Personalized Nurture Campaigns
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The opportunity
CarMax
I
Jan 2026
Customers move in and out of the shopping journey. They save searches, favorite vehicles, return to browse, and explore financing—often before they're ready to make a purchase.
Our existing communications presented an opportunity to do more than remind customers to come back. By responding to what customers had already done, we could make each interaction more relevant and help them pick up where they left off.
The challenge: How could we use behavioral signals to deliver the right message and vehicle recommendations at the right moment?
The strategy
Make the experience smarter as we learn more
We designed nurture journeys that responded to the signals customers left behind, using those behaviors to determine how they entered a campaign and which vehicles they saw next.
The experience connected six audience segments- including returning shoppers, saved-search users, favorited-vehicle shoppers, and customers exploring third-party inventory or navigating a total loss- to relevant communications and personalized recommendations.
First Touchpoints
Return shopping · Account creation · Saved search · Favorited vehicle · GEICO total loss · Third-party shopping
First touchpoint emails
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.
Influencing the recommendation engine
Personalization depended on more than selecting which vehicles to feature. We also needed to determine how different customer behaviors should influence the recommendation engine.
I partnered weekly with the recommendation-engine team to help define the hierarchy of intent signals. Actions that indicated stronger interest, such as saving a vehicle, carried more weight than lower-intent behaviors, such as viewing one.
This connected the communication strategy with the logic behind the recommendations, helping make the experience more relevant to each shopper.
Recommendation Nurture
Encouraging exploration
Introduce shoppers to a range of vehicles through broad, personalized recommendations. A side-by-side tile layout encourages discovery and makes it easy to compare options.
Narrowing the choices
As shoppers engage, recommendations become more relevant. A curated set of top picks brings the strongest matches forward and gives each vehicle more room to stand out.
Zeroing in on the right car
After three weeks of engagement, behavioral signals help identify a shopper's strongest match. Personalized messaging highlights the recommended vehicle and relevant interior imagery to help move the decision forward.
Testing the experience
We ran a 50/50 experiment comparing existing communications with a new experience that introduced four personalized recommendation emails.
The test experience gave customers additional opportunities to discover relevant inventory and return to shopping, rather than relying on the existing communication cadence alone.
6%
Click rate
+75%
Customer → sale
+6%
Online shopping activity
+35%
Customer → reservation
~$7M
Estimated incremental annualized value
Learning and iterating
We saw huge increases in most segments but we also saw something important: customers entering through Inventory Alerts saw a decline in customer-to-sale conversion.
Rather than scaling the experience across every audience, we excluded that segment and continued investigating how its needs and intent differed. The successful experience was scaled to Account Creation and Shop No-ID audiences.
The takeaway was clear: more recommendations don't automatically create a better experience. Personalization needs to reflect why a customer is engaging and what they need next.
Extending personalization to
Pre-Qual
Use financing context to make the next step more relevant
Pre-qualification provided another layer of insight into customer intent, including the vehicle a customer had been considering.
We extended the nurture strategy to this higher-intent audience, using the pre-qualified vehicle to inform personalized inventory recommendations and help customers continue toward a purchase.
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
The Pre-Qual experience achieved a 1.66% conversion to sale and an estimated $8.8M in incremental annualized value.
Performance varied by financing outcome. Straight-approved customers responded positively, while several other segments were flat or negative.
That reinforced a key lesson across both initiatives: effective personalization must account for more than what a customer wants. It also needs to reflect where they are in the decision-making process.
What's next
The work established a foundation for expanding personalized recommendations throughout the shopping journey.
Next opportunities included adding more recommendation touchpoints, incorporating financing outcomes into communications, introducing inventory and expiration nudges, and continuing to tailor experiences around customer state.