Overview
Below is a short guide including some basic performance knowledge and account ramp-up information for Dealers who have just launched Audience Activation.
Graduated Engagement
In order to ensure the highest rate of deliverability and emails on behalf of a Dealership customer, Audience Activation Standard Operating Procedure is for all accounts to launch with Graduated Engagement enabled. This means we start sending emails slowly when we launch new accounts, ramping up in batches, and according to highest priority.
We do this in order to:
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- To ensure deliverability
- To “warm up” the email domain
- To protect the Dealer Reputation
- To maintain Fullpath sending integrity, reputation
Internal Procedure Automatically Includes:
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- Start by sending 500 emails day 1, each day thereafter it doubles.
- Start with customers in the highest priority campaigns
What Does this Mean for Initial Performance
Dealers should expect engagement numbers (email sends) to start slow and low and work their way up as the account matures. Depending on the size of your emailable contact base - almost all dealerships will still have email sent to their entire emailable customer base in the first 2 weeks.
Post- Launch Performance Basics
Some other important details to keep in mind when your Audience Activation account is first launched:
Engagable Contacts
Audience Activation leverages the data from your Dealership CRM in order to create Shoppers who then are then put into audiences for Email and SMS campaigns. Read more about Shoppers here.
At the core of this process, is the need to engage with customers who can be engaged - meaning, those with complete customer records which include emails and phone numbers, of those records, we can only reach out to those with valid emails and phone numbers (think: manually entered typos, disconnected numbers, inbox full emails etc.) those who have not been marked as Do Not Contact etc.
Example of a very common Dealership scenario:
- The Dealership CRM has 51,000 contacts.
- Of the 51,000 contact, only 39,000 have emails.
- Of the 39,000 contacts with emails, 13,000 are marked as DO NOT CONTACT, and 2,000 are invalid emails.
- This means the Dealership actually has 24,000 emailable / engagable contacts.
Be aware - you may know the total number of contacts in your email - but our system is looking at the a different number when we launch Audience Activation - engagement numbers may be lower than expected.
Data Lag-time
When looking at any data, but especially in the first 30 days of an Audience Activation account, that there is almost always lag time between when a vehicle is sold, when it is declared sold, when it is marked as DMS sold, and when that demarcation is passed back into the Dealership CRM for Fullpath to then pull via SFTP or API (every 24 hours). This delay could be a matter or days or sometimes up to a week, depending on how tight your dealership's processes are and your system defaults.
This matters when choosing the date range to examine which performance data to focus on. If you look at the first 15 days of performance data in the Audience Activation dashboard - you are very likely missing 50% of the actual sales (and maybe some lead data too) simply because of these system or procedure delays. It is best practice to look back at a full 30 days and keep in mind that the most recent 10 days of data you are examining are likely not final and could very well be missing some attributed sales.If you were to go back and look at the exact same 30-day date range, at day 45, you will see different and more accurate reporting than if you were to examine that same date range on day 30.
Attribution Window
Also important to note, the Sale attribution window for Audience Activation is 90 days. This means we look at meaningful engagements which took place 90 days prior to a logged Sale and we see in what ways Audience Activation impacted that close. Sent emails that were opened, clicked, directed the Shopper back to the site where they converted again, or requested a test drive, or took some other meaningful action, are all actions that comprise the engagements which Audience Activation facilitates and then become ROI records in the reporting.
If however, you look at the first 30 days of activity after a launch, you may be missing leads and sales which will later be attributed to Audience Activation and therefore will appear in the Dashboard after the Sale is finalized and all actions are recorded and attributed. Keep this in mind when communicating initial performance to the customer.
Campaign Ramp-up
Campaigns like VDP Views or Price Drop work based on data collected from the code on site. If code was placed on site and the account launched within the last 30 days, there's not a ton of historical data available about who has seen which VDPs or which vehicles of interest have had a price drop. This takes time to build out and therefore those audiences will grow as the account matures and more shopper data is collected. Expect low engagement from these campaigns for the first two months after account launch.
Weekend Engagement
We send emails daily Monday - Friday. We don't email on Saturdays and Sundays - do not expect engagement over the weekend. Do not expect to see email engagement first thing on Monday if you launched on a Friday.