Building Customer Insights is the foundation of a successful marketing strategy in the automotive industry. By analyzing customer information from different first and third-party sources—such as transactions, leads, engagement, behaviors, and marketing preferences—dealerships can better understand their existing customers and identify their true target audience. This process allows companies to create targeted campaigns that speak directly to the needs and interests of their customers based on real data, not assumptions.
In today’s competitive automotive market, understanding who your customers are and what motivates their purchases is more important than ever. Building effective Customer Insights helps dealers uncover patterns and trends, enabling them to deliver a personalized experience that drives sales and builds lasting relationships. By focusing on the right audience and tailoring your marketing strategy accordingly, you can maximize your impact and stay ahead in the industry.
Most dealerships are sitting on a goldmine of data — CRM leads, DMS transactions, website visits, and email engagement — but without a way to connect it all, dealers are left guessing who’s really ready to buy. At the beginning of your building Customer Insights and marketing strategy, it’s crucial to establish a strong foundation so your targeting is effective and your churn is lower.
Guessing leads to wasted ad spend, irrelevant offers, wasted money, and inefficient use of marketing budgets — and missed opportunities your competitors may quickly capitalize on. The average dealership spent $708 per new vehicle sold on advertising in 2023 (DealerMade), and automotive digital ad spend is projected to reach $21.22 billion in 2024, up 11.1% year over year (Demand Local). If your marketing isn’t precise, you’re simply amplifying the noise — not the results. Prioritizing convenience for customers can improve conversion rates and reduce wasted marketing efforts.
Every interaction — whether it’s a website visit, a test drive, or a service appointment — offers valuable data that can help dealerships better understand their target audience. By collecting information from online forms, social media engagement, and in-person conversations, dealers can create a richer picture of each customer. Capturing accurate address information is especially important, as it helps consolidate Customer Insights and detect duplicates by matching mailing addresses and other contact details.
This is crucial because 95% of car shoppers rely on online resources before ever stepping into a dealership (Invoca). Without a plan to capture and act on that data, dealerships risk losing opportunities — and it happens often: nearly 23.5% of dealer leads are lost due to missed follow-ups within 24 hours, and another 13.3% never make it into the CRM (Invoca).
Dealerships should aim to make the experience seamless (mobile-friendly forms, in-dealership surveys, etc.) so customers are more willing to share data. When that information is tied back to behavior, it unlocks powerful personalization — and the results prove it.
Activator is a performance-driven Customer Data Platform (CDP) built for Web, CRM, and DMS environments. It helps dealerships unify Customer Insights across channels by pulling data from multiple sources and surfacing the most useful attributes and intent signals. By recognizing whether a shopper is casually browsing, actively researching, or showing readiness to buy, Activator enables dealers to prioritize follow-up and personalize offers that align with each customer’s stage in the journey. It becomes the central hub for understanding both active buyers and passive shoppers, translating intent signals into timely, relevant outreach that increases conversion opportunities. It provides unified access to customer information for dealership teams, ensuring seamless management of customer interactions while equipping them with insights to anticipate needs rather than simply react to them.
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Your most profitable opportunities might not be the ones raising their hands today. Activator helps identify:
By surfacing these shoppers, dealerships can reach out before competitors do — which is critical when 88% of consumers visit or call a store within a day of a local mobile search (Demand Local). Making outreach engaging is essential to gather valuable insights from these potential customers and foster loyalty.
Building targeted segments is a critical step in turning Customer Insights into actionable marketing. In the automotive industry, companies can group customers based on shared characteristics like age, location, vehicle ownership, driving habits, or service history. This segmentation allows dealerships to create marketing campaigns that are highly relevant to each group, increasing the likelihood of engagement and conversion.
For example, a dealership might create a segment of customers based on those who recently purchased a car and are likely to need service soon, or another segment for customers interested in electric vehicles. By targeting these segments with tailored messaging and offers, companies can enhance their brand reputation, attract more customers, and stand out in a crowded market. Effective targeting ensures that marketing resources are spent wisely and that every customer feels understood and valued.
Customers often interact through multiple channels — email, web, phone, in-dealership — which can create duplicate records. That fragmentation leads to inconsistent messaging and inefficiencies. By using tools that automatically dedupe and manage duplicate records (like Activator’s Data Management Layer paired with CRM cleanup routines), each customer ends up with a single, accurate profile.
This prevents duplicate promotions, conflicting offers, and wasted ad dollars while keeping the experience seamless — helping build trust and loyalty.
Surfacing Customer Insights means making detailed customer information easily accessible to your sales and marketing teams. In the automotive industry, this includes data such as purchase history, vehicle ownership, service records, and previous interactions with your dealership. When teams have access to these insights, they can deliver a more personalized experience—offering the right support, service, or promotion at the right time.
By leveraging complete Customer Insights, dealerships can anticipate customer needs, recommend relevant services, and provide targeted support that enhances the overall customer experience. This not only increases satisfaction and loyalty but also drives more sales by ensuring every interaction is meaningful and relevant. In a market where customer expectations are higher than ever, having a clear view of each customer’s journey is a powerful advantage.
With Activator’s Activation Studio, you can segment customers into meaningful clusters based on real-time data, engagement signals, and purchase behavior. These segments are then activated via automated, multichannel campaigns (email, SMS, digital ads, social, etc.) with offers tailored to each group or event, or exported to build audiences in your preferred digital or traditional marketing platforms. Campaigns can be triggered by specific events, such as upcoming industry workshops, webinars, or notable industry updates, ensuring timely and relevant outreach.
Example: Instead of blasting every customer with a lease offer, send personalized messages only to those whose leases are expiring in the next 90 days — reducing noise and driving more showroom visits.
This precision targeting is paying off: in Q2 2025, dealerships saw F&I profit per vehicle retailed rise year-over-year, and front-end gross profit improved quarter-to-quarter, proving that effective profiles and marketing pay dividends (JMA Group).
Activator uses real-time customer intent signals and behavioral data to deliver hyper-relevant offers. The messaging is dynamically adjusted based on what the customer did previously and what the profile says now — so your marketing evolves, not remains static.
Ongoing development in automotive technology and marketing tools enables dealerships to continuously improve personalization efforts, ensuring that messaging stays relevant and effective.
The benefits of complete Customer Insights in the automotive industry are best illustrated through real-world examples. One dealership, for instance, used Customer Insights to identify a segment of customers who were likely to purchase more cars in the near future. By targeting this group with personalized marketing campaigns and exclusive offers, the dealership saw a significant increase in sales and revenue.
Another company focused on improving the customer experience by analyzing service records and purchase history to anticipate customer needs. This proactive approach led to higher customer satisfaction scores and greater loyalty, as customers felt the dealership truly understood and valued them. These examples highlight the critical importance of complete Customer Insights in the automotive industry—where knowing your customers and targeting them effectively can make all the difference in driving future purchases and building a strong brand reputation.
To ensure your customer insight efforts are delivering results, it’s essential to measure their effectiveness using key metrics. In the automotive industry, this means tracking data such as customer retention rates, sales conversion rates, and customer satisfaction scores. By analyzing these metrics, dealerships can assess the impact of their personalized experience initiatives and refine their marketing strategies for even better results.
Regularly reviewing the effectiveness of Customer Insights helps businesses identify what’s working and where there’s room for improvement. This data-driven approach allows companies to optimize their marketing budgets, enhance the customer experience, and ultimately drive more sales and revenue growth. By focusing on the importance and benefits of complete Customer Insights, dealerships can create lasting value for both their customers and their business.
This is especially dangerous given market shifts — light-truck and SUV sales are up 11.4% YoY, while passenger car sales fell 9.2% (Marklines). Dealerships aligned with OEM incentives are seeing strong gains — in July 2025, GM sales rose 11.9%, Ford 10.4%, and Stellantis 12.7% year-over-year (Marklines). Industry forecasts indicate that continued growth in these segments is expected over the next several years.
Maintaining compliance with data privacy regulations is crucial, but dealerships must also ensure that all marketing practices adhere to automotive safety standards. Failing to prioritize safety and compliance can result in significant risks for both customers and businesses.
Dealerships also play a key role in supporting the community's transportation needs and must adapt to shifts in how people use vehicles and alternative transport modes.
Dealerships using this approach stay competitive in a changing market — and build long-term loyalty by consistently showing customers the right offer at the right time.
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