Car dealers in the UK are in the process of adapting to the GDPR era, as stronger regulations surrounding consents hits data-driven marketing campaigns.
Business is taking a hit as a result, as dealerships find themselves under new restrictions on data handling, The Drum reports, following a study carried out by Marketing Delivery.
According to the research, email consents took a 10% drop (from 80% to 70%) in the final quarter of 2018, compared with data taken from the final three months of 2017.
Data on mobile telephone numbers took an even sharper tumble, with consent rates falling from 73% to 53%.
The findings suggest that dealers are still building leads that are not GDPR-friendly, but this comes despite enquiry numbers pushing up over the same periods, from 222,660 to 252,600.
Marketing Delivery managing director, Jeremy Evans, said:
“Email remains the most productive channel for converting sales enquiries, and is the most likely channel through which car retailers can gain customer consent for marketing communications, such as new car sales messages, used car stock alerts, and service and MOT reminders.
“While GDPR appears to have impacted the ability of some dealers to secure customer consent for future communications, data capture rates for email and mobile remain strong in the majority of cases.
“It’s down to dealers to sell the value of consent to their customers, by offering only the most useful, relevant and timely communications.”
Those coping best with the legislative transition are dealers that work harder to make more attractive offers to consumers. Such businesses are far steadier reporting customer data capture and consent levels over the GDPR implementation period.
