Welcome to another episode of Auto Marketing Now, with Brian Pasch, founder of PCG Companies and auto marketing expert, who continues his original series exploring customer data platforms (CDPs). In this episode, Pasch explores the various activation routes available to organizations with a CDP.
The Rise of CDPs in Automotive Retailing study by Pasch Group
During Pasch’s research into CDPs, or customer data platforms, he discovered platforms that solely focus on the normalization and unification of customer data into audiences and segments. He continues by explaining that other solutions and businesses specialize in marketing automation, called marketing automation platforms (MAPs). These businesses will extract data from anyone’s CDP and distribute it to outside parties. But according to Pasch, “The automotive sector and OEMs have specific fonts, images, and image libraries that dealers like to watch videos with pricing on top of discounts or vin-specific ads.”
Therefore, hybrid platforms play a crucial role in these functions because they create templates for the automotive library and other third-party advertisements. “These hybrids play a pivotal role in activating clean data in the CDP for automotive-specific marketing,” Pasch says.
Customer preferred challenges
However, Pasch notes that once dealer groups combine their data, duplicates will be eliminated, and “you’ll be sending out the right campaigns to the right sources.” However, he predicts that rather than marketing, CDP’s main source of income will come from altering the user experience. Pasch highlights amazing digital experiences, like when a customer receives a personalized text message with current recall alerts or an integrated AI tool helps to schedule an appointment.
He continues, “When someone goes back to the website, these AIs should refrain from refilling forms or re-entering vin numbers.” Since CDPs should be aware of the preferred pain points of their consumers, the best time of day to respond, and when to automate outbound contact, an ideal communication segway for data activation is created in two areas: marketing and communication.
While making targeted offers based on credit profiles, removing duplicates, and reducing your reach are great, dealers continue to have retention issues. Therefore, Pasch suggests, “They need to manage their customers as portfolio loan-to-value (LTV) increases, and they’re going to accomplish it by closing the gaps in current sales and service that are making consumers feel like numbers.”
