On the 1st of June, after three long months of lockdown, automotive plants restarted their production lines and dealerships started opening their doors again to the public. But those three months had left their mark.
Many OEMs and dealerships suffered immediate and significant cash flow issues with money tied up in cars that couldn’t be sold, all depreciating in value by the day.
As a result, most OEMs had stopped all or most above-the-line (ATL) media activity, with some maintaining only a limited digital presence.
At the beginning of June, media agencies were briefed on restarting marketing activity to shift this stock, but with an added complication: budget cuts.
Media planners and buyers need a way to do more with less by quickly identifying and reaching in-market customers, accelerating sales and improving the efficiency of their budgets.
To make matters worse, auto OEM campaigns are constrained with longer-term strategic challenges around their limited ability to understand, capture and track increasingly fragmented and complex customer journeys.
To help with these issues, LiveRamp has partnered with leading online car-buying marketplace carwow, and we are utilising their rich automotive data as part of a strategy to help OEMs and their media agencies build and activate audiences across every channel – all in a consistent and privacy-safe way.
Revving up the data engine
Let’s look at a hypothetical example of a well-known car manufacturer that specialises in small, reliable cars. They capture data on their customers through multiple owned and paid channels:
- Website engagement data (though the brand cannot recognise whether these are existing customers)
- Media exposure data (for example users who have engaged with ads online)
- CRM data (for example customers whose finance is expiring over the next 3 months, and therefore may be starting to shop around for new finance deals)
The OEM can unify these first-party data silos and build a single view of the customer across these multiple touchpoints. So now they can see that someone browsing the website is actually a customer whose finance is expiring in the next 3 months.
The car brand can now unlock the opportunity to personalise the website content for that customer based on this newly uncovered data connectivity point.
But this is just the starting point. By tapping into carwow’s data available within LiveRamp Safe Haven – the LiveRamp platform for data collaboration – the car brand can gain richer customer insights and build a more holistic customer journey.
4 ways OEMs can leverage carwow data
The car manufacturer can overlap their own first-party data on lapsing customers with carwow data to augment their view of the customer journey. This allows them to identify ‘hot, in-market customers at a risk of churn’, made up of CRM customers with expiring finance who are also researching competitor offers on carwow. These are existing customers with a high churn risk, where data-driven insights can help unlock customer retention. Once this audience is created, the OEM can:
- Deploy these enriched audiences across their CRM/ email comms with the right personalised finance offer to retain them
- Deploy these enriched audiences on their website for personalisation, so that when the lapsing customers browse the brand’s website, they will see personalised offers based on their existing finance deal plus their recent research on carwow
- Target these ‘hot, in-market customers at a risk of churn’ across their paid marketing channels, to message these customers with the right offer at the right time and retain them
- Build lookalikes of the lapsing audiences for acquisition strategies, to run across all their addressable media channels
Get better insights
For OEM marketers, time is of the essence. Everyone is suffering the same fallout from lockdown, but those who find a way to identify and reach audiences quickly and accurately will recover quicker.
Get in touch today to find out more about how this partnership can supercharge consumer analytics and insights.