In the near future, car dealerships face a challenge in utilizing their first-party data due to the digital advertising landscape's move towards a cookieless future. As tracking and targeting consumers become increasingly difficult, rising privacy concerns and regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) are causing many consumers to opt out of third-party cookies altogether.
Additionally, dealers must consider strict Federal Trade Commission (FTC) privacy, data security, and encryption policies, as violating them may result in hefty fines. These factors pose a difficult challenge for dealers trying to effectively target and market to potential customers. However, dealerships can utilize their first-party data to create personalized and effective marketing campaigns without relying on cookies.
First-party data is information collected directly from consumers through interactions with a dealership's website, digital properties, or in-person interactions. This data includes contact information, browsing history, and purchase history and is owned by the dealership. Having this data makes it easier for dealerships to retarget and nurture their audiences based on what they know about them.
Without the ability to use options like audience matching, dealerships will need to rely on their own first-party data to understand and engage their customers in a more personalized and relevant way. For example, dealerships can segment their audience based on their stage in the purchase life cycle, such as customers whose lease is about to end. While most dealerships have a CRM or a DMS, it is important to note that a Customer Data Platform (CDP) is not the same thing. A CDP focuses on customer data and creating specific audiences for marketing outreach.
By utilizing a CDP with marketing technology, a dealership's data can be cleansed, consolidated, and easily deployed across a wide range of marketing channels, resulting in more efficient and accurate ad targeting. The key to making first-party data work for a dealership is to untangle their data, clean and append it against a number of secure industry databases, and store it in a secure data lake. This results in a treasure trove of audience insights that can be customized depending on a dealership's strategy and used to target customers with any outbound marketing channel, including digital advertising, social media, email, direct mail, text, and BDC.
With access to all of this data, dealers also get precise attribution reporting to optimize their strategy and ad spending. In summary, while the move towards a cookieless future poses challenges for car dealerships, utilizing their first-party data can create personalized and effective marketing campaigns without relying on cookies.