Outsell Case Study

• A Fully Staffed Live Chat Service
• Interactive Email Newsletters

Problem
In 2004, Outsell began looking for a new email service provider to replace the start-up provider they had outgrown.  Outsell creates and delivers email newsletters on behalf of dealerships, and was rapidly signing on new dealers. It was essential to them to find an intelligent system that would act as a central library to store, replicate and share content and images across their dealership databases. Outsell's reputation depends upon newsletters getting delivered to the inbox, so they required that the email service provider have secure relations with ISPs that would keep them on the white list.  It was crucial to Outsell's success to have a reliable infrastructure that was cutting-edge and would continue to grow and shape into the perfect fit for their ever-evolving business needs.

Solution
Outsell partnered with TailoredMail in 2005, and created an email marketing program that would allow them to uniquely drive dealer sales by improving the retail consumer experience through enhanced customer engagement email campaigns.

As an agency, Outsell needed automated and seamless tools and features in the application that would allow them to easily handle hundreds of accounts yet give each a personal touch. To accomplish this, TailoredMail took the following steps:

• A centralized-library feature was created to quickly create/replicate new accounts, templates, images and content.
• TailoredMail designed the architecture in the system where the set-up, management, and reporting was simplified for "Buying Groups" implementations.  In this sense, they were able to remarket their service offerings to large buying groups such as Chevrolet and AutoNation, and easily set up mass accounts all at once (yet each one still personalized), generate content from the centralized library, broadcast all campaigns at once, and supply the buying group management team with an automated email of the rolled-up reporting of campaign performance on an individual and group/regional level.
• TailoredMail created highly flexible templates that could be changed centrally in the system and dynamically insert the different dealer's imagery, content, and contact information. The approach allows Outsell to quickly add/remove/edit layouts for different campaigns "one time", and have it automatically deployed for all their clients.
• TailoredMail consulted with Outsell to create customized subscription pages to allow subscribers the opportunity to choose what type of articles they want to receive from the dealership and when they wanted to receive it - creating a completely dynamic broadcast in which one template was created and each newsletter was tailored for each specific subscriber.
• TailoredMail implemented best practice email marketing strategies, such as list hygiene to clean their inactive subscribers, along with putting them on a dedicated IP address.
• TailoredMail created monthly reporting and charting features such as:
  • Automated campaign reports emailed to each dealer after the broadcast was delivered.
  • Reporting that ranks and lists subscribers based on the most-active users (this has been a popular feature for the sales team to view their "hot leads").
  • Built-in customized analysis charts to identify trends.

With a demanding need for Outsell to stay ahead of their competition with reporting details, along with an understanding of how their subscribers behave, the TailoredMail developers created additional custom features like:

• Lead generation and lead scoring programs- With built-in lead-scoring and nurturing features, triggers and automated reports, Outsell can easily create and manage their dealership's lead  lifecycle campaigns.
• Analytics integration- Outsell allows dealers to really see the impact their email marketing has on subscribers by seamlessly tracking clicks from their email marketing campaigns all the way to conversions on the dealer website.
• API integration- With hundreds of accounts, Outsell doesn't have time to access each dealer CRM or DMS in order to pull the latest subscriber list, so TailoredMail created an automated data and content exchange with the dealership's internal databases via XML.

These features allowed Outsell to uniquely sell their service as a full-feature program with a tangible benefit to the dealership.

Result
TailoredMail's streamlined deliverability system allowed Outsell to quickly ramp up their newsletter sales by presenting a solution that was able to result in a 99.8% deliverability rate to over 2,000,000 subscribers, with an average open rate of 20.9%, and click through rate of 20.0%. The replication of databases feature cut new account set-up and on-going newsletter production time by up to 66%.

The TailoredMail technology has allowed them to partner with leading providers of fully-integrated services and solutions like ADP, and they have become the preferred email newsletter provider for leading dealer management groups nationwide. Dealers using Outsell's Interactive Email Marketing Service report to receive a monthly average gross revenue of $9,456 from newsletter subscriber sales.

So how has this affected the Outsell business?
In their 2008 Second Quarter Press Release Outsell announced "a quarterly growth of 32% in the number of dealers utilizing Outsell's Dealer to their showroom floors and service bays."

"The rapid adoption of our Dealer eNewsletter service was driven by major upgrades to the eNewsletters Outsell provides its clients," said Mike Wethington, CEO of Outsell. "The new look and feel of the Outsell Dealer eNewsletters, not to mention their upgraded functionality and reporting, stands head-and-shoulders over any other comparable service in the automotive market- choosing them is a no-brainer for dealerships looking to increase their sales and service revenues every month."

About TailoredMail
Email Marketing Solutions for Newsletter, Campaign and Lead-Lifecycle Management. TailoredMail dramatically simplifies email content creation and management. Empower your email audiences like never before by giving them the choice and control of information they receive, and develop stronger, more-engaging email relationships. TailoredMail's streamlined web-based application makes authoring, broadcasting and generating reports, straight forward Ð and AUTOMATED. Take advantage of TailoredMail's delivery reputation, and PICK AND CHOOSE from an immense feature set.  Partner with TailoredMail, and you'll attain more opens, higher click and conversion rates (often by more than 50%), and the flexibility to go beyond basic newsletters or one-off email blasts.