Today, responsive design—including email—is a necessity. More users are viewing emails on mobile than ever before—a study by TopRankBlog found that 64 percent of decision-makers read their email via mobile devices. These users expect your emails to look great, and if one of your messages doesn’t hook them due to poor readability or layout, you may not get another chance.

Your content and the way it’s delivered are inextricably intertwined—and both aspects need to be optimized to stand out in today’s competitive marketing arena. Often, though, it seems like vendors are promoting one or the other, which can make it frustrating and confusing for dealerships looking for an all-inclusive solution.

Responsive email vendors: the options for dealerships

Up until now, dealerships have had to go outside of the automotive marketing circle to find a vendor that can support responsive emails. The options might seem straightforward—but do you know exactly what you’re getting?

Fixed options. Often, email vendors will offer a small selection of responsive templates to choose from, or offer the option to code your own. While these options can be effective in some instances, the difficulty of transferring (or even coding) your own content can consume lots of time—and if you bring an agency in to assist, that means even more vendors and costs to manage.

Generic strategy. As you well know, there’s rarely such a thing as a one-size-fits-all solution. Email vendors are generally focused on making the technology as widely applicable as possible. The person managing your send isn’t necessarily the best choice to decide which offers to include or which customers to target—which means you could be leaving customers (and revenue) on the table.

Limited support. Imagine that it’s ten minutes before you need to send your campaign, and suddenly a minor edit throws your whole responsive template off. Who do you call? You can try checking through a library of FAQs or emailing a generic help desk, but without a dedicated support member, you may find yourself waiting on a response at the time when it matters most.

Lack of integration. The best campaigns don’t end at a single sale—they work with data-targeted follow-ups and other messaging channels to turn new buyers into customers for life. A responsive email is an important aspect of that, and it should work with your CRM and other messaging channels (including social media and model-specific landing pages) for best effect. If you’re using a separate email vendor, be sure to ask about integration capabilities.

Cut out the middleman

If you’re looking for a full-bodied responsive email to send through an email vendor and the existing templates just aren’t cutting it, your previous options included hiring a team to convert a Photoshop file into a responsive template or contracting out the development of the entire campaign. Of course, this means more costs, more people in the loop, and more chances for your message to get diluted before it makes it to the very customers you’re trying to reach.

At 3 Birds, we believe that the best way to optimize content and delivery is to do it all. That’s why we’re introducing fully responsive emails to complement our responsive web design architecture—and our in-house team is also available to create adaptive or fully customized campaigns when the situation calls for it. That means you never have to wonder who to call—because 3 Birds has got you covered.