The automotive industry moves faster than a pedal to the metal 400hp car downhill. I’m not just talking about the cars themselves and keeping up with the innovations in the car industry — that’s just one piece of the puzzle.

The real challenge is keeping up with automotive digital marketing trends and marketing demands.

Up until a decade ago, the automotive industry was uncannily slow to adopt digital innovation. It made sense, too, because your customers typically preferred to come to your dealership and negotiate the price of their next car, live.

These days, even cars can be purchased online, which means that automotive digital marketing just got more competitive. Buyers demand state-of-the-art digital marketing, and you need to deliver it.

Your competition certainly does — or will, in the near future.

Learn how smart automotive industry leaders use automation and integration to deliver stellar digital marketing experiences and increase their sales. Download our free Automotive Digital Marketing Guide here.

Automotive Digital Marketing Trends at a Glance

As the automotive industry dives deeper into digital marketing, the advertising spend has increased every year since 2022:

• $11.4 billion in 2022
• $12 billion in 2023
• $12.3 billion in 2024 (projected)

Most of these budgets come from co-op deals, where the OEMs make a certain dollar amount available to all their dealers.

However, these deals come with certain strings attached: you typically need to spend that money on specific channels, use specific imagery, and create campaigns around specific events, like Memorial Day, Father’s Day, Christmas, and so on.

In addition to the co-op dollars, dealerships sometimes add their own budgets to maximize reach, especially if the local competition is steep. This is where leveraging current digital marketing trends comes into play.

If the OEM is essentially forcing you to promote the lasted EV or hybrid model with the co-op budget, it’s up to you to make sure you integrate some of the automotive digital trends in your campaigns:

• AI is the hot word in automotive, as everywhere else. Most modern cockpits have at least some AI features, so why should your digital marketing be any different?
• Personalization: Analysis paralysis is very common for car buyers, so you need to target them with the right message at the right time.
• Sustainability: people buy EVs and hybrid cars out of environmental concerns. Are you addressing those concerns in your digital marketing?
• Automation: the demand to be on dozens of channels at the same time is not sustainable without a huge team — which most car dealers don’t have. Automation can help you implement a cross-channel strategy without a team of a dozen marketers and a huge budget.

The good news is that Mailchimp automotive digital marketing can help you with all of the above, even sustainability — it’s far more sustainable to email your prospects than to send them physical flyers and letters.

Automation for Automotive Digital Marketing

Automation — automotive, see? It’s kismet that these two work together.

This is marketers’ answer to “we can’t be everywhere but we know you should”. Automation is on when you can’t be.

And it’s important that your digital marketing works for you round the clock because you need a constant stream of new leads, as well as a way to nurture existing leads.

The value of a lead is much higher in automotive than in most industries, except for real estate, perhaps. Dealerships pay up to $250 per lead because automotive purchases have a hefty value—every purchase is expensive. 

You can, of course, acquire leads through paid ads, but that gets expensive very fast. Plus, you still need automation to nurture those leads.

This is where power users of Mailchimp excel.

Here’s what you can easily automate in your automotive digital marketing:

• Social media posting
• Social media DMs
• Email marketing
• Segmentation for precise email marketing i.e. funnel your Salesforce leads straight into the proper segments in Mailchimp
• SMS marketing
• Sales and marketing alignment

Story Time: How Smart Automotive Marketers Use Mailchimp in Their Digital Marketing

More than 100+ dealerships use the SyncApps integration solutions for Mailchimp to automate their digital marketing. While their business goals are not identical, they all fit into three distinct categories:

• Save time → most automotive digital marketing departments are severely understaffed, so they need to do more with less.
• Hyper-personalize everything → you shouldn’t send a promo for a coupe to your truck clients; you’ll just annoy them.
• Grow revenue → through hypersonalization, you can easily target leads who are ready to buy and nurture the rest. If you conflate the two, you’ll miss sales opportunities and annoy people who aren’t ready to buy.

Customer stories

25K+

The Company We Keep Across The Globe

Syncing our Salesforce lists with Constant Contact to send email newsletters and announcements has been simple with SyncApps. It saves us a ton of time having to create the lists manually.

Storey S.  |  Greenway Health

I like that this has allowed us to have an easier time integrating our CRM solution to our email marketing software and has simplified our workflow for us.

Jillian K.  |  RIEGL USA

Support has been excellent. I am new to these systems and have had a lot to learn in a short space of time and their NetSuite and Mailchimp expert has been very helpful and supportive on a daily basis, every time I have a problem.

Chris Barter  |  Ruffwear

We needed a way to make 100% sure that when we email our customers, our Salesforce users know that every time the right persons are involved in the mailings. It’s a flat-out reliable solution for our company without spending too much money on integration tools that offer much more functionality than we need

Walter Stegen  |  CRH

Great Solution, Excellent Support, Super Fast Support, Allows us to integrate systems that don't otherwise talk to each other. Integrating Marketing & CRM systems. Increased quality of communications, speed & efficiency of our email marketing systems

Ben Irvine  |  Seven Miles Coffee Roasters

Use SyncApps to sync campaign members from Salesforce to Constant Contact for social sharing of campaigns for increased profits.

Matthew B.  |  Winston-Salem Rescue Mission

My favorite tool for Salesforce - MailChimp integration. A fully-featured and flexible integration tool that I can quickly implement and customize for individual organizations' needs

Stephanie K.  |  Redpath Consulting Group

Flexibility and customization of the tool. Responsiveness of the team. Advanced mailing list management and synchronization between Salesforce and MailChimp

David D.  |  Nexell GmbH

Using Syncapps for Salesforce to Mailchimp Sync and EventBrite sync. Genuinely blown away by the power of the product and the responsiveness of the team to all of my questions.

Danny B.  |  Science Gallery International

Integrating the Language field from Mailchimp to Salesforce for our marketing works great!

Jay C.  |  The Vines of Mendoza

The tech support is fast, efficient, and always helpful. I love working with their team. They are always willing to work with us and ask the right kinds of questions to make sure we are implementing the proper solution in the best way possible

Margo G.  |  Handshake, Product Manager

I was super impressed with the knowledge and assistance that I was provided. Help was swift.

MKatie R.  |  Commercial Coordinator at SACO AEI Polymers

Real talk, real subscribers

Let’s see it in action:

Mailchimp and Salesforce: from “Who Are You?” to “I’m Your Biggest Fan!”

The Mailchimp for Salesforce integration for the automotive industry takes leads from complete strangers to your biggest fans through a series of automations designed to qualify and nurture every prospect.

Here’s how smart automotive marketers use it for their digital marketing:

• Capture leads online via Mailchimp or in your dealership through Salesforce
• Automatically segment and tag them based on where they start their journey and countless other criteria: the type of car they are interested in, their budget, their history with you, and more.
• The integration ensures that all your segmentation data flows seamlessly from Salesforce to Mailchimp and vice versa.
• Create a series of emails to nurture every lead exactly where they are in their journey — no guesswork, no blasting everyone with the same offer.
• You can pick from hundreds of pre-defined automations created specifically for automotive digital marketing.
• Lay back and watch the automations do the heavy lifting for you.
• Create cross-platform reports with a single click so you can see at a glance what’s working and what needs tweaking.
• Enjoy your fully automated revenue generation machine!

Try Mailchimp for Salesforce for $0!

Mailchimp and NetSuite

What takes less than 10 minutes to set up and frees up dozens of hours every week? It’s the Mailchimp for NetSuite integration, of course! (Yeah, we timed it!) 

If you’re a NetSuite user, you know that this platform can level up your automotive digital marketing — but not on its own. When your data is siloed between NetSuite and Mailchimp, you lose precious hours retrieving data and miss precious opportunities.

The integration helps you know exactly:

• Who is a new lead and needs to learn more about you before committing to a purchase
• Who’s ready to buy
• When’s the best time to target each of these categories
• How to personalize each email — you’ll have plenty of accurate data for hyperpersonalization.

Much like the integration above, Mailchimp for NetSuite will help you:

• Capture leads online via Mailchimp or in your dealership through NetSuite
• Automatically segment and tag them based on where they start their journey and countless other criteria: the type of car they are interested in, their budget, their history with you, and more.
• The integration ensures that all your segmentation data flows seamlessly from NetSuite to Mailchimp and vice versa.
• Create a series of emails to nurture every lead exactly where they are in their journey — no guesswork, no blasting everyone with the same offer.
• You can pick from hundreds of pre-defined automations created specifically for automotive digital marketing.
• Lay back and watch the automations do the heavy lifting for you.
• Create cross-platform reports with a single click so you can see at a glance what’s working and what needs tweaking.
• Enjoy your fully automated revenue generation machine!

Try Mailchimp for NetSuite for $0!

AI-Enhanced Automotive Digital Marketing at Your Fingertips 

Powerful reporting is just one tool in the toolset. Today’s automotive digital marketing has to rely on AI for efficiency and fast time-to-market.

Forget AI-written content — that’s most likely boilerplate that no one will ever read. The real power of AI for automotive digital marketing lies in analyzing huge chunks of data that would take humans months and hundreds of thousands of dollars to churn.

The SyncApps integrations for Mailchimp leverage AI the smart, not lazy, way:

• Launch quickly with pre-defined AI-powered integrations.
• User predictive analytics and predictive segmentation to target the right leads at the right time with the right message.
• Personalize every experience with automatically triggered content, i.e., if a contact is labeled as a warm lead in Salesforce, Mailchimp will automatically add them to a new email sequence.

Key Takeaways: Build Your Automotive Digital Marketing Strategy

With ad costs rising everywhere and economic uncertainty looming, there’s just one solution for effective automotive digital marketing: do more with less.

Annoying, right?

Not necessarily. 

You already have enough data to fuel your sales for years to come — you’re just not leveraging it to the fullest. This was the biggest discovery our clients in the automotive space made after they started using SyncApps: they don’t need to collect more data and generate thousands of unqualified leads.

They simply need the right tools to leverage the data they have.

More good news: you already have powerful solutions working for you: Mailchimp and NetSuite or Salesforce. All you have to do is bring them together to build a well-oiled cash machine.

Automation and integration are no longer reserved solely for big corporations with huge budgets. Join us in our movement for the democratization of data through affordable state-of-the-art integration services.

Start here—create your free SyncApps account in seconds and experience automotive digital marketing the way it should be—automated and seamless.

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