How to Provide a Better Online Shopping Experience without 3rd Party Cookies

Imagine if you knew your customer so well that you could personalize their online shopping experience to give them exactly what they need. Suppose there was a better way to target the right people with the right message. What if there was a way to know which customers are your most profitable, now and in the future? 

As a Dealer in this new 3rd party cookie-less world, it’s harder to know where your customer is on their online shopping journey. The ability to track and display relevant ads to shoppers as they move throughout the web has become more of a challenge in this age of digital privacy. These days, Dealers and their agency partners need to be creative to target car buyers without the ability to track their behaviours. Most of the time, this requires shifting the focus from 3rd party cookies to making the most of first-party cookies, but this can require significant changes in how you plan your marketing.

How can I best use my first-party data?

Your Dealerships first-party data is full of valuable information you can use in many ways. This is data that usually comes from lists found in your DMS, CRM, and any other system in your store where customer data can be found. The biggest advantage of first-party data is that it’s yours. The people in these systems have been in contact with you in some way, shape or form and have given you their information freely. If you collect, store and organize it well, first-party data can become one of your competitive advantages. You can use this data for things like direct mail or email blasts or use it to find out the history or buying behaviour of a customer you’re seeing in person at your dealership.  

The challenge with first-party data is that it lives everywhere. For a Dealer, this data can be found in all departments; Parts, Service, Sales, etc. Plus, exporting this data is tricky because it comes from all different platforms and systems. With no central source of info for a customer, it’s difficult to have an accurate profile of who they are and their complete experience at your dealership. Unless you have an agency or someone who knows how to collect, store and utilize this data, it can be a huge pain for a Dealer to sort and use it effectively.

Isn’t there an easier way to export and organize my first-party data?

You’re not alone if you’re feeling overwhelmed or struggling to find more efficient ways to use your first-party data in this trackerless world. The inability to follow a customer’s digital journey prevents us from targeting or re-targeting users the way we used to; it also raises many questions on how to make the most of our marketing dollars without wasting a ton of time.

Questions like…

• How can I advertise a new vehicle to the right people while excluding existing customers that just purchased from me?
• How can I tell if someone is ready for a sales phone call without wasting my salespeople’s time?
• How can I personalize my customer’s online journey to improve conversion rates?
• How can I remind customers of the vehicles they’ve seen on all channels, including ads, email, and text?
• How can I see what ads my customers are clicking on?
• How can I more closely align my in-person sales experience with my online sales experience?
• How can I automatically push my segmented lists into my ad platforms (google ads and Facebook) rather than manually?
• How can I be sure my advertising is working?

And more importantly, how can I find out all this information without taking a 6-month course?

In a perfect world, there would be some way to pull, organize and analyze your first-party data, match online to offline behaviour and know a customer’s online journey on your website from start to finish. There would be a way to centralize your first-party data without hours of manual data entry and get higher accuracy on your conversion values so you could get a better ROI on your marketing efforts. Until this perfect world exists, Leadbox will continue to innovate and work with Dealers to implement successful digital marketing campaigns that make the most of your data and ultimately help make you profitable. At Leadbox, we love a good problem to solve. In other words, stay tuned…