Targeting Automotive Customers With Data-Driven Insights

As automotive shoppers move more of their buying process online, it is important to understand their identity throughout the car-buying journey to provide a more personalized shopping experience that builds dealer and lender confidence in who their customers are online.

As online customer interactions grow in record numbers, dealers and lenders are challenged with accurately ensuring they are working with the same digital shopper on multiple devices, verifying identity and preventing fraud, assessing an online shopper’s buying capacity and customizing the right offer that fits their needs.

A 2019 Neustar and Forrester survey shows only 10% of marketers say they are confident in building a 360-degree view of their consumers.

Impacting this process further is the customer buying journey, which leverages online more but reduces the time a shopper spends in-market. According to the 2020 Cox Automotive Car Buyer Journey study, consumers now spend 89 days in-market, compared with 118 in 2017. Furthermore, consumers are averaging nearly 15 hours researching online, up from 13:55 in 2019.

Because of the increased time spent online, dealers and lenders must target their promotions and messages earlier on, and in a more personalized way that uniquely speaks to each shopper. Advanced analytical data and insights are increasingly being leveraged to accomplish this stronger targeted marketing, as well as offer better digital identity and verification solutions and protections against fraud.

What’s needed is a thorough understanding of a shopper’s identity. As a result, comprehensive and validated metadata-driven identity graphs based on all of these personalized criteria provide the digital technology needed to help create a more complete consumer profile to engage persona-based marketing and omnichannel strategies.

This process helps the automotive ecosystem establish transaction-able identifiers along with all necessary requirements for consent management.

Knowing the Customer’s Individual Needs

New target-marketing data resources help dealers better identify consumers who are likely to be ready to take on new financing for an auto loan or lease.

It also can better match those consumers to vehicle models that dealers have in supply, based on what those consumers can afford. This is important because dealers and their marketing partners must re-evaluate their strategies to better align with changing consumer needs and financial capacities.

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Driven largely by the impact from COVID-19 last year, financial durability remains an important way to segment the economic health of households within the same credit bands. It considers a consumer’s assets, income from dividends and interest, retirement income and the relationships between income, debt and spending.

Today’s sophisticated economic anonymized marketing data resources tap into this information to help dealers make better and more precise decisions when putting an incentive-driven offer in front of a specific customer.

This deeper level of identity graph-powered insight is helping dealers and agency partners shift their traditional media strategy to a programmatic audience one.

Changing Target Marketing Strategies

Successful programmatic strategies are based on truly understanding their in-market shopping audience. However, just because a consumer is shopping for a car online doesn’t mean they can purchase it.

For example, first-time buyers may have no idea if or what they can afford, and these waters have been muddied further by the pandemic economy. They may be shopping for a vehicle online without knowing if the payment fits into their budget or if they can get credit.

Dealers and their marketing agency partners need to identify several intent signals besides financial capacity to target consumers who have income and assets; discretionary spending ability; credit capacity; and propensity to buy.

A Stronger Focus on Online Fraud Protection

Even with this higher level of personalization power, dealers and lenders must be wary of fraud and synthetic fraud because of the increased presence online.

According to Cox Automotive in a recent edition of Auto Remarketing, nearly 40% of buyers want to finalize their vehicle price online, up from just 25% in 2017.

Fraudsters create new, fictitious identities by using different components of real identities – such as a name from one person, an address from a different person or the Social Security number of a minor or deceased person.

Fraudsters then attempt to gain credit with the fictitious identity to monetize it. These manufactured identities are used for short-term gain and then abandoned.

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Today’s fraud-prevention technologies leverage alerts delivered in batch or real time, using machine-learning algorithms to detect synthetic ID behaviors and patterns at various entry points.

The alerts can be used during account origination to sort applications that trigger an alert into a manual review process. For example, when used in waterfall with a credit report, auto dealers and lenders can leverage these real-time alerts to vet new customers opening or applying for an auto loan or when seeking financing for a vehicle.

The rapid growth in digital retailing means customers will be spending more time online shopping for their perfect vehicle. With these advanced analytical insights along with uniquely personalized identity graph technology, dealers and lenders will have more power to reach them on a personalized level while protecting against fraud.

Lena Bourgeois (above, left) is automotive general manager for Equifax.