Many dealerships spend astronomical amounts of money into email campaigns, direct mail, and text-based marketing without necessarily knowing how much messaging actually reaches customers.
So, Rohrman Auto Group decided to find out. And after cleaning 2.5 million records, the group discovered that 48% were outdated, incomplete, or entirely unusable.
What they’re saying: "When the consumer starts to shop for a vehicle, if they give us a dialed down email address that they don't really use or check at all, and we don't update that in the CRM when they say yes or the DMS when they go through finance, then we now have that dumbed down email address to market to for however many years to come," Jeremy Nowling, Rorman's sales and digital retailing director, told Daily Dealer Live hosts Sam D’Arc and Uli de’ Martino.
Driving the news:The initial cleanse revealed that the majority of problems were concentrated in email addresses.
"[email protected]" and "knowmeknow.com" variations filled Rohrman’s databases as placeholders that customers used to dodge marketing.
On top of that, 30% of physical customer addresses were outdated and basically useless.
Surprisingly, (or maybe not), customer phone numbers were cleanest. Only less than 1% of that pool needed revising.
That’s because service advisors validate phone numbers constantly to send estimates and updates.
But email and physical addresses get entered once during the sale, then sit untouched for years while customers change jobs, move houses, and abandon old email accounts.
"If a number is transposed in the cell phone number or physical address, now we have a bad address that we're mailing or calling to that consumer," Nowling said.
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The fix: Nowling and his team built a digital system using cloud-based data engineering company Snowflake as the "center of truth." Rohrman’s data gets cleaned monthly, fed into the customer data platform (CDP), and then updated back to the dealership management system (DMS) as activity happens in real time.
Rohrman partnered with David Steinberg, CEO and Founder of Foureyes, to build the architecture. "Partnering with a company like him who really doesn't have any skin in the game as a lead provider or anything else, he is there to help you advance into the newer technologies," Nowling explained.
Beyond data cleansing, the system handles consent management. When customers opt out in one platform, that opt-out updates everywhere instantly—CRM, appointment scheduler, marketing automation, service reminders, CDP, etc.
"Consent management is more important when you think of opt out rules and consumers can now sue dealerships," Nowling said. "If you opt out of my marketing from the CDP, it will now opt you out from everything else."
Why it matters: There’s still a cohort of dealers who respond to bad marketing performance by buying more sophisticated tools or increasing ad spend.
But Nowling's approach shows the problem is likely upstream, and no marketing automation can fix corrupted source data.
However, with this method, Rohrman ensures every dollar spent on campaigns actually reaches customers.
Looking ahead: Ryan Rohrman, CEO of Rohrman Auto Group, will publish a playbook on LinkedIn describing his exact process, partners, and the mistakes to avoid.
"Ryan truly wants to drive the success of the organization, but also how can we make the industry move forward so that everybody benefits," Nowling said.
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