How Garber Automotive Group Reclaimed 30 Hours a Week with Fullpath’s AI

For many dealership groups, the in-house marketing dream turns into a logistical and manual nightmare that requires increasingly more effort just to maintain performance over time. The marketing team at Garber Automotive Group was no stranger to this struggle.

The In-House Hurdle

As an enterprise organization with 25 dealerships, a used car dealership franchise, their own financing company, and even a sports team, Garber Automotive is a diversified automotive powerhouse. Managing marketing at this scale – even in-house – is a gargantuan task. Robert Norcross, Marketing Director for Garber Automotive Group, and his team were dedicating 20–30 hours every week to manual email marketing alone. Between battling ever-changing spam filters, generating and exporting CRM lists, and building email templates by hand, the team found itself in the weeds of repetitive tasks rather than working on high-level strategy for their group.

“Most of what we do is in-house. It’s a rare scenario where we’re doing something with a vendor in a big way,” Robert explains. “One of the big challenges was emails going to spam, open rates, click rates, Google got more strict on rules and we were spending so much time trying to figure those things out. We kept running into roadblocks and when we found Fullpath, we were like, my gosh, this solves all our problems!”

The Group CDP Advantage 

Garber Automotive found their success in partnering with Fullpath’s Group Customer Data Platform (CDP). The Group CDP, designed specifically to support the needs of large dealer groups, works by connecting the various data sources in play including the CRM, DMS, website data, and more across the entire enterprise in one secure platform. This visibility ensures that different departments can use the same clean data set for various use cases, turning a fragmented group of stores into a unified, data-driven organization. For Robert, the visibility that was made possible by the CDP transformed the way his team strategized on a group level, making it manageable, and effective. 

“The traffic source report is huge as a marketer because I can see everything across the whole plane of all the dealerships we have,” Robert says. “You can really find some good attribution, find the holes, all those kinds of things. Different people in different departments [in the group] are starting to use [the CDP] for different use cases. That’s the strength of having all this data in there.”

Activating the Existing “Gold Mine”

After implementing Fullpath’s Group CDP, the dealership group implemented Fullpath’s Audience Activation to engage their database at scale. Leveraging unified shopper data from across multiple data sources, Audience Activation automates dealership email campaigns using hyper-targeted audiences pulled from the dealership’s own data. Then, using powerful AI, it personalizes every email so shoppers receive content that speaks directly to their unique needs and preferences. 

From July through the end of December 2025, leveraging Fullpath’s Audience Activation, Garber Automotive Group sent out a whopping 8.7 million hyper-personalized emails, something that would have been impossible to achieve without AI automation. In that same time frame, the dealership group closed $7.2 million in sales and service ROs directly attributed to email performance. That’s a 31.3x ROI on their investment on email alone. 

“We found a significant amount of the ROI was actually with customers we’ve never sold a car to before,” shares Norcross. “What we found is that over half of the [leads in the CRM] are brand new customers…You spent so much money to get them into your CRM and then we do nothing with them and we go chase a new one. How much money are we spending on the new one? We already have a piece of customer data. We know what they’re looking at. Let’s sell that customer!” 

By moving away from CRM email campaigns, many of which yielded a mere 1% open rate, to Fullpath’s optimized, AI-driven email solution, Garber was able to solve their deliverability problems. Audience Activation helped the dealer group engage over 651,700 shoppers, achieve a 53% average open rate, and hit a 3.35% click-through rate (CTR), far exceeding industry standard of 29% and 2.5% respectively. 

The Empowering Impact of AI Automation

While there is still some mistrust in the automotive industry when it comes to the implementation of AI and automations for fear that they will take jobs away from people, the team at Garber Automotive sees it differently. The shift to Fullpath was a strategic move that allowed the team to focus on the things AI and automation can’t do. Robert views AI and automation not as a threat, but as a necessary evolution for a modern marketing director.

“AI is good if it can save me some time, because that means there’s bigger things to be working on,” he explains. “Automation should not be feared because if it’s something that can be automated, it’s repetitive. That means there’s other things going on that we’ve got to take care of that can’t be automated. Same with AI. If AI can put information in front of me to get me quicker to where I want to go, I’m going to take that path.”

As an added bonus, the transition from manual to AI-automated email marketing didn’t require Robert’s team to sacrifice their creative identity; the platform’s Custom Campaigns allowed them to import their own HTML for specific campaigns around events and special offers, ensuring their in-house standards remained intact while reaching more eyes. Ultimately, this synergy created an entirely new subset of high-intent website traffic that directly fuels car sales across the group’s 25 locations. 

Significant Time, Significant Value

For Robert Norcross and the team at Garber, partnering with Fullpath represents more than just a software switch. It is a commitment to a smarter way of doing business. By letting AI and automation handle the technical weeds, the group has future-proofed its marketing strategy and ensured that Garber Automotive is no longer just keeping pace with the industry, they are setting it.