Acima Eliminates 80,000+ Duplicate Records

Acima is a leading lease-to-own solution provider, helping customers get the products they need through flexible payment options across thousands of U.S. retail partners.

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That growth had started straining the marketing operations behind it: Salesforce Marketing Cloud was creating duplicate subscriber records faster than the team could clean them up, forcing a manual deletion cycle every 15 to 30 days just to keep the platform usable.

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Another quick fix was not going to hold, the platform needed a structural rethink.

• A single email address could carry multiple Subscriber Keys, flooding the subscriber list with duplicate records
• Manual subscriber removals ran every 15 to 30 days, destroying historical engagement data at each cycle
• Weekly, monthly, and ad-hoc campaigns ran on Journeys and Automation Studio workflows with no structured data relationships behind them
• Inconsistent Data Extension structures meant no controls existed to stop duplicates from being created in the first place
• Overlapping targeting kept hitting the same subscribers repeatedly, with domain and IP configuration gaps hurting inbox placement

• Eliminate duplicate subscriber records without destroying historical engagement data
• Remove the need for a recurring manual cleanup cycle entirely
• Give every campaign a structured, reliable data foundation to build on
• Put governance controls in place to stop duplicates from returning
• Fix deliverability by closing configuration gaps and cleaning up targeting logic

• Standardized email address as the single unified Subscriber Key, running a full audit across All Subscribers, Data Extensions, Journeys, and Automations to resolve every record carrying multiple keys
• Captured engagement, bounce, and unsubscribe data in structured backup Data Extensions before any cleanup ran, preserving the historical record that manual deletions had been destroying
• Put validation rules and governance controls in place to stop non-aligned Subscriber Keys and duplicates from being created again
• Rebuilt Automation Studio workflows for recurring, weekly, monthly, and ad-hoc campaigns, restructuring journey entry sources to control record injection logic
• Deployed Einstein Send Time Optimization alongside IP warming, domain alignment, and authentication standardization to close the gaps hurting inbox placement
• Embedded a half-time dedicated team, one SFMC subject matter expert and one campaign manager and developer, directly into Acima's marketing operations

• 80,000+ duplicate records eliminated - Removed with historical engagement data preserved through structured backup before cleanup
• Zero manual cleanup cycles - Down from a recurring cycle every 15 to 30 days, freeing the team from a task that used to eat time every month
• Subscriber Key structure fully unified - Restored historical engagement tracking and reporting accuracy across the platform
• Salesforce subscriber utilization back under control - Billing limits no longer absorb the cost of duplicate records
• Bounce rates declined - Fixing duplicate sends and adding Send Time Optimization lifted open and click-through rates as a result
• Campaign execution now faster - Manual dependency dropped across both recurring and ad-hoc campaign work

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