15 Feb 2012: CRM, database and insight services provider Eclipse Marketing has set up a collaboration agreement with automotive solutions provider, Progress Automotive Solutions, to establish what it claims is the first ever complete predictive marketing analysis system for the UK’s automotive sector.

The collaboration provides automotive marketers with traceable insight into a vehicle’s entire histor, regardless of changes in ownership, service centre or the dealer management system that the data is captured in. The companies believe the system will deliver powerful programmes for sales activities and enable automotive brands to fully understand a customer’s needs and score propensity to repurchase or to buy additional cars.

This insight allows automotive marketers to predicatively target consumers with timely and relevant service offers and reminders. Marketing campaigns will benefit by using historic data, extracted from dealer management systems in the sector, and put directly into the hands of people who can understand the data and use insight to help deliver solutions. This will ensure that marketing campaigns will now be targeted directly at consumers to help improve efficiency and results.

With the capability to extract data from all mainstream global dealer management systems, this collaboration enables automotive marketers to predicatively target drivers with:

• Vehicle maintenance prompts
• Vehicle milestone checks and recommendations
• Predictive wear and tear marketing with Electronic Vehicle Health Check (EVHC) data
• Tyre checks/replacements
• CRM activity 

David Pickering, Chairman and Managing Director, Eclipse Marketing, said: “Establishing the ability for automotive marketers to have the individual insight into a car’s history and tailor marketing and customer service communications to customers accordingly is an exciting prospect. We will be able to now give marketers an empowering level of insight which will then open the door to providing exceptional customer service to automotive customers.”

Carl Lightfoot, Managing Director, Progress Automotive Solutions, commented: “Vehicle data has been something that has long been collected by dealers and service providers, but it has proved almost impossible to do this across different dealers and service centres for different automotive marques and across different territories. We are the only company that has the ability to do this.

“The art of getting data from systems has evolved and cannot be replicated easily. There are a plethora of systems available but we don’t just go for the low hanging fruit – we cover every dealer management system. To be able to offer consistent and clear data across such a broad spectrum of DMS vendors in multiple countries is almost a nirvana for car brands and we’re really excited that collaborating with Eclipse can open up more opportunities to create more effective marketing programmes for the industry.”