Dealers who are investing in a CDP should be reviewing their existing tech stack to confirm that their vendor partners can handle the demands of real-time retailing. In many cases, the turnkey marketing agencies who participate in OEM co-op programs lack experience handling CDP audiences and activating messaging and marketing in real time.
Their lack of experience is in activating high-quality micro-audiences.
Before I provide some specific examples of the tech stack partners you will need for your CDP to succeed, I would like to address the mindset dealers should have when shopping for a CDP partner. Here are some suggestions for dealership leaders:
- CDPs are an investment similar to selecting a CRM. This is a serious investment that you should be planning to use for the next few years. Changing CDPs is not simple so don’t treat it like hiring a marketing agency.
- CDPs are not designed to be a quick fix for marketing and customer experience problems. Yes, there are many cases where the ROI on a CDP can be proven in 30 or 60 days, but the more exciting use cases take time to implement.
- CDPs are often a group level decision, which means the framework has to be able to support multiple brands, agency partners, data integrations, and different geographies. This is in stark contrast to the CDPs which are built for one OEM brand and activation strategy.
- The CDP you choose should make clear commitments to integrate the data from your DMS, CRM, phone switch, and website.
- Data lakes (or swamps) are not a CDP. For larger dealer groups both will be needed. The data lake is ideal for custom reporting and KPI development and the CDP for real-time activations.
- The CDP vendor should be transparent and confirm that their identity resolution technology is already working and integrated inside the iframe vendors on your website (i.e. trade, credit, finance, service scheduler, etc.)
- If the leadership of the dealership is not committed to effectively managing their first-party data and willing to be involved in changing customer communications to improve LTV and CSI, you should wait to implement a CDP.
- Real-time retailing will require dealers to change their staffing models and reconsider how they can use outsourcing partners and AI to handle real-time alerts and “data ups”. When dealers see that if they connect with their customers when they first start shopping their profits increase dramatically, realignment of business processes will be much easier.
Creating a firm foundation
If you have a commitment from a CDP platform to be seamlessly integrated into your website and tools and they will ingest data daily (or in real time) from your website, phone switch, DMS, and CRM, then you have a great starting point. However, getting all those commitments to work effectively is not a simple task.
Since most dealers have 5+ iframed applications bolted on their core website platform, they will quickly find out that these iframes operate as separate websites. The ability to see inside all iframes is critical for abandon shopping cart workflows and identity resolution.
Make sure that your CDP can identify the data which is entered into forms inside iframe applications (i.e. digital retailing, trade, or service scheduler forms) so you can identify existing customers who abandon their “shopping cart.”
Do you know that approximately 40% of the records in a dealership DMS are incorrect or missing critical contact data? Please ask your CDP partner how data hygiene will be handled BEFORE data matching and daily ingestion of data in the CDP.
The answers from your CDP partner or third-party data hygiene service should detail all the specific conditions which will trigger a data update. Data hygiene conversations, from what I can see, are rushed. Few people are asking the questions which will enhance the final product and activations from the CDP.
If you get your clean data into the CDP, then you will have to ask how often will the data be updated. For example, if an email bounces, will the customer record be updated and flagged to get a new email address? If so, how long will that process take? Will the data integrations with the DMS and CRM allow for bi-directional updates or just data pulls.
The type of integrations will make a big difference in creating a better customer service experience from your CDP investment.
Dealers will also need to discuss opt-out signals which come from the CRM and all marketing vendors who are emailing, texting, or calling outside the CRM. Dealers have never had to manage global opt-out signals from the stores in their dealer group. This is a new skill which requires much thought to be in full compliance with privacy laws.
Check your tech stack for data activation
Once your CDP has its unified data loaded and is receiving signals in real time from your website and data partners, audience creation and activation comes next in your priorities. Depending on your CDP, and the type of identity resolution technology used, you will likely find that audiences of existing customers shopping online are small at first and will grow over time.
So when you have an audience of a few hundred existing customers who are shopping on your website, you should agree that the list (audience) of consumers is very valuable. However, the list is too small to send to Google or Facebook, so what can dealers do?
Dealers need to find partners who can activate small audiences of consumers or existing customers, which I call micro-audiences.
It may seem like a “no brainer,” but it actually is something fairly new for most agencies. Why?
- Email campaigns must be deployed on a “one-to-one” basis with unique hyperlinks based on the customer profile in the CDP which help to confirm identity resolution frameworks. No longer can you send out an email “blast” with all the same content and links.
- Personalized offers should be pulled from the CDP and not the DMS. The vehicle ownership data in the DMS horrible and so is the PII data associated with aging transactions. Most personalized marketing applications are only designed to pull data from the DMS or CRM.
- SMS, email, and call center campaigns must check the centralized opt-out flags in the CDP before reaching out to consumers. The vendor cannot solely rely on the data in the CRM or in their own platform.
- Vendors who email, text, or call your customers must be able to send opt-out signals back to the CDP to update customer records. This is very critical and most agency partners do not have any tech integrations in place to make this happen.
- Agencies who run Google and Facebook campaigns must change their audience activation strategies to use the audience data from the CDP and not from the Google or Facebook pixel. Agencies fight back hard on this because it means changing what they have in place.
Partners who are excelling
Since I have been working on some very interesting data activation projects involving CDPs, let me share a few partners who are making first-party data management and activation easier for dealers.
Contact centers
One of the best activation partners for a CDP is an experienced contact center. When an EXISTING customer abandons a service scheduler or a digital retailing workflow, one of the best ways to elevate the customer experience is calling the customer after they leave the website. I will be sharing some updated examples of CDP to Contact Center activations at the Digital Marketing Strategies Conference (DMSC) which will put a smile on any General Manager’s face!
The best partner which I have found to date is the team at Better Car People . This company has been running OEM and dealer campaigns for years. They handle all the OnStar calls and also recently acquired Proactive Dealer Solutions and Brooke.ai. Their ability to connect directly to any CDP or receive data in real time is amazing. Anyone who wants to activate real-time retailing using trained callers should check out BCP.
Data hygiene and activation
There are many data hygiene and activation partners on the market, but what I love about automotiveMastermind Inc. is their willingness to provide data hygiene in real time as well as sharing their business intelligence flags (BPS scores) to update the CDP and improve ALL marketing campaigns activated from the CDP.
The partnership yields their best-in-class marketing activation campaigns (AMM is a CDP marketing partner) plus the ability for the CDP owner to run companion campaigns using the same data on Facebook, Google, Amazon, or Streaming media. Their self-healing data model is perfectly timed for the rise of CDPs in automotive retail. When campaigns use the BPS scores from automotiveMastermind Inc., the performance increase is significant showing that CDP owners need to consider partnering with business intelligence leaders.
Since they are a part of S&P Global Mobility, their VIN-level updates come from their Polk Data division, they can enhance CDP records with email, phone, and address data from TransUnion, an power personalized offers from Market Scan. In the coming months dealers will hear about more successful CDP use cases of their data with dealer groups, which I have a front row seat to see.
Identity resolution
There are several companies which I am testing to see who has the best identity graph for the automotive industry. I should have data to share at DMSC from companies including Lead Lure, Launch Labs, and TransUnion based on testing which has started this quarter. I hope to test more companies who have a strong identity graph in Q2 include M1 Data & Analytics, Acxiom, and LiveRamp .
One company who has proven that their identity graph produces amazing results is Client Command. Their patented Active Shopper Network® (ASN) knows when consumers are shopping in the greater automotive eco-system. This gives dealers signals when their existing customers are out shopping. If the consumer does NOT go to the dealer’s website, no problem! We still know what they are doing.
About 94% of customers who are actively shopping for service do NOT visit their dealer’s website.
A recent case study showcased the power of the ASN when their audiences were connected to Dealer Funnel and Stella Automotive AI, Inc. The combination of the audience activation from Dealer Funnel and Client Command and the strategy to drive sales and service appointments to Stella, a leading digital voice assistant, yielded stunning results.
Shop for CDP and technology partners at DMSC
Dealers who are looking to elevate their marketing, retention rates, and customer experience while reducing waste should be coming to the Digital Marketing Strategies Conference (DMSC) to meet with the technology leaders who are providing solutions for first-party data management and personalized activation.
