Customer data platform (CDP) for automotive brands: Benefits & use cases

However, the right CDP can do much more than unify and analyze customer data. For example, Insider — our AI-powered CDP and personalization platform — can also help you activate customer data across 12+ channels to:

• Generate more test drive sign-ups on your website.
• Shorten the car purchase cycle with strategic, one-to-one lead nurturing on the right channels and at the right times.
• Cross-sell and upsell at key points in the customer lifecycle and form profitable, long-term relationships with your customers.

In this guide, we’ll discuss exactly how CDPs benefit automotive brands using examples from our platform and customers like Renault, Avis, Lexus, and Toyota.

How automotive businesses benefit from using a CDP

CDPs are software solutions designed to unify customer data from multiple sources into one database. 

The data sources can be both online and offline — like customer relationship management systems (CRMs), dealership management systems (DMS), customer service tools, analytics platforms, data management platforms (DMPs), and others.

Put simply, CDPs aggregate first-party data, second-party data, and third-party data into one convenient place. By doing that, they give you unified, 360-degree views of each customer full of useful information, including:

• Names, locations, and contact information.
• Preferences in terms of brands, models, and communication channels.
• Customers’ interactions with your brand across your digital (e.g., your website, social media profiles, and emails) and physical channels (e.g., automotive dealerships).
• Previous test drives, leases, and purchases.
• And much more.

This is essential data for automotive businesses that want to provide a truly personalized customer experience.

While this data is typically siloed off in different tools, CDPs pull into one place, create detailed customer profiles, and give automotive marketers a solid foundation for building tailored campaigns that drive engagement, revenue, and retention.

Insider’s automotive CDP and personalization platform

Insider is our AI-native cross-channel platform that offers a true enterprise CDP and tools for activating your data across 12+ channels. Thanks to its versatility, Insider has been ranked among the top solutions in different categories, including:

• Customer data platforms (CDPs) by G2 customers.
• Omnichannel marketing platforms by IDC.
• Personalization engines by Gartner.

Our expert support teams also ensure that implementing our platform is as quick as possible. Specifically, our teams:

• Help you set up Insider with no extra setup charge.
• Answer and resolve questions quickly, regardless of where you’re located.
• Show you how the platform works based on your needs, goals, and marketing strategies.
• Migrate automated flows and customer journeys to our platform for you (if you have ones running on other platforms).

Additionally, we have an Integration Hub that lets you easily connect to 100+ tools across 20+ categories with minimal reliance on technical teams. These include:

• CRMs like Salesforce, Pipedrive, Zoho, and Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
• Email marketing platforms like Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, and Constant Contact.
• Analytics and attribution platforms like Mixpanel, Amplitude, and AppsFlyer.
• Marketing automation tools like Pardot, Keap, and Marketo.
• Live chat software like Drift and Intercom.
• And many other popular solutions.

You can also connect to any other online or offline source (e.g., DMS providers, legacy systems, and so on) using our flexible API. 

In short, Insider’s combination of excellent customer support, setup versatility, and connectors make it easy to integrate our solution into your existing tech stack. That’s why customers also rank our CDP at the top of categories like ease of setup, ease of use, and quality of support.

In the next sections, we’ll explore five ways Insider can help your automotive brand unify and activate customer data across 12+ channels to drive revenue and customer loyalty. 

#1 Unify your customer and visitor data from all online and offline sources

Our CDP aggregates customer data from any online or offline source. By doing that, it can resolve omnichannel identities and create 360-degree profiles of all your customers, like the one shown below. 

As you can see, these profiles contain valuable customer insights into preferred channels, previous leases and purchases, and even predictive characteristics, such as their likelihood to purchase.

Our CDP also creates unified profiles for all anonymous visitors who browse your website. When combined with our on-site personalization and engagement tools, this lets you personalize the experience of anonymous visitors based on the brands, models, and other attributes they’ve shown interest in.

This helps you generate more leads (e.g., via personalized test drive forms) and reduce the resources necessary to turn website visitors into customers. If you’re interested, we explore this process in our guide to anonymous visitor personalization.

#2 Segment and analyze your customers’ behaviors

Segmentation is the essential process of organizing your customers into groups based on shared characteristics, traits, and behaviors. Insider helps you do that by using 120+ attributes across three categories:

• Standard, like locations, demographics, devices, operating systems, and more. 
• Predefined, like leads, cart and browser abandoners, mobile app users, customers who have interacted with your brand on a specific channel, and more.
• Predictive, like shoppers with a discount affinity, with a high likelihood of buying or engaging on a specific channel, and more. These predictive audiences are created by our AI algorithms. You can learn more about them and their benefits in our guide to predictive marketing.

Once your data is unified, you can perform a detailed analysis of your segments to understand what drives their purchase decisions. For example, you can use Insider’s behavioral analytics capabilities to:

• Analyze channel reachability and message frequency. This helps you plan your campaign strategy and budget accordingly, based on where and how often customers want to be contacted. 

• Build funnels around goals, like collecting test-drive applications, getting survey responses, scheduling meetings at dealerships, and more. Funnels show you where drop-offs occur during these multi-step flows, so you can focus on finding and fixing issues that are hurting your conversion rates.

• Analyze purchase behavior by brands, models, and other attributes. You can also track key metrics like average order value (AOV), purchases and revenue per customer, and much more.

In short, these behavioral analytics tools let you dive deep into your customer data and uncover valuable insights for your digital marketing campaigns.

#3 Get access to 12+ activation channels

Unlike traditional CDP vendors, Insider isn’t solely focused on data unification, identity resolution, and analytics. Our solution is an Actionable (or Campaign CDP), meaning that it also gives you the tools and channels you need to activate your data.

Insider brings together 12+ activation channels, personalization tools, and omnichannel automation capabilities under the same umbrella as our enterprise CDP. 

This means you can use our platform to unify your martech stack by reducing the number of point solutions you’re using. Many of our customers have done that to achieve a lower total cost of ownership (TCO), improve ROI, and streamline their campaign creation process.

For example, Spotlight Retail Group used Insider to unify their customer data and reduce the reliance on technical teams for launching campaigns. This helped them slash campaign launch times by 80% and generate a 37x ROI in less than a year.

#4 Personalize your website, mobile app, and communication channels to every user

Your website is one of the most important marketing channels for generating leads, test drive sign-ups, and meetings with your salespeople. That’s why Insider gives you the tools you need to personalize the on-site experience and engage website visitors with relevant content.

Some of these tools include:

• Hello Bar: Lexus needed a tool that could deliver targeted banner messages across their site quickly, with little IT support. They used Insider’s Hello Bar to do that by highlighting products or services on limited-time sales. This helped them achieve an 86.5% increase in conversion rates.

• InStory: For another use case, Lexus was also looking to improve product discovery and boost customer engagement on mobile devices. To do that, they used InStory — a tool that lets you add personalized, Instagram-like stories to your site or mobile app. These strategically placed stories helped Lexus achieve a 104.9% increase in lead collection.

• Exit Intent Overlays: Toyota needed more users to apply for test drives on their website. Our team suggested they add a button at the bottom of each prompting users to sign up for a free test drive. Toyota then used our Exit Intent tool to target people who were leaving the campaign detail page. The new button led to a 17% increase in test drive applications, while the Exit Intent Overlays — to a 166% increase in applications.

Other leading automotive brands have also used Insider’s functionalities across different communication channels. 

For example, Renault and Avis both used Insider’s AI-powered digital assistant to handle inquiries about their brands and car purchase (or rental) processes across WhatsApp. Using this approach, Renault achieved a 93% decrease in customer service wait times, while Avis has 70% of their inquiries handled by the digital assistant and achieved 39% cost savings in one year. 

You can use Insider to apply similar personalization tactics across many other touchpoints, including email, push notifications, and SMS. For a deeper dive into this topic, check out our guide to achieving personalization at scale.

#5 Build automated flows and campaigns (with the help of artificial intelligence)

Alongside personalization, strategic automation flows and campaigns are essential for maximizing lead generation, revenue, and customer lifetime value (CLTV). Insider lets you build these flows and campaigns with Architect — an omnichannel customer journey builder and marketing automation solution.

You can use this tool to build various customer journeys, including:

• Email welcome flows for people who just subscribed to your newsletter.
• Test drive booking confirmations and reminders across SMS, WhatsApp, or another channel.
• Email surveys followed by relevant product recommendations across your website and messaging channels. You can even use AMP emails to let customers answer survey questions right in the email.
• Other complex omnichannel marketing automations (e.g., lead nurture flows) that are personalized to each user’s preferences. 

Building these journeys is as simple as using a drag-and-drop editor that lets you select channels, wait times, conditions, and much more. You can even A/B test different channels and tactics against each other to see which one produces better results.

Finally, you have plenty of AI-powered features that streamline the process and optimize each journey for you, including:

• Next-Best Channel Selection and Send-Time Optimization (STO), which analyze customers’ behaviors and automatically send messages at the times and on the touchpoints they’re most likely to engage on.

• A/B Test Winner Auto-Selection, which automatically guides users to the winning path in an A/B test, based on a metric you select beforehand (e.g., open rates, conversion rates, or revenue). This is a great way to scale your experiments and auto-optimize your journeys, as you don’t need to manually review the results and adjust flows based on that.

Finally, you can also rely on Sirius AI — our AI solution that combines the power of large language models and machine learning — to streamline the campaign creation process even more. For example, this solution can create customer segments, journeys, copy, and images using simple text prompts.

Unify your customer data, predict future behaviors, and deliver personalized experiences with Insider

Insider can enable your automotive brand to unify customer data and activate it across 12+ channels — including your website, mobile app, email, WhatsApp, SMS, and many others. 

Additionally, our advanced personalization tools and versatile customer journey builder make it easy to tailor every touchpoint to your customers’ needs, interests, and preferences. 

Finally, our best-in-class customer support and ready-made templates for tons of use cases ensure you can get started and drive meaningful results (like lead generation, revenue, and retention) as quickly as possible.

Click here to book a demo with our team and learn how Insider can help you reach your business goals.