Building Intelligent Audiences: A Dealership's Guide to 1st & 3rd-Party Data

In today's complex digital landscape, automotive dealership groups face significant challenges in managing customer data and marketing effectively. The proliferation of online and offline touchpoints, combined with increasing data privacy regulations, necessitates a sophisticated, integrated approach to customer data.

‍

A Customer Data Platform (CDP) serves as a critical solution, centralizing and unifying customer information to enable precise audience creation and personalized engagement. This white paper, "Building Audiences using 1P and 3P Data," outlines how a robust enterprise data strategy begins with taking ownership of your data, particularly first-party data, which is an asset belonging to the dealership.

‍

Key aspects of this approach include:

‍

• Building Comprehensive Shopper Profiles: A CDP like Orbee's consolidates information from various disparate systems into a unified shopper profile, offering a 360-degree view of each customer. This involves actively ingesting data from numerous sources such as CRM systems (e.g., DealerSocket, eLead), Dealer Management Systems (DMS), website activity, digital retailing tools, and chat plugins. The CDP then performs identity resolution, merging website activity with CRM and DMS records to link anonymous user data to known customer profiles.

• Creating Intelligent Audiences: Once data is centralized and unified, a CDP allows for the creation of dynamic and highly targeted audiences based on customer behaviors and interests, moving beyond traditional lead lists to segments that reflect true intent. Audiences can be segmented based on criteria like vehicle views, source of lead, site interactions, willingness to submit information, shopper freshness, and CRM/DMS data. Third-party data can also be incorporated to enrich existing records.

• Activating Audiences for Personalized Engagement: The power of a CDP lies in its ability to activate these intelligent audiences across diverse marketing and sales channels, enabling personalized engagement everywhere. This includes highly personalized and automated email campaigns , on-site personalization through customized website experiences , and syndication to major advertising platforms like Google, Facebook, Bing, Pinterest, and TikTok for dynamic ad campaigns. CDPs also provide Business Development Center (BDC) teams with current and actionable data for lead prioritization.

• Measuring and Optimizing Audience Performance: A CDP provides advanced analytics and reporting capabilities to measure the effectiveness of audience-driven strategies. This includes journey-based attribution to understand the entire customer journey , lead scoring to prioritize follow-up based on engagement factors , and lead reactivation reports for re-engaging previously inactive shoppers. Furthermore, a CDP assists with compliance by centralizing data, providing consent management, and ensuring privacy-first design.

By embracing data ownership, centralizing customer information, adhering to stringent privacy standards, and activating integrated marketing efforts, dealerships can overcome inherent vulnerabilities, significantly enhance customer experience, improve marketing ROI, and be well-prepared for future industry consolidation and regulatory changes.

‍