Overcoming Data Challenges at Your Dealership with Identity Resolution

Have you ever visited an online retailer, selected your products, and gone to check out only to realize you forgot your account login information? Instead of going through the whole password reset process, you might simply decide to open another account with a different email address so you can finish your purchase and move on. 

The next thing you know, you are getting emails from the retailer in two inboxes, being targeted with their ads on your social media accounts, and receiving duplicate text messages every time the business sends an offer to your phone. Annoying, right? 

Think about it this way – the same thing is happening at your dealership. A prospective lead visits your website and converts through a form on a specific page. Two weeks later, they click on your social ad and convert again – but this time, they use a different email. Or spell their name differently. Or provide a different phone number. The slightest variation from the original information they provided – even something as silly as a typo – results in the creation of a whole new profile in your dealership’s data management system or CRM. 

Not only does this create an extremely poor customer experience, it is costing you serious money. You are now spending your marketing budget to sell to the same person twice and, even more importantly, because they now have two profiles, you are no longer tracking their full customer journey which creates an automatic disadvantage for your marketing and sales efforts. 

This is where the importance of identity resolution for dealerships comes into play. 

Understanding Identity Resolution

Identity resolution is the process of connecting various data points to specific customer profiles to create a single, unified, data rich 360° view for each lead. This involves merging and deduping customer data pulled from multiple sources with the ultimate goal of accurately identifying a single customer across different channels, devices and platforms to create a better customer experience. 

The Role of Identity Resolution in Streamlining Dealership Sales 

Once you have identified your lead and gotten a clear picture of who they are, you can use that clean, full data set to improve your dealership’s operations and drive sales.

Optimize Your Lead Management

By pulling together multiple data sources to create a singular, unified view of your customers, your dealership can identify hot leads and prioritize your follow up. Quick follow up with qualified leads can improve sales and drive revenues.

Improve Customer Recognition
With a unified 360° view of your customers, you can identify customers across different platforms and create a more personalized customer experience, from the sales approach to post-purchase follow-up. 

Drive Customer Loyalty

By giving customers an excellent and seamless personalized customer experience across all channels, you increase the chances of the customer coming back through your dealership doors for their next purchase or service appointment. Customer loyalty and extending your customer lifecycle can help you fortify your dealership for the future. 

Improving Your Dealership’s Marketing with Identity Resolution  

In addition to improving sales, identity resolution can help your dealership optimize your marketing efforts. With a 360° view of your customers in hand, you can take a more strategic approach to your marketing and improve your marketing spend. Here are just a few way identity resolution can impact your marketing strategy: 

1. Create personalized campaigns – with a more complete view of your customer, you can deliver personalized messaging based on their demographics and preferences.
2. Increase customer engagement – with personalized campaigns and relevant messaging being sent to the right leads, you can increase your engagement and response rates.
3. Hyper-segment your audiences – with a clean data set in place, you can segment your audience based on distinct factors and target them with hyper-specific ad campaigns.
4. Reduce marketing waste – with identity resolution, you can ensure your marketing budget is being spent wisely and that you are not marketing to the same lead twice. 

Identity resolution needs to be a part of your dealership’s data and marketing strategy for the simple reason that it not only saves you money, but helps you spend your budgets more effectively. 

Implementing Identity Resolution Technology at Your Dealership

While identity resolution sounds nice and all, the idea of manually sorting through your data to identify duplicate leads may send you running for the hills. The good news is, there is an easy way to eliminate your duplicate leads and come away with that super valuable 360° view of your customers. 

Automotive centric Customer Data Platforms (CDP) and Customer Data and Experience Platforms (CDXP) were designed specifically to help dealers consolidate and clean their data sources so they can then leverage the data to improve their businesses. A good CDXP will come with identity resolution technology built in, to help you automatically identify and consolidate your customer data into clear data-rich profiles across all of your digital touchpoints. 

Identity resolution technology has taken the manual work out of lead identification. Rather than sorting through your leads one by one to find matches, the CDXP instantly deduplicates your leads so you can properly track their customer journey. 

Forward-Thinking Dealers Need Identity Resolution Technology 

As the economic winds shift and car prices fluctuate on the daily, identity resolution technology is a sound investment in helping your dealership become a more resilient business. With identity resolution technology on your side,  you can optimize your dealership’s marketing, drive sales, build customer loyalty, and improve your dealership’s bottom line – what more could you possibly need? 

Fullpath, automotive’s leading CDXP, utilized identity resolution technology to sort and clean your dealership’s first-data and create singular, data-rich profiles for every lead. Fullpath then utilized the data to create personalized, omni-channel marketing campaigns that increase revenues and drive customer loyalty. If you are interested in seeing how Fullpath can help your dealership improve your marketing strategy, get in touch with us at get.started@fullpath.com.