Franchised dealers hold inaccurate or incomplete records for 30% of their customers, according to Marketing Delivery research.

Between January and March 2018, more than 200,000 customer records were analysed by the company and the research found that, on average, dealers hold incomplete information for 29% of their customers.

Marketing Delivery assessed the presence of four key ‘essentials’ for effective customer marketing: email address, mobile phone number, MOT date and service date.

Marketing Delivery’s managing director, Jeremy Evans (pictured), said: “Most dealers have information about service or MOT due dates for the vast majority of their customers, but many are lacking crucial contact details that will allow them to communicate effectively with these people.

“Comprehensive customer data is essential to successful digital marketing campaigns, and with the implementation of GDPR looming, it is more important than ever to be on top of data quality and accuracy.”

Email addresses were most likely to be absent from the database, as 16% of customer records were without one. This represents a small improvement on data quality compared to Q1 2017, where the figure stood at 17%.

However, capture rates for customers’ mobile phone numbers have shown slight improvement.

In Q1 2018, dealerships were on average securing a number for 88% of their customers – up from 87% in 2017. On average, service and MOT dates were either missing or overdue for just 6% of customer records held by dealerships.

Among the best-performing dealer groups, capture rates of 96% for email addresses is currently as good as it gets, which is up from 92% for Q1 2017.

Evans said: “Dealer groups can benefit from software that analyses and reports on data quality across all of their systems and all of their sites.

"Such systems enable aggregation of records to produce a group data ‘health check’, making it easy to see which sites or staff are underperforming when it comes to accurate and complete data entry.”

According to separate Marketing Delivery research, missing email addresses should be of particular concern to aftersales teams, as the trend of favouring email is most stark when it comes to dealers contacting customers regarding a service or MOT.

Nearly half of customers (48.3%) prefer email contact – double the number that favour telephone calls (19.7%) or SMS (17.3%).

Marketing Delivery’s analysis encompassed a wide range of dealerships throughout the UK, representing both prestige and volume brands.

It conducted the evaluation of customer records as part of its quarterly Data Quality Report.