How Mazda Empowers Partners & Customers Through Data With Relay42

SHARE

Robert Vonk, Manager of Online Marketing & Data at Mazda, the Netherlands, talks about their evolving relationship with Relay42 and how their approach to first-party data and the customer journey has transformed over the last 4 years.

How Mazda Empowers Partners & Customers Through Data With Relay42

Video transcript 

One of the biggest challenges is the fact that we have such a complex customer journey that goes from us as a brand to our dealerships, which are our valuable partners. Obviously sometimes there are breaks in that link, and that’s what we are trying to constantly remove to create the best customer journey for our customers — and in the end, the best result for us.

I think Relay42 is creating that link for us, especially in all the online bits, to make sure that on every touchpoint we can manage the customer journey that people are getting. We get insights out of it; we can improve our media, which saves us money and makes a better customer experience. Also, recently we’ve started sharing that data with our partners and that is also helping us to boost conversions. So, I think Relay42 is actually the thing we needed to make this work. 

We started working with Relay42 four years ago. In the beginning, it was through our online marketing agency. One of our big challenges is that we are a relatively small player in the market — there are many other players and many of them have much larger budgets. So, we were thinking we need to do something smart, and that’s when our online media agency suggested we start using a data management platform (at the time) from Relay42 to optimize our media. 

That’s where it started; we did that for a couple of years and had some nice use cases, and I think about a year-and-a-half ago we started working more directly with Relay42 with our Solutions Consultant. That helped us expand the use cases further than just online media or online behavior, and I think it was a much-needed next step. 

I’m really happy about it — as I said, it helped us to get into new territories, so to speak. We noticed when we started, we set up a couple of use cases that all went pretty fast. We measured them, of course, and they were successful; but we noticed that at some point it was like, ok… this is it. We knew that there was more out there, but because we came through our online media agency, obviously we did all the stuff that was also within their territory, and in order to expand further to stuff like CRM, or maybe offline, we also needed to dig deeper into that. 

That’s where the direct relationship with Relay42 helped a lot. Not only does it help to define new ideas, but also to carry them out. Because we’re a relatively small team at Mazda in the Netherlands, we don’t have people that are specifically working on this subject — it’s on the side of many other tasks. It helps that our Solutions Consultant helps create some of the documentation and talks to some of the technical partners, and that’s really helped to make it go quicker again and start new use cases. So that was a great step.