Dealers are sitting on a goldmine of data—here's how they're putting it to work

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Welcome to The Breakdown, an analysis of auto retail’s top trends, moves, and insights—in under 5 minutes.

Customer data platforms are not new.

In fact, they’ve been used in industries like banking, hospitality, and healthcare for years.

Sure, they might be the most boring sounding tech tools in the market, but the payoff for dealers is typically anything but.

At a high level, CDPs are software programs that unify customer data from multiple sources, like the CRM, DMS, website, and service platform, to personalize customer interactions that build trust (and bring in more $$$).

Yet, for many dealers, navigating the world of CDPs is still a big question mark.

So, I spoke to several forward-thinking operators who are deploying this tech at scale.

And distilled the ways they are unlocking marketing efficiencies, while creating better experiences for customers at the same time…

Between website visits, email opens, service appointments, and purchase history, CDPs can create a single, clean profile for each shopper.

That’s the difference.

You see, many dealers have historically relied on CRMs for tasks like sending follow-up emails. But CRMs often store static or siloed data and may not integrate real-time behavioral data from websites, apps, etc.

But CDPs do. 

When someone abandons a dealer’s service scheduler midway through, a CDP can instantly trigger a personalized follow-up email while the interaction is still fresh.

CDPs also connect behavior across locations. When a customer who previously bought from one store in the group starts browsing inventory on another location's website, the CDP recognizes them and can customize the experience.

And yes, CDPs don't manage sales processes or track deal progression. Think of them more like marketing intelligence tools that feed clean data back into the operational workflow.

Step 1. Address data quality.

Rohrman spent $60,000 across 22 stores just on data cleansing with Experian before activating anything.

"We realized only 48% of my data was actually good data," he said. 

The cleansing process identified incorrect email addresses, phone numbers, mailing addresses, and confirmed current vehicle ownership for each customer record.

McDonald saw similar results. His data was only roughly 60% accurate before cleaning it up. Without this foundation, any CDP activation will amplify bad data across more channels.

Step 2. Prioritize highly specific audience building.

Rohrman's team has built 96 different audience types across their stores. And each audience triggers specific marketing based on customer behavior. 

For example, a shopper who starts customizing payments using a dealer’s digital retailing tool will then get targeted content about financing options.

Step 3. Use high-impact, low-complexity activations. 

Knowling’s team also uses the CDP to retarget customers who abandoned service schedulers midway through the process. And the campaigns his team has built to recapture these customers has led to a 28% increase in appointment completion.

Meanwhile, at Jeff Wyler, the group’s CDP-powered campaigns achieve 40-55% open rates versus 1-3% from traditional CRM blasts.

Instead of sending the same trade-in message to everyone with a five-year-old vehicle, he envisions an AI system that creates individual comms based on each customer's complete history with the dealership.

Broader marketing campaigns with messaging like "Time to trade?" might be too vague to reach Sarah.

But an AI system could craft something completely unique and highly specific to her, like: "Saw you've been looking at the new Pilot. Perfect timing with Emma's soccer season—want to test drive one this Saturday during practice?"

Knowling is testing similar applications by embedding AI chat directly into CDP-triggered emails so customers can start conversations without even visiting the website.

But really, dealers can't do anything of this nature without having a CDP.

CDPs are becoming standard operating procedure, and frontrunners are already carving up micro-audiences to maximize profitability.

Because when dealers hone the infrastructure to talk to a single customer like they’re the only one that matters, there’s no need to waste a bunch of money shouting to the crowd.

This week on the

Shout out to Impel and OPENLANE for making this episode possible!

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Shout out to Lotlinx and BizzyCar for making this episode possible!

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