If you’re unconvinced about the future of data’s involvement in literally any area of business, simply unlock your phone, navigate using Google Maps, take an Uber, order takeout or, well…you get the drift. Data is everywhere; not just within the confines of the company walls where teams are developing self-driving vehicles or sending people to space.

In part two of a two-part series on how tech teams are leveraging data, we spoke to six additional companies about what the ability for direct personalization means for the future of their industries.

Affinitiv

At Affinitiv, vehicles aren’t the only thing in the space that’s driven. The company relies heavily on data so that their customers can provide their clients with marketing collateral that makes a dent. We recently spoke to Courtney Evans, vice president of product marketing, about how they segment their audiences as precisely as possible and where they see themselves further down the road.  

What’s one way your team uses data that people may not expect?

Data is at the core of everything we do. With all of our customers — both original equipment manufacturers (OEM) and dealer levels — we base our marketing efforts on data. We also feed data back to help create efficiencies within the dealerships and give the OEMs further company insights. 

How we analyze this data and use it is unique to the market in the last few years. Ten years ago, we based our communications on data that was given to us. Today, we are taking in many different forms of data, both first-party coming from the customer and third-party data to help support and segment out different audiences. This third-party data can help paint a fuller picture of the customer, with everything from life events, consumer habits, credit history or additional facts. 

Think of it as a giant Excel page. The customer would be the rows and different data points would be the columns. By supplementing and adding in new data sources, we are able to add more columns and learn more about each customer as an individual. Our marketing efforts can become more geared towards the individual rather than a segment based on time and mileage or basic customer information. 

What’s a recent data-driven project your team worked on that created success for either the company or its customers?

We have focused a lot on consuming different data sources, merging it with the data we already have. We then use the collective data to create better segments and audiences for our marketing efforts. A great example of this is the work we do on prospecting clients. Our customers are constantly looking for new customers and how to supplement those lost. We have designed new audiences that are based on life events and consumer habits to create more specific groups of people who are likely to be in the market either for a new vehicle or servicing work. 

By using the data collected from both first- and third-party sources, we are able to get more granular, create more audiences and properly convey the right message. This helps to bring new customers in and decreases our clients’ marketing spend. With those same audiences, we can vary the offers or messaging in one piece of marketing material to appeal more to the individual and their unique needs and habits to warrant better results.

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