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Products / Services Used
Atlantic Coast Automotive runs franchises across Chevrolet, Ford, Nissan, and Toyota, across five states, through multiple acquisitions, under dozens of business units. When you're that massive, your marketing issue isn't a lack of creativity, it's a breakdown in infrastructure. And infrastructure problems don't get solved with better copy.
Customer journeys activated
Business units running live, personalized communications
Journey types deployed across the full customer lifecycle
Phase approach: Data → Build → Optimize
Customer records were pouring in from many sources - messy, mismatched, and totally unverified. You can't personalize marketing on dirty data. If you try, every customer journey you build will hit the wrong person, with the wrong message, at the exact wrong time.
There was zero strategy for how customer messages should flow. No lifecycle logic, no trigger framework, nothing standardised across the group. Every business unit was doing its own rogue thing. Trying to grow in that environment requires rebuilding the foundation from scratch.
The brief was to activate 10 journey types across all 55 business units simultaneously, a scope that would stress-test any team. The margin for a slow start was zero.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud is an absolute powerhouse. But it’s also famously underutilized because syncing Journey Builder, Automation Studio, and Audience Builder takes serious dev expertise. DodgeMiami owned the tech; they just didn't have the chops to drive it.
Phase 1
Data hygiene & preparation
CDP audit Treasure Data SyncSFMC Pipeline
Phase 2
Journey build & automation
Journey Builder Automation Studio Audience Builder
Phase 3
Monitoring & optimization
Analytics Builder Einstein STO Iterative Tuning
Before mapping a single customer journey, we did a massive autopsy on their existing systems, tech, and creative. It's where you find the gaps that derail a rollout three months in. The audit gave us a clean starting point and showed us exactly what to fix before turning automation on.
Data hygiene practices were established and connected to ACA's CDP (Treasure Data), creating a structured pipeline for staging and incremental syncs into SFMC.
Ten journey types were constructed in Journey Builder. They were mapped to actual moments in the customer relationship, not generic email sequences. A first-time buyer sits in a different place than someone due for a service visit or approaching the end of a lease. Each journey was built to reflect that reality.
Scheduling and messaging triggers were configured across all 55 business units. The right message now fires at the right time without anyone managing it manually. For a group this size, that operational shift is noticeable. It's the difference between a marketing team running campaigns and a marketing team building strategy.
With Audience Builder, we built precise segments so campaigns only reached the right buyers. Relevance is everything in automotive. Sending a tire discount to a customer with a fresh lease isn't just a waste of money, it signals that your brand doesn't know who its customers are.
Einstein Send-Time Optimisation was applied across journeys to send each message when that specific customer was most likely to engage. Based on their own behaviour, not a fixed broadcast time. Open rates improve. It's one of the highest-ROI adjustments available in SFMC and one of the most overlooked.
We used Analytics Builder to track performance and optimize the customer journeys in real time. Launching the campaigns was just step one. The real growth happens during the weekly optimization work where results start compounding.
Deployed on time, across the full group, with no critical failures. The scale of the rollout, 10 journey types, 55 locations, multiple franchise brands, made this a genuinely complex activation. Getting it done without deadline slippage is itself a meaningful result.
Open and click-through rates improved across the board because the right person was receiving the right message at the moment they were actually receptive to it. That's what proper segmentation and STO deliver.
Higher-quality audience targeting meant campaigns were reaching people with relevant offers rather than broadcasting widely and hoping. The conversion lift came from doing less to more people and more to the right people.
The most durable outcome isn't the 600 journeys, it's the framework underneath them. Adding a new journey, onboarding a new business unit, or adapting to a new franchise no longer means starting from scratch. The architecture is built to grow.
Customer Retention & Martech VP
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