Personalized Nurture Campaigns
The opportunity
CarMax
I
Jan 2026
Car shopping doesn't happen in one session
Customers often move in and out of the shopping journey—saving searches, favoriting vehicles, returning to the site, or completing pre-qualification before they're ready to buy.
We saw an opportunity to use these signals to create more relevant communications and help customers pick up where they left off accross 6 distinct customer segments.
The strategy
Make the experience smarter as we learn more
We designed nurture journeys that became increasingly personalized as customers gave us more signals about their intent.
Behavioral signals
Return shopping · Account creation · Saved search · Favorited vehicle · GEICO total loss · Third-party shopping
↓
Relevant first touchpoint
↓
Personalized vehicle recommendations
↓
Continue shopping
↓
Reservation & purchase
Influencing the recommendation engine
Defining the signals behind personalization
The experience depended on more than designing the communications—we also needed to determine what made a recommendation relevant.
I partnered closely with our recommendation engine team, meeting weekly to help define how customer behaviors should influence vehicle recommendations.
Together, we established a hierarchy of intent signals, giving stronger actions—like saving a vehicle—more weight than lower-intent behaviors like viewing one.
Upper-funnel nurture
Bringing shoppers back with relevant inventory
Each audience entered through a communication tailored to their behavior or context. From there, eligible customers moved into a recommendation campaign featuring personalized vehicles designed to bring them back into the shopping experience.
Testing the experience
Would recommendations actually change shopping behavior?
We ran a 50/50 test comparing existing communications against an experience that added four personalized recommendation emails.
Control
Existing communications
Test
New communications → Recommendation 1 → Recommendation 2 → Recommendation 3 → Recommendation 4
6%
Click rate
+75%
Customer → sale
+6%
Online shopping activity
+35%
Customer → reservation
~$7M
Estimated incremental annualized value
Learning and iterating
One experience didn't work for everyone
Customers entering through Inventory Alerts saw a decline in customer-to-sale conversion.
Rather than scaling the experience universally, we excluded that audience and continued investigating how their needs and intent differed.
The successful experience was scaled to Account Creation and Shop No-ID audiences.
Extending personalization to Pre-Qual
What if we knew even more about the shopper?
Pre-qualification gave us additional context about both customer intent and the vehicle they were considering.
We extended the nurture strategy to these higher-intent customers, using the vehicle they pre-qualified from to surface personalized inventory recommendations and help them continue shopping.
Designing around customer state
The next message depended on where the customer was in their journey
The experience combined email and SMS across key moments after pre-qualification. Customers could receive messaging encouraging them to continue with their current vehicle or personalized recommendations to keep shopping.
Pre-Qual completed
↓
Financing communication
↓
Continue with this vehicle → Progress / reservation nudges
Keep shopping → Personalized vehicle recommendations
1.66%
Conversion to sale
~$~$8.8M
Estimated incremental annualized value
What we learned
Relevance meant more than recommending the right car
Performance varied based on customers' financing outcomes. Straight-approved customers responded positively, while several other segments were flat or negative.
This reinforced that effective personalization needed to consider both what a customer wanted to shop for and where they were in their journey.
What's next
Building toward a connected personalization ecosystem
The results gave us a foundation for expanding personalized recommendations throughout the shopping journey.
Next steps included adding more recommendation touchpoints, incorporating financing results into communications, introducing inventory and expiration nudges, and continuing to tailor experiences based on customer state.