Audi Germany and Salesforce Activate the Future of Automotive with Digital Offerings

Audi Germany, a leading manufacturer of automobiles and motorcycles in the premium segment, is pooling its expertise in the area of e-mobility with Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), the global leader in CRM, to deliver smart, personalized customer engagement throughout the entire customer lifecycle. Audi's new innovative “Functions-on-Demand” solution enables customers to order and obtain—temporarily or permanently—optional equipment and services for their vehicles. As a result, owners of an Audi benefit from a high degree of flexibility and freedom. The Audi e-tron and Functions-on-Demand solution can be experienced at the Salesforce Basecamp events in Munich, Düsseldorf and Berlin.

Audi e-tron with Functions-on-Demand

With the Audi e-tron, Audi introduced its first fully electric production vehicle in the fall of 2018 and with Functions-on-Demand, Audi customers can continually adapt their cars with the ability to temporarily or permanently obtain special equipment such as lights, driver-assistance systems and infotainment. This solution, built with Salesforce Marketing Cloud, allows Audi to provide its customers maximum flexibility and customization of their vehicles. Salesforce powers communication for Functions-on-Demand, putting Audi customers in the center of the process: customers receive personalized services through one single interface, and in turn, Audi benefits from a closer connection to its customers and better understanding of their needs.

“In the Fourth Industrial Revolution, artificial intelligence and IoT are setting new customer expectations,” said Markus Ehrle, SVP Enterprise Business, Germany, Salesforce. “This transformation is especially significant in the automotive industry. Audi understands this, and is unifying the customer journey on Salesforce to give customers an innovative experience without any roadblocks.”

About Audi

The Audi Group with its Audi, Ducati and Lamborghini brands is one of the most successful manufacturers of automobiles and motorcycles in the premium segment. It is present in more than 100 markets worldwide and produces at 18 locations in 13 countries.

What Is Email Deliverability and What Impacts It?

Deliverability vs. Delivered rate

Deliverability measures where (and if) your emails land in a customer’s inbox. If you have poor deliverability, your customers will not receive your email. And if customers do not receive your emails, they are not going to open and see your message.

You can have a high delivered rate and low deliverability. Delivered Rate measures the number/percentage of emails that do not receive a hard bounce (a message that is not delivered because the recipient's address is invalid, for example) or soft bounce (a message that is undelivered despite the email address being valid). However, the delivered rate does not take into account where the message is placed in the inbox. The message can end up in a spam folder or the promotional tab, so even if your subscriber receives the message, they may not see it.

Email deliverability is a crucial component of an email marketing strategy. Even if you design beautiful, personalized campaigns every week, your sender reputation determines whether or not your subscriber will receive your message. After all, 20% of emails never reach a subscriber’s inbox.

What is an email sender reputation score?

Internet Service Providers (ISP), like Comcast or AT&T, look at a myriad of data points and factors to determine whether or not they’re going to accept or reject a given email message. These data points also govern where the message is delivered--the prized inbox or the lowly spam folder. Think of this “reputation scoring” like credit scoring, where a whole bunch of your past spending and payment history is rolled up into an equation that governs whether or not a lender will trust you with a new loan or credit card. Much like different credit bureaus, ISPs use different scoring metrics from each other, so it’s possible to have a good reputation at one ISP but not another.

Calculate an email reputation score

• Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page. The number of recipients who open, click, reply to, forward, and delete before opening an organization’s messages.
• Unsubscribe rate is the percentage of recipients that ask you to remove them from these types of email messages. Of course, some number of recipients are going to unsubscribe after every send; this is expected. But an excessively high percentage of unsubscribing recipients is often an indicator that your mail is unwanted.
• Whether or not you’ve sent mail to spam trap addresses. A spam trap is an email address that does not belong to a real person. ISPs, spam/security appliance vendors, and blacklists all maintain networks of spam trap addresses. Spam traps can identify organizations with irresponsible list building techniques. If you send email to spam traps, it’s an indication that you are not keeping your email list clean.

Protect your email sender reputation score

• Use double-opt-in and reactivation campaigns. This way, you can make sure that an email address belongs to a real person and avoid spam traps.
• Keep your email list clean! Purge your subscriber list regularly and remove invalid email addresses and non-responders.
• Implement an IP warm-up plan. Do this by increasing campaign volume week over week.
• Make your emails actionable! The more your customers click and interact with your email content, the higher your Email Sender Regulation score.

Did you know your file size also impacts deliverability? In our next post, we’ll discuss how email size can lead messages into t