Since unveiling the Unified Data Platform at NADA, I’ve gotten to talk directly to more people in automotive than any time since I’ve joined Foureyes. Hearing from CEOs, CTOs, CMOs, VPs of Sales, and VPs of Marketing about their data challenges and processes, there’s one software product mentioned more consistently than any other: Microsoft Excel.

Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised by that; Excel is a powerful tool for any business. It’s simple to start with. Pretty much every business leader is at least comfortable in it. It’s flexible to handle a variety of needs. 

Nonetheless, I am surprised that really significant and sophisticated automotive groups are using Excel to access their data, uncover insights, and track progress. 

Why Are Automotive Groups Still Relying on Excel?

My hunch is that this is due to the federated nature of many group relationships. Each store is given decision-making authority around their tech stack, vendors, and marketing budgets. So that leaves groups with, say, 20 stores, 3 different CRMs, and 14 different strategies being executed by 7 different vendors. 

Excel becomes a very attractive and approachable place to start wrangling the data to answer questions like: 

• Where am I getting my leads? 
• How am I closing them? 

This becomes problematic when you push Excel too far. Excel was never designed to be a database. And groups have a TON of data. Add these two factors together, and the solution you implemented to get to answers may be leading to false conclusions or have gaping visibility holes that you can’t even see. 

From conversations, I’m seeing 7 common symptoms to indicate that it’s time to get your data visibility and reporting out of Excel and into something better equipped to handle a large volume of data.

Symptom 1: Reliance on a “mad scientist”

In case you are your group’s mad scientist, know that I use the term with the utmost affection and respect. I’ve been this person myself:

• 2 AM Thursday: Awake because of a nagging business problem 
• 4 AM: Give up on sleep, get up, and open Excel
• 10 AM: 3 tabs, 17 hidden columns, a pivot table, and a graph that’s moving towards an insight
• 2 PM: Share with a few team members. They can’t understand the spreadsheet, but they get the graph. They like the graph. You keep improving it, and that view becomes a staple of monthly reporting. 

Or you’re NOT the mad scientist, but you have one on staff. Their graph is good, but you’re worried: 

• Maybe they’re biased.
• Maybe they’re leaving the organization. 
• Maybe they’re spending all their time in this spreadsheet. 

Whether you or someone else is the mad scientist, relying on an individual isn’t a good sign.

Symptom 2: Multiple people maintaining a spreadsheet

Excel has only gotten better at allowing people to collaborate in a single document, and reliance on a single individual has its drawbacks. So multiple people *shouldn’t* be an issue. And yet, multiple people maintaining a spreadsheet is a symptom of a problem because Excel is not designed to be a database. When you start using Excel as a database and invite multiple people to manage it, you open yourself up for errors. 

Some common errors that you start to see: 

• Row count limitations
• Duplicate records
• Empty fields
• Formatting that conveys information

Symptom 3: A really costly mistake

Data errors like the ones outlined can sound trivial, like minor annoyances that really precise people get hung up on. But once you start using data to make decisions, data errors can lead to costly mistakes. I stumbled on this page that collects spreadsheet mistakes that hit the news. Lost business opportunities. Paying wrong salaries. Inaccurate electoral votes. It shows the variety and relative frequency of active mistakes coming from pushing Excel beyond its intended scope. But I think the pernicious problems are the ones that escape us because we don’t have clean data. For example, how much money do you think the average automotive group spends unnecessarily because of an inability to answer where they are getting their leads?

Symptom 4: Excel running slow

More than any of the other symptoms, Microsoft running slow is the most objective and easy to spot sign that you’re relying too heavily on Excel. 

Symptom 5: Data access limited to a developer

A lot of groups have told me about their efforts to get data out of their CRMs. In addition to political hurdles when CRM companies exert ownership of the data input by dealerships into their own CRM instances, there are technical hurdles as well. Many CRMs use APIs or file transfers that are really only accessible to people with coding skills. I talked with one group who negotiated for over a year to get their data from the CRM vendor only to be provided with an API that required a developer’s skills to use--and when they got a developer hired, they found that the API only had a portion of the data they needed. 

While this isn’t a failing of Excel directly, it is indicative of how Excel is too simple of a software to match the complexity of the data challenge facing automotive groups. If the data is too hard for a typical businessperson to access, then the tools of the typical businessperson are unlikely to be the right tools for the task.

Symptom 6: Three or more sources

To combine data successfully, you have to normalize the data so it matches up. Take for example something as simple as a lead generator’s name, like TrueCar. Or is it True Car? How about TrueCar.com? Or True car? In our work normalizing automotive data, we’ve seen more than 300 variations of this one lead source in a single group’s dataset. 

Additionally, you need to understand the data and the decisions being made to get to the numbers. Take something as simple as open rate on an email. It’s easy to assume that every email tool uses the same formula, but they don’t. Here are three variations I’ve encountered: 

• Total unique opens/total sends
• Total unique opens/(total sends - total bounces)
• (Total unique opens - opens triggered by system caching)/(total sends - total bounces). 

All three formulas are reasonable, but If you have two vendors using two different formulas, you are going to need to get more data to normalize the open rate.

Symptom 7: Lack of clarity

Maybe the most meaningful symptom of all is that you feel unanchored to your group’s performance. You’re consistently frustrated that you can’t quickly see what’s making one store excellent while another is average, and getting apples-to-apples data feels elusive. 

If that’s where you’re finding yourself, know that you’re not alone. I’ve talked to massive groups, really smart groups, and some of the highest-performing groups in the industry and all of them are feeling this pain.

Can Foureyes Help?

Foureyes has spent the last five years wrangling automotive data. Our developers integrated with all the CRMs, engineered a simple script to track all forms, calls, and chats on your website, and collected all the franchised inventory on a daily basis. Our data scientists have explored, normalized, and visualized the data. Now we’re making all of that data accessible to groups through the Unified Data Platform. My hunch is that it can automate and scale a lot of what you may be managing in Excel. Just get in touch.

Since the fall of 2021, Apple Mail Privacy Protection updates have been changing the email  marketing game.  

We see the impact of these changes on brands who rely on email to connect with prospects and  customers. We also see it first-hand as a partner for automotive dealers who use our Prospect  Engagement email marketing tool. As such, we feel compelled to help you understand what  these changes mean for your dealership. 

What’s Changed? 

The Apple MPP feature intentionally hides email data and according to Apple, “helps protect  your privacy by preventing email senders from learning information about your Mail activity.” As  a result of this change, senders may see up to a 100% open rate from Apple Mail users  regardless of whether the individual actually opened the email.  

Apple’s release had a staggered launch, but there is a clear change in reported open rates – and an inverse effect on click-to-open rates – starting in fall 2021. We’ve seen the effects of this  change in our own data per the graphic below. However, not all metrics are affected, including  the click and click rate. 

What Does This Mean For Dealers? 

With approximately 52 percent of all email opens happening on Apple devices, this change has  a significant impact on email marketing data and reporting.

While the email marketing  community has been grappling with these changes since they were initially announced, this  update has flown under the radar for those managing dealership emails. 

Open Rates Are Out, Click Rates Are In 

Email metrics enable you to make one-to-one comparisons. You can use them to evaluate  campaigns, vendors, tools, and A/B tests. 

But open rates, a long-standing, primary measure of success for many brands, has suddenly  become a largely unreliable and inflated metric since the release of Apple MPP. Similarly, the  click-to-open rate (CTOR) metric also suffers from the same issues since it’s measuring the  action of clicks against opens.  

In the wake of the update, many across the email marketing space suggest that clicks and  click rates should be the new de facto standard. Email click rates remain accurate despite  Apple’s changes, and have already been a key performance indicator for email marketing. 

They’re arguably a more reliable and insightful metric given they: 

- Reflect your email’s overall performance on topic, messaging, creative, subject line, etc.

- Tell you exactly what recipients have an interest in and be especially insightful if you  have multiple CTAs

Vendors Must Lead the Way 

Adjusting your reporting metrics for success is an important step, but we believe the real story  around Apple MPP for the auto industry is less about numbers and more about vendor  relationships. 

As a vendor in the email marketing space, we want to partner with our customers to navigate  these changes. Too many vendors have swept the effect of the Apple changes under the rug, or  worse, taken credit for the boost in open rate. 

If your vendors–email providers, agencies, or other email partners–aren’t bringing these  changes up to you, they’re doing you a disservice. 

Data transparency relies on all vendors proactively working to provide reliable and accurate  data. Beyond acknowledging known inaccuracies, we believe this promise includes openly  discussing how external factors may be impacting your information, even if, and especially  when, you may not be aware. 

While we don’t claim to have all the answers, we do want to have open conversations with our  customers to help them solve current challenges. 

Where Do We Go From Here? 

We know email opens are still a primary reporting metric for many dealers. While we still  encourage dealers to consider shifting to other metrics like click rate, we know it’s unreasonable  to do so overnight.  

We believe in transparency and working alongside our customers as we navigate industry  changes together. So to help, we are making changes of our own. 

Filtering Out Email Opens From Bots 

In response to these changes and to give more options for our customers, our email tool,  Prospect Engagement, now lets users exclude all email bot activity – extending beyond just  Apple email and device users. This gives you a clean view of actual human email opens for  more accurate analysis, and in turn actually increases your click rate and click-to-open rate as a  result.

Changes You Can Make Today 

1) Ensure everyone who sees open rate as a measure of success is aware of these  changes. The first step is awareness, and whether you share email results in your  monthly reporting or in vendor conversations, add this as a key update.  

2) Focus on click rate. Shift to this metric as a default measurement when making 1:1  comparisons, particularly when making comparisons before and after the updates were  released. 

3) Ask questions of your vendors. While we hope they lead the conversation, if you're not  getting the information you need, ask. We don’t expect perfection, but they should have  insight into the changes they are (or aren’t) making in light of Apple MPP.  

Whether you’re a Foureyes customer or not, if you use email marketing for your business, these  changes affect you. While change always has some hurdles, this is also an opportunity to  connect with your partners and vendors on your priorities, see who is committed to data  transparency, and improve your email program as a whole.