How Russ Darrow Honda Mastered Personalized Marketing with Fullpath and Achieved a 53.8% ROI

Car dealers have long relied on a high-volume, generic approach to marketing, sending one-size-fits-all content to broad customer and shopper lists in the hopes of catching a lead. As consumer expectations around personalization and 1:1 offers continue to rise, these more stagnant outreach methods often fall short, resulting in lost leads and a reduction in long term loyalty.

Russ Darrow Honda recognized the need to evolve. Despite having a treasure trove of first-party data sitting in their CRM, their marketing long relied on manual efforts and broad messaging. By implementing Fullpath’s Audience Activation, Russ Darrow Honda shifted into an always-on marketing model, leveraging their customer data to power a precision outreach engine to create personalized shopper journeys. From September 2025 to February of 2026, the dealership saw a 53.8% ROI on the partnership, proving the true power of personalization.

Building a Precision Outreach Engine

The true power of Fullpath’s Audience Activation lies in its ability to leverage unified customer data through an integrated Customer Data Platform. Unlike traditional marketing tools that rely on manual lists and audiences, Fullpath unifies CRM, DMS, and website data to create real-time, unified shopper profiles that are leveraged to determine the next marketing action. This ensures that every email and SMS sent to a shopper or customer is created based on their most recent behaviors, needs, and preferences. 

“Before Fullpath, all we did was come up with our best 5 offers – I have no idea who you are and what you want but I’m going to throw them at you and see what you like,” explains Alyssa Mazur Hulbert, Marketing Director at Russ Darrow Automotive Group. “Now we can communicate with people one to one and say, ‘Hey, I saw you looking at this Jeep Grand Cherokee, here’s an offer that I have for you and here’s why you should work with us.’ Having that one to one communication Amazon style is what the customers expect nowadays. Fullpath is helping us bridge that gap.” 

Extraordinary Engagement Leads to Measurable Growth 

By shifting to data-driven engagements powered by Fullpath, Russ Darrow Honda saw engagement levels that significantly outperformed industry standards. In 6 months, the dealership successfully sent 810,694 emails that achieved a 53.5% open rate, significantly above the industry standard of 37%. The emails also saw a 45% drop in unsubscribe rates when compared to the six months prior. These emails ultimately drove 552 attributed leads proving the importance of deep personalization.

The dealership successfully sent over 49,000 personalized SMS messages crafted by Fullpath’s AI in that same time period to target every individual shopper based on their individual preferences. This resulted in a 20.3% click through rate and resulted in 579 SMS-attributed leads, a 10% increase over the previous 6 months, indicating strong relevance and shopper interest. 

“Before Fullpath, we’d send out an email in the CRM, maybe get some leads back, not really be able to tie it to an actual sale,” shares Alyssa. “With Fullpath, we can literally send it out, see the leads that came in and click into the campaign and say ‘so and so actually bought the car because they saw this campaign.’ To be able to actually see the impact it has on our day-to-day operations and actually ultimately selling the car is the biggest lift I’ve seen from the marketing side.”

Recovery Strategies Powered by Custom Campaigns 

While Audience Activation handles continuous engagement of every CRM contact at the dealership, Fullpath’s Custom Campaigns offer dealers the flexibility to send targeted engagements to shoppers around specific events or using specific messaging that may not be covered out of the box. These campaigns allow dealerships to build specific segments of shoppers in the CDP, and then target them with email and SMS campaigns that work alongside Fullpath’s AI-powered engagements.

“We made a campaign for sales that we call our shopping cart campaign,” shares Alyssa. “Someone who was on our site for a certain amount of time but did not ultimately submit a lead – we know that and we text them and say we saw you were looking, are you interested in this type of vehicle.”

Using the built in ability within Fullpath’s Custom Campaigns that allows groups to create campaigns across rooftops, this campaign was launched across multiple stores in the Russ Darrow Automotive Group. “We started that in November 2025. In the first 30 days across our 15 stores we sold 87 cars. Pretty tangible results.”

At Russ Darrow Honda specifically, the ‘Shopping Cart’ campaign was sent out to 2,894 shoppers. They saw a 57.1% open rate on the campaign’s, and an SMS click rate of 25.15%. The campaign ultimately drove 109 leads that led to 26 sales from shoppers who would have otherwise been lost to the competition. 

“After we saw all that lift, we said why don’t we just try it on the service side as well. Service schedulers take so long and you have to answer all these questions and a lot of people fall off,” explains Alyssa. “We started sending out a campaign [across the group] that said ‘Hey, you didn’t finish scheduling your service. Can you come back and do it – or call us here.’ Within the first 30 days, we saw 100 extra service ROs across that as well.”

Activating the Goldmine 

By automating the heavy lifting with Fullpath’s Audience Activation from audience segmentation to content generation, Russ Darrow Honda was able to turn their existing static CRM leads into a proactive revenue driver that provides shoppers with the positive, personalized experience they have come to expect. 

“Everyone is trying to spend money to get people into the dealership but what we didn’t realize is that we have this goldmine of information that we can work on,” Alyssa concludes. “The automation side of things to really streamline our day is the biggest lift for our [marketing] department.”