the basic % you see in your email reports here, that’s just the % of emails sent that were accepted by the recipient’s mail server as ‘valid’.

No, we’re talking about the UNSEEN deliverability %. The one that is hard to measure but reveals exactly what % of your emails actually land in the inbox.

For example, let’s say you send a campaign to a list of 1,000 people. On average 97% of those will be accepted by the mail server, meaning 970 ‘delivered’. However, taking the worst performing ESP from below, only 477 of those will ever reach the inbox.

Overall results

average email deliverability 2019average email deliverability 2019

These overall results represent the % of the test emails that were received into the inbox or promotional tabs of the recipient.
The major players have distinctly average deliverability rates.
ActiveCampaign scored highest for the second year in a row.

So where did the emails go?

With MailChimp being quite a popular choice for automotive email marketing, it’s worrying to see such a low delivery rate to the main inbox at only 63.6%.

Deliverability to most popular mailbox providers

Again, MailChimp doesn’t fare so well only getting to the main inbox in Gmail 40% of the time.
It’s worth noting that if you’re contacting B2B audiences they may well use Office 365 which is covered under the Microsoft column.

Summary

Personally, I was shocked when I read these numbers. Actual inbox deliverability isn’t something that usually gets reported because it is so difficult to measure, but these numbers highlight a problem with some of the major players.

If your ESP is not listed? Perhaps conduct your own test internally with your team’s personal email accounts and see how it fares. If you do run your own tests, leave us a comment below.