Last month, we discussed improving the customer experience, keeping customers engaged and how a customer data platform (CDP) makes it easy to collect data, unifies that data and allows you to activate or execute on that data. Here, in Part 2, we’ll discuss what this engagement allows you to do and how to evolve beyond static campaigns.
In this day and age, it’s no longer enough just to try to reach customers with a letter or email. Today, it’s about connecting beyond just a critical touchpoint that’s been determined in some static journey or particular interval, such as a birthday or purchase anniversary. In the times that we’re in now, it’s meeting somebody where they’re at — and it’s doing that with highly personalized, highly engaged content that’s done on a one-to-one basis. This personalized content offering is made possible with a customer data platform.
CDP Benefits
One big benefit of a CDP is the ability to have suppression. If anyone’s been doing email blasts long enough, they have a suppression list — the list of people who will not receive an email.
Sometimes it’s just as important to understand who not to send to than it is to know who to send to. It’s at the core of being personalized. If I’m sending you the wrong message or I’m doing it at the wrong time, I’m telling you I don’t know anything about you and that I don’t care. I’ve basically negated any equity chips that I had built in that relationship.
But now with the unification process in the CDP’s core automatically taking in personal information, transaction dates, etc. and writing rules into the system, we have intelligent suppression. The CDP can automatically create suppression within a particular customer journey.
Personalization is the next benefit. Think about all the possible touchpoints that someone may make leading up to making a decision about a vehicle — whether it’s for sales or whether it’s for service. Every time you collect information on someone, you’re increasing the chance that the next message is going to be a little bit more on point.
The third area is insights. The CDP breaks down all of the silos that are inherent, and it takes all of the data from all these different sources, all the different analytics and organizes all of it into one system that’s designed to learn and designed to share. Its whole purpose is to then help execute and push that information into the appropriate marketing systems.
It’s no longer enough just to have data in a neat place. It’s about using that data to drive engagement and to provide those right experiences every single time. And, if you miss on that once, you can ruin it forever with that particular customer.
The CDP is going to solve the age-old problems that every dealer faces:
1: Disorganized data. Data’s a hot mess. And — whether it’s a dealership or it’s a company selling sneakers — if data is disconnected and disorganized, it’s hard to understand an individual, let alone try to start to create connections with them in the way that they expect. The number of data sources is getting bigger, which is all the more reason why there needs to be a solution to have all that information live in one place — a DMS is not designed to do that. Most of the CRMs out there right are great, but they’re not designed to store all of this disparate information from these other places.
2: Segmentation. The ability to unify customer identity and organize everything into one place, this becomes the first step in your ability to segment and start to target better. Then everyone can be treated the same because everyone’s being treated differently.
3: Customer identification. I have yet to meet a dealer who is happy with their ability to link all of the different customer identities that they have from all these disparate sources into one location. The CDP is the secret weapon. It is the secret sauce that will address head on many of these issues that have plagued a lot of dealerships, for years.
We start by continuously cleansing and enriching the DMS as the key data source. And then we plug information from other sources, whether that’s Equifax, IHS, Polk, etc., into the system. The CDP then connects the dots between the information that we have and action that we’re tracking. So now we start to create a better multi-channel approach and new avenues for personalized journeys.
So, depending on how someone interacts, the system determines what the next step is in the journey. It’s not static; the journey is actually affected by what they do or what they don’t do as they work through the flow.
We now have the ability to start engaging at various points in the journey, earlier and more often, and you’re sending appropriate content, people will appreciate that. This results in more loyalty and in more chances to connect and it’s collecting critical intel that ultimately is going to deliver more qualified and more engaged hand raisers.
