[Infographic] Hey, Auto Makers and Dealerships, Are You Stuck in the Digital Slow Lane?

If you’re a marketing leader or dealership manager, you know that understanding customers and their buying behavior is 90% of achieving higher sales results. But how can you devise auto sales and marketing strategies that work for each and every customer, at a scale and cost that is profitable?

Check out the following infographic to understand how car companies such as Subaru and Maruti Suzuki are already using proven, advanced digital marketing technology (martech) to accelerate both near-term profits and long-term digital transformation—to become truly data-driven auto businesses.

In the automotive industry, many factors affect the supply chain for cars worldwide. But on the demand side, what’s really holding the industry back is even harder to see and more difficult to fix: a lack of understanding of what customers want and how they want to buy cars now. Consider this:

• The average customer visits more than 24 car research sites
• Car companies typically use data from more than 200 different sources to better understand customers and their buying cycles
• Customers on average spend more than four weeks on vehicle purchase research, much of it online
• Only 8% of auto OEMs can fully use digital data to understand their customers and increase sales

“The ones who interpret digital data correctly—who can get a sense of who’s really in-market for a vehicle, and deliver a smooth buying experience—are going to be the ones who win.” —Senior Executive, OEM

But there is technology that can help: Customer Data Platforms (CDPs).

CDPs take customer data from a maze of different data sources from platforms customers use and turn that data into intelligence that helps car dealers improve customer journeys to sell more cars.

Here’s how CDPs drive sales and customer loyalty for OEMs and auto dealerships

• A CDP clears the road to sales by unifying customer data into a single customer view
• This allows OEMs and dealerships to provide a seamless customer experience across multiple channels—social, email, web experiences
• A shared view of each customer allows OEMs and dealerships to coordinate campaigns and deliver highly relevant and targeted messages
• A personalized post-purchase relationship drives customer loyalty, regular vehicle service and maintenance, and repeat purchases

How Maruti Suzuki Unified Customer Data to Boost Results

Maruti Suzuki recently used data to transform its sales processes, unifying data from many different silos to cut advertising costs, as well as improve car sales and add-ons to achieve these impressive results:

1. More than 200 data sources unified
2. About 1,100 dealerships were helped so they could increase sales
3. Advertising costs plummeted 34%

“We need to manage the customer conversation with consistency across our businesses and omnichannel journey—purchase, loyalty, insurance, accessories, finance—all of it. Treasure Data is the backbone to our customer centricity. It also helps us drive performance. It is changing the culture here.”—Noritaka Wakuda, Advisor & Leader for Digital Transformation, Maruti Suzuki India Ltd.

These results are common for companies adopting CDPs. Using data to understand customers and gain new insights into their customer journeys works. Want to achieve better results in the omnichannel era? See how, at Treasure Data.