Agero Insights

We see everyday that top brands leverage many digital channels, from email to web to social, to reach consumers. But let’s dig into why that is so and why digital marketing is such an important part of any marketing campaign, as well as a few tips that will help you perfect your roadside assistance program's marketing strategy.

Why Digital Matters

The world is getting more and more digital. To connect with your customers, meet them where they are—online. Nielsen found that “the average American spends 11 hours per day with electronic media”, with digital marketing you can get in front of this captive audience and increase brand visibility and engagement. This engagement isn’t limited to brand awareness, digital gives your brand the opportunity to connect with customers before, during, and after the point of purchase versus with a single touchpoint in traditional media or direct mail. And unlike traditional media, digital allows you to be nimble, giving your brand the ability to react to trends and adjust campaigns as needed, in real time.

Increasing frequency of communication with your audience is one of the top ways to increase engagement. In fact, a Salesforce study notes that it takes between 6 and 8 marketing touches to close a sale. This may seem simple, but traditional media costs can make it impossible to achieve 6 marketing touches within a budget. Adding a large digital component can stretch your budget further, while also helping you to diversify your channel strategy and creating a steady drum beat of awareness to keep your brand top of mind. In a recent pilot we conducted, we found that shifting our channel mix to be more heavily weighted on digital marketing and less so on direct mail led to a 58% increase in conversion to sale with a 50% decrease in costs.

Website + Email Best Practices

While Google ads, promoted social posts, and other paid digital channels are highly effective tools, the most cost-effective places to begin your digital marketing campaign are email and web. A website forms the backbone of any digital strategy, ultimately all marketing roads lead customers here to complete their purchase. You can spend all the money in the world on advertising, but if your landing page doesn’t engage your customer, they will leave.

UsER-FRIENDLY UX: Getting your point across in 10 seconds or less

Content can quickly become overly complicated. The trick is to simplify both your content and user-experience to be as straightforward as possible, while also achieving your primary goals. This is easier said than done. Most websites or emails are looking to raise brand awareness, introduce product value, and explain product features, all with an ultimate goal of converting a customer to purchase. When you are looking to achieve this much in a single piece of content, prose can quickly become long winded and confusing.

Back up and remember the essentials to any good piece of marketing content: make it simple and digestible. Keep it specific, and don’t go overboard or stray too far from the main point. Use a clear call to action so that your customer knows where to click when they want to purchase. The average customer spends just 10 seconds reading an email and under 1 minute digesting a website. Scannable headers, subheads, bold text, and quotes allow your customers to internalize more of your takeaways, faster.

The same principles can be applied to a good user experience. Make it easy for your customer to take the action you want them to take. How quickly can a customer purchase on your website? Ensure there are as few barriers as possible and that customers are able to easily follow the page flow to get where they need to go without having to navigate many extraneous pages, paragraphs, signup flows, etc.

A recent Agero motor club website refresh prioritized a simple user experience. The site went from an original UX of 6 clicks to purchase down to 2 clicks to purchase in the new experience. Our view to submission rate (% of customers who saw the purchase page and did in fact purchase) increased by 250%, just by eliminating 4 clicks from our user payment process flow.

Holistic Engagement: How to add value and increase engagement

Every piece of marketing content is an opportunity to engage with your customer. An effective email or website should be more than a means to a sale. How can you provide value beyond the point of purchase?

Always leverage content to increase brand awareness in addition to any primary goal. For new customers this may mean introducing them to your product value and then reinforcing that value with additional touchpoints. However, existing roadside assistance subscribers are an audience that is already deeply invested in your product and are primed to hear your message. In fact, according to our research motor club email campaigns see an average email open rate of over 50% across a multiple email campaign vs an industry standard open rate of around 21% (Mailchimp). This means that there is considerable brand awareness generated for our motor club, even for the subscribers who don’t convert to purchase.

While brand awareness creates brand value, there are other ways to engage with customers to provide them with added customer value. This can take shape in providing customers value with access to added features or offers that are either included in or adjacent to the subscription within your web or email experience. Not only will these features and tools be useful, but they will keep customers engaged and on your site. Through Agero Extended Benefits, motor club members are offered access to additional tools and benefits from within our site, including access to things like exclusive discounts and coupons and a digital roadside request intake.

Annual subscription products like motor club memberships can make it tempting to limit your communication to an annual solicitation for renewal. However, regular connection with your customers, with easy to consume, value added content creates opportunities to expand your reach and increase your brand awareness.