The Impact of Automotive CDPs on Activating Solutions for Car Dealerships

Customer Data Platforms are at the core of any modern dealership’s data infrastructure. 

Your CRM and DMS are powerful tools by themselves, but without a way to bring all that data together into one centralized location, your data isn’t doing as much as it could do for you. By unifying, cleaning, and managing all your first- and third-party data, a CDP gives you full access to every data point at your dealership, offering deep insights into your shoppers and inventory so you can make smarter, data-driven business decisions.

A CDP supercharges your list-building capabilities by unifying customer data and enabling granular audience segmentation through powerful list-building tools. This targeted segmentation empowers marketers to deliver highly personalized campaigns across channels for maximum impact. Moreover, a CDP’s real-time data updates ensure that your lists remain accurate and relevant, enabling you to deliver timely, relevant messages that resonate with each individual customer. 

The Role of CDPs in Email Marketing

CDPs have the power to transform your dealership’s email marketing. By aggregating data from a variety of sources, the CDP offers you easy access to data points such as VDPs visited, ads interacted with, emails opened, and more, which can help you streamline the creation of personalized email campaigns.

More data means better segmentation. A CDP can help you create super granular audience lists by looking at specific audience features like shopper demographics, shopper equity, and current vehicle. Combining all of these segments allows you to build hyper-targeted emails with highly relevant information. 

In a world where your CDP is providing data-driven insights, targeted emails can include personalized content such as:

• Offers based on their current equity
• Prices for the 3 VINs they spent the most time looking at on your website
• Reduced monthly payments on a new car
• Service reminders

Fact is, the average dealership sees an email open rate of just 15%. Highly personalized, targeted email campaigns can help your open rates rise to around 35-40%. 

Data-driven personalization isn’t only about sending out the most relevant offers, it’s also about not sending any emails at all. Your CDP not only helps you understand what content will resonate with your audience, it also highlights what they aren’t interested in based on their current shopper journey, ensuring you send content that is relevant in the moment instead of, say, emailing them with a new offer on a vehicle they just purchased. Audience suppression is just as valuable as audience engagement, and an AI-driven CDP will figure out the right balance of messaging and cadence.

Fullpath’s Audience Activation takes these insights and turns them into email campaigns that use AI tools to do the segmentation, prioritizing, and even the content generation for you. With zero manual effort, Fullpath gives you data-driven personalized emails that speak directly to shoppers’ individual preferences. 

Enhancing Digital Advertising with CDPs

By tapping into your CDP’s rich data insights, you can amplify your digital advertising efforts and reach the right people at the right time with personalized messaging, significantly increasing engagement and conversion rates. 

Instead of relying on broad, location-based ads on Facebook or Google Search, activate your CDP data to focus your ad spend on individuals who have demonstrated genuine interest in your dealership and vehicles. With the digital advertising technology unlocked by CDP data, you can retarget website visitors with tailored ads that align with their specific interactions on your site. 

By integrating your CDP with your AI-powered marketing platforms, you can trigger personalized emails based on specific customer actions, such as a VDP visit or 1 week since last engagement. These automated workflows save you valuable time and resources while ensuring timely and relevant communications with your customers.

The smarter the AI technology, the smarter the ad budget spending. A powerful AI engine analyzes your data in real-time, dynamically adjusting your ad budget across platforms and ad campaigns to optimize for your digital advertising goals.

Fullpath’s AI-powered Digital Advertising solution takes this to the next level. By leveraging cutting-edge AI and machine learning, Fullpath creates and optimizes thousands of campaigns at a scale and speed unmatched by any human. Fullpath continuously monitors and optimizes campaigns for leads at all times to automatically reallocate ad budgets cross-platform to support the most promising campaigns. The results speak for themselves: one of Fullpath’s clients saw a staggering 192% increase in leads and a 67% decrease in CPL within six months.

Sales Enablement Through CDPs

Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) transform sales by seamlessly integrating your automotive CDP with your CRM to create a reservoir of sales intelligence. By analyzing data from various sources, Fullpath’s CDP creates a 360° view of each shopper and their full journey through the sales funnel. This comprehensive picture is built from website visits and clicks, engaged ads, chatbot conversations, and of course, the initial lead source. Now your sales team is equipped with data about each shopper’s journey, creating a more personalized and efficient sales experience. Some of the details a salesperson can use to make each interaction more personal include:

• Vehicle(s) of interest – create offers specific to what you know they’re interested in, be that specific VINs or something more general like body type or fuel source.
• Equity status – present options to leverage the customer’s positive equity for a new vehicle.
• Current vehicle – consider targeting customers with information about the latest generation of their current model, especially if it’s been a few years since their last purchase. 
• APR –  knowing a customer’s current APR before initial communication lets you come to them with financing options that could lower their payments.

Armed with CDP insights, your sales team can move beyond generic pitches and engage in personalized communication. By understanding a prospect’s interests, preferences, and pain points, they can craft tailored messages that resonate and build rapport. 

Website Engagement and User Experience

Your website is often the first point of contact with prospects. With just a few website clicks, your automotive CDP will be filled with data about each shopper’s interests. Utilizing identity resolution technology, the data from each website visit is contained within the shopper’s profile in your CDP, ready to be applied to your sales and marketing efforts. These CDP insights support AI-powered technology that can then tailor website content to each individual visitor based on their profile, preferences, and behaviors. 

Imagine someone on your website who has previously demonstrated interest in hatchbacks through ad engagement and prior website visits. Your CDP recognizes this and dynamically displays website content with offers and information relevant to this individual. This might include highlighting current hatchback deals, or more specifically, lease options for the specific models they’ve already explored. 

Personalized website experiences have a proven impact on engagement, conversion, and time spent on site. When website visitors feel understood, they are more likely to interact with your content, explore your vehicles, and ultimately make a purchase. A CDP enables you to maximize the potential of every website visit. 

The key to effective personalization lies in real-time data updates. As shoppers interact with your website, their profiles within the CDP are being continuously updated. With identity resolution technology, their profiles might even go back a decade. This allows for dynamic content adjustments, ensuring the experience remains relevant and engaging throughout the journey. 

The AI-Powered Dealership

AI is already making waves in the automotive industry, but its effectiveness is heavily dependent on the quality and depth of data it can access. This is just another way CDPs are invaluable, serving as a central hub of data for numerous AI-powered tools.

The comprehensive shopper profiles made available by the CDP empowers AI algorithms to deliver highly personalized experiences. For car dealerships, this translates to AI-powered solutions such as digital ads that adapt and evolve in real-time, chatbots that can provide personalized offers and book demos, and identifying VINs that need additional help selling.

The truth is in the data. After integrating Fullpath’s AI solutions, dealers have seen a 1,266% marketing ROI, CPL of $14.02, and a nearly 50% conversion rate on all website conversations.

By integrating your CDP with AI technology, your dealership can unlock a powerful synergy where they continuously feed into each other round-the-clock, transforming your marketing campaigns, customers experiences, and sales.

Embracing AI-Driven CDPs for Dealership Success

Customer Data Platforms are at the forefront of the automotive marketing revolution. As AI and machine learning continue to evolve, we can expect even more sophisticated segmentation, hyper-personalized experiences, and predictive capabilities that will further enhance the customer journey and drive sales.

Fullpath envisions a future where dealerships effortlessly leverage AI-powered CDPs to anticipate customer needs, deliver tailored experiences at every touchpoint, and achieve unprecedented marketing ROI.

The era of generic one-size-fits-all marketing is fading fast. The future belongs to those who embrace the power of data and AI to forge meaningful connections with their customers. 

Schedule a demo with Fullpath to discover how our AI-powered CDP can drive your dealership into the future.