By Jaden Miller, Content Strategist, 9 Clouds

What’s almost always partnered with a successful automotive digital marketing strategy? The answer is, healthy, updated, and organized CRM data.

There’s no one formula for removing stale leads from a CRM that will work for every dealership. You must determine which process for filtering out cold leads will work best with your CRM and for your operation.

Maintaining healthy automotive CRM data will help dealerships reach the right audience with their digital spend. Here are two examples:

• Email — Sending to an accurate, segmented email list of leads and customers who are ready to purchase or lease, results in more website traffic and vehicle sales. The alternative is to “blast” your email messages to a wide net of contacts, including many unqualified recipients, which results in a lower ROI despite a dealer’s best efforts.
• Digital ads — Using existing CRM data can help reach a qualified audience with the digital ad spend. In Facebook Ads Manager, for example, marketers can target custom lists from the CRM, as well as other Facebook users who share similar qualities. But, for this to work, dealers must identify the target audience and segment them in the CRM.

If you’re using your CRM provider for email marketing, your CRM is a great place to start clearing out disengaged leads. As a first step to removing stale leads, decide on some criteria based on what makes sense for the dealership and create corresponding lists if the CRM tool allows. It may look something like this:

• Contacts who have bounced more than twice
• Contacts who haven’t opened the last five emails they’ve received
• Contacts who have unsubscribed from emails

Also, consider the contacts who purchased more than five years ago. Do the records indicate that they have since purchased elsewhere? If so, cut them from your marketing efforts.

If these past customers haven’t purchased elsewhere according to the data, it may be time to re-engage them. Perhaps they are thinking about buying again soon. And, if they are not interested, they will have the opportunity to jump ship by unsubscribing from the dealership’s messages. That puts them back in the first bucket of disengaged contacts and helps dealers to continue to prune and segment CRM data.

In addition to the risk of sending the wrong message to the wrong person with an email “blast,” you may also consequently get marked as SPAM, which impacts your sender reputation and future deliverability.

If you hit a “honeypot” (dormant email accounts that are set up to catch spammers), your sender status may be compromised. Internet service providers may direct all of your emails into your recipients’ SPAM folders. And your email marketing software can impose strict limitations, like requiring double opt-ins, manual review, or even account deactivation. It’s serious business. Don’t email those old, dead email addresses.

Now, depending on a dealership’s process, dealers and marketing managers may not be comfortable deleting these old contacts from the CRM. But what they certainly should do is, mark or segment them in such a way that indicates that they won’t spend marketing dollars on them anymore. (Until, of course, they perform an action that indicates they’ve re-engaged, like walking into the dealership or requesting an online trade evaluation.)

Maintaining an organized and segmented CRM database takes work, but it’s a critical part of maximizing your marketing dollars and improving your ROI.