Why Your Automated Marketing Tool is Failing You

Success and failure

Successful customer engagement platforms create environments that balance the right tools for dealers in order to ensure brand consistency and flexibility for localization.

Here is an example of how Outsell Fuel gives dealers unparalleled brand integration and campaign options for customer engagement:


Marketing automation tools aren’t designed with this model in mind, and frequently miss the mark by:

• Assuming one user owns the entire marketing process – including template selection, offer management, audience segmentation, and sending. The automotive marketing environment tends to involve various roles from each tier, all of whom play a part in managing campaigns.

• Ignoring the need for customization – most stores can’t create their own unique campaigns and have to be content with whatever the brand happens to offer that month, regardless of their dealerships’ monthly goals.

• Forcing dealer users to learn and manage a complex array of marketing tools in order to deploy their marketing communications. Many dealer marketing staff members have full time jobs as salespeople or administrators that only handle marketing tasks in their spare time.

• Lacking a streamlined way to manage multiple data sources – between CRM and DMS systems, dealers have different data in different places, and a lot of marketing automation providers ask dealers to merge and deduplicate those data sources on their own (which adds complexity and frustration to the process).


More than marketing automation, forward thinking customer engagement providers embrace the automotive multi-tier selling environment (the brand, region, and dealer) across campaigns, creative, and contact frequency limits. Through the use of predictive analytics, Outsell Fuel determines the optimal content and timing for each customer, while weaving together brand-centric creative with localized dealer messaging – all without heavy lifting by the dealer, region, or manufacturer.

The “right” customer engagement platform shouldn’t be hard to use, automatically cleanses your dirty data, and makes it easy to craft a message that speaks to each customer. The interface should make it easy to customize campaigns and guide you through the process of selecting a creative treatment, offer, and message in three easy steps.

Automotive marketing success comes from encouraging cooperation between dealers and their brands, and marrying local messaging with the OEM brand image. Choosing to engage your customers rather than just automating your marketing is the first step to effectively communicating with customers with the right message at the right time.