Same Journeys, Better Inbox: How SóCarrão Made Every Lifecycle Email Count

SóCarrão has been connecting vehicle buyers and sellers in Brazil since 2003. The marketplace covers cars, motorcycles and other vehicle categories, and its strength is regional: Paraná, São Paulo, Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul, with buyers able to search city by city, from Curitiba to Porto Alegre.

That local focus shapes how the business measures itself. Every listing exists to produce a lead – a buyer reaching out about a specific vehicle. Leads are the number the team watches most closely, and email sits right beside them, keeping both sides of the marketplace engaged across the buying and selling journey.

A classifieds marketplace serves two customers at once. Buyers want the right vehicle near them, at a price that works. Sellers, private owners and dealers alike, judge the platform on one thing: whether enquiries arrive. A lead is the point where both sides get value at the same moment, which is why it carries so much weight.

A vehicle purchase is also rarely a single visit. Buyers compare, step away and come back. Between those visits, email is how a marketplace stays in the conversation – and that only works if the email gets noticed. A perfectly timed message that sits unopened does nothing for the buyer, the seller or the platform.

Where the Journeys Hit a Ceiling

SóCarrão’s team had already done the harder part. Automated journeys covered the lifecycle moments that matter, each one triggered by something a user actually did rather than by a calendar. The structure was right. The return on it hadn’t caught up, and three things showed where.

1. Relevant by design, unseen in practice. Journey emails averaged a 12.69% open rate and a 0.17% click rate. Every send was tied to a real action, yet roughly seven in eight went unopened – so most of those moments passed without the user ever noticing them.
2. The journey closest to the KPI was trailing. The First Lead Journey opened at a weighted 10.97%, with a 0.149% click rate. Below the journey average, on the sequence that sat nearest to the number the business cares about most.
3. Reach lost before the inbox. Across campaigns, delivery rate stood at 92.71%, with 7.29% of emails bouncing. Roughly one email in fourteen wasn’t reaching anyone.

Sending more wasn’t the answer SóCarrão wanted. The brief was better results without adding journey pressure, and without touching sender, domain, audience, frequency or campaign strategy. Left as it was, every new journey the team built would inherit the same ceiling: the right message at the right moment, opened by roughly one user in eight.

SóCarrão and Netcore treated this as a visibility problem rather than a content problem. The journeys were already deciding when to speak and to whom. What needed attention was what happened to each email after it left.

Six weeks of baseline

NIVO’s diagnostic phase began on 25 June 2026, and the six weeks that followed became the baseline. On 6 August, NIVO went live across every active campaign and sending domain, with a narrow job: improve inbox visibility, so more of the emails SóCarrão was already sending landed where users would actually see them.

Nothing else moved

The journeys themselves stayed exactly as they were. Same sender, same domains, same audience, same frequency, and the same seven steps in the First Lead Journey. That consistency is what makes the result readable. A journey fires the same email at the same point for every user who takes the same action, so six weeks before go-live and six weeks after compare like for like. No extra sends, no audience reshuffle – just SóCarrão’s own journeys, before and after, with inbox visibility as the only thing that changed.

The numbers compare six weeks before NIVO (25 June-5 August 2026) with six weeks after (6 August-16 September). Journey open rates rose from 12.69% to 20.96%. That’s a 65.2% increase.

The First Lead Journey did even better. Its open rate went from 10.97% to 18.83%, up 71.6%. This journey had been lagging behind the rest. Now it grew faster than the average.

Leads and site visits went up too. From 6 August to 21 September, SóCarrão saw 16.39% more leads and 41.51% more sessions than before NIVO, based on figures from the SóCarrão team. Many things affect leads and visits, so this isn’t all down to NIVO. But both rose during the same weeks that more people were opening SóCarrão’s emails.

The lesson is simple. Journeys decide when an email goes out. NIVO helps make sure people see it. Each makes the other worth more. For any marketer running automated journeys, that’s the point to take away: a well-timed email only works if people open it.

Vicente de Andrade Lopes

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“We’d put real work into our journeys, and the timing was already right. What we hadn’t solved was how many people actually saw those emails. NIVO changed that without us touching volume, audience or frequency. The same journeys started doing far more for us, and that’s what I’d tell any marketer to look at first.”

Running lifecycle journeys of your own? See how NIVO could work across them – talk to Netcore’s deliverability team.