As customers prepare to spend holiday bonuses, now's the time to launch your most successful automotive marketing tactics. Why? December is the best time of year to buy a car — and meet year-end sales goals. 

Automotive Consumer Buying Trends

Deloitte's 2018 Global Automotive Consumer Study explored vehicle purchasing behaviors. A top finding was interest in technology, both related to features and the auto buying process. At the forefront are customers asking dealers about alternative powertrains, including electric, hybrid and autonomous, self-driving vehicles.

When shopping for a new ride, the report said customers want to go online to view inventory, compare prices and read reviews, not visit a showroom. And, surprisingly, low prices aren't a driving factor. The customer experience on the dealer website has a significant impact on decision-making, second only to the opinions of friends and family. So, let's make those moments of online engagement incredible.

As a digital marketer, email frequency is one of those factors that gets mulled over to the point of analysis paralysis. It makes sense, though. Perhaps more than any other type of digital marketing, email is the most personal.

You're serving your list of contacts content right to their inbox, where you may be among important work correspondence, emails from friends, notes from loved ones — and about a million marketing messages.

It may come as no surprise, then, that the average email open rate hovers at around 20 percent, depending on the industry, according to research by MailChimp. And click-through rates? You're lucky if 3 percent of those who open your email click on a link.

Many factors contribute to email marketing success, including aforementioned industry, the cleverness of your subject lines, your reputation among current customers and at least a dozen things that can't be quantified or qualified. But email frequency is 100 percent in your control. It's testable and can make a huge difference in your email marketing success metrics.

Frequency matters because if users feel bombarded by your messages, they'll either start to ignore them or unsubscribe. If you don't send enough, you fall off people's radar. It's a fine balance.

In this post, we'll focus on how you can strike the right balance with your audience and see healthy open rates and better overall email marketing performance.

Whether you're a business leader delving into digital advertising for the first time, or a marketer exploring the unfamiliar terrain of the advertising industry, it's easy to get lost in the jargon and three letter acronyms. Sometimes, merely reviewing your ad performance can feel like trying to read a report in a foreign language.

To help you feel less like an outsider, more like a digital ad native and give you marketing resources, here are seven essential digital advertising terms every marketing decision-maker should know:

You've done the usual. You started a Facebook business page, wear your company logo shirt around town proudly and sponsor the Little League team. Your home services marketing tactics work pretty well, but there's still room for improvement. Whether you're fixing leaky faucets, mowing lawns, cleaning homes or helping homeowners in another way, you can land more customers by taking a structured approach to your promotional efforts.

Business operations software company Jobber shared a list of 2018 trends and predictions to help guide home services business owners. Here are a few of the top takeaways:

• Customers seek time efficiency. The ability to book appointments 24/7 through apps or social platform messaging services trumps calling an office line during the 9-to-5.
• Adopting new technology helps you rise above your competition. From promoting multiple lines of communication to using mobile billing and payment processes, adopt current tech trends.
• Stay in touch with your clients. Being top of mind can only happen when your past customers hear from you regularly. Implementing a strategic marketing plan is the foundation for effective communication.

Each week we hear a friend joke about banner blindness and pop-up takedowns. They simply click those ads away without regard to the information. Our marketing hearts sink, leading us to wonder how we could have made the content more pleasing — even engaging — rather than yet another annoyance. Thankfully, there are lots of options.

In 2017, the Nielsen Norman Group shared the results of a survey regarding digital advertising techniques completed by adults not involved in IT or marketing-related industries. Variants of 23 display ads were shown on desktop and mobile, then rated. Let's dig into the top five least-liked display ad types, and ways to make them more palatable.

Dayparting allows marketers and advertisers to get the most out of their budget by scheduling ads to go live at opportune moments, whether it's the most effective day of the week or the least costly time of day.

If it sounds like an essential part of a successful advertising strategy, that's because it is. However, many businesses don't implement this tool for various reasons — either because they want to cast a wide net, they have trouble identifying their most profitable time slots or they're not even sure where to start.

In this post, we'll walk through everything you need to know about optimizing your ad schedule, including how to handle multiple platforms as well as how to test and analyze ad sets on a programmatic platform.