Post one of ten posts I will be making leading up to Digital Dealer 12.

If you are one of the best dealers in the country you are using 10% of your Secret Weapon…what is it?

DATA!

Your DMS is full of it, but that’s just the tip of the ice burg. Your OEM has 10 years of your dealerships customers you need to get it. Polk has data you can use, there are 1000’s of people that hit your website every month who leave trails of billions of bits of behavioral data, your call tracking provider has data you can use I could go on but you get the point…

OR DO YOU?

In a recent Automarketing tweet chat (you can catch it every Wednesday 12pm Central time on Twitter, shameless plug) we discussed why a CRM application should not be your marketing database. There was a lot of discussion on this but the integration of  all these silos of data is one of the biggest reasons I think they cannot be the same thing.

Should they integrate? YES

Bottom line where ever you have your Relational Marketing Database (in this case I use Relational in the sense of the relationship of the customer / prospect to the dealership and the data it has about them) you need to have one.

What should it do?

The following at a MINIMUM:

• Contain all your DMS customers, all your CRM customers, the data you procure from your OEM and it should segment these customer based on their relationship to the dealership (Existing or Potential Customer).
• Segment these customers based on their market status and relationship to their trade cycle or service cycle
• Allow for automated email communications (there are actually 44 touch points over the life cycle of a customer it should automate)
• Allow for Email content distribution
• Allow for Email Marketing
• Allow for Direct Mail Marketing
• Track all Channels (Email, Direct Mail)
• Give you a Sale ratio and an ROI

I don't know of a single CRM vendor who can do all of this and these are the MINIMUMS, we haven’t gotten to the hard stuff.

The database of your future is here today and will be used in the presidential campaign of 2012.

I was reading a post this morning by Dave Levinthal “Obama’s 2012 Campaign Is Watching You” it talks about the various offline databases the Obama campaign is using to collect millions of dollars in campaign funding and to persuade people for their vote, that is the marketing database of the future.

Earlier in this post I brought up just a few of the offline databases that have good data dealers can leverage, there are many more and would make this post very long. Suffice to say for now the data integration and uses for retail automotive like what is being done for Obama 2012 will be here before then end of 2012, count on it.

What should you do?

• Get the minimums above done as best you can
• Look at who’s getting your data and what they can do with that data when they get it
• If they are using your data outside of helping your dealership in anyway, at the very least tell them you want data from them… Qui pro quo. All data is has uses some you just may not have thought of yet.
• Make sure that where ever your data lives you can get it if you want to move to another solution
• Ask what plans do you have for the future to leverage this data? At the end of the day if you are partnering with a vendor, you should be doing it based on their vision not on what they have now. What they have now everyone will have soon.

Data is the foundation of a good marketing strategy, online or off. Begin the process of building a Relational Marketing Database in some form as best you can and look for a marketing partner that can deliver a vision of using that data to help your dealership grow.

Hope this helps, 

Other Links that may help:

Marketing Automation... The Future Of Marketing

If you like this post and are going to be at Digital Dealer in Orlando in April you may want to check out my Session Marketing By The Numbers "How to execute ZMOT in your store"

Twitter: @pcmguy