Online Realtor Move, Inc. Boosts Opens, Clicks Via Triggered Email Program
- Written by Demand Gen Report Team
- Published in DemandGen Reports
Effectively leveraging prospect activity can prove to be a huge advantage for BtoB marketers. Aiming to deliver a more engaging experience to its customers, Move, Inc. leveraged relevant prospect activity to deliver personalized email content.
The Move.com and Realtor.com Web sites offer a host of features to attract and retain visitors. Home buyers or renters can search for properties using a wide range of criteria, view maps and photos, connect with real estate agents, research mortgages, and take part in other activities that make the sites extremely sticky.
The marketing team wanted their email marketing programs to deliver a similar range of features that would encourage users to return to the site. Working with a relatively small team, Move.com realized that whatever personalized campaigns they developed had to be automated. As a result, they looked to integrate email with the site’s registered-user program, which allowed visitors to customize their experience and save recent searches or property listings of interest.
Enhancing Experience
The Move.com marketing team employed Responsys to create a triggered email program for Realtor.com and Move.com called “Home Alerts,” designed to notify users whenever there was an update to a property search or particular listing they had saved in their account. The automated messages delivered targeted content relevant to each user’s specified criteria.
“The whole point is to get the user to personalize their experience, and then bring that personalized experience to them when they are away from their site and checking their email,” says Steve O’Neill, Director, Marketing Consumer Lifecycle Management, Move, Inc. “We want to be able to deliver information that is relevant and useful to our users, and Responsys enables us to provide valuable content that is timely and relevant, information that our customers are very eager to receive.”
The marketing team developed the campaign in a series of steps, including selecting certain actions (such as saved searches or saved property listings), to drive the program; encouraging first-time visitors to customize and save search criteria or individual listings by becoming registered users; and collecting email preferences during an alert opt-in process. The team worked to link user account data to its online listing database to automatically check for updates to a saved search or property listing and adopted a batch email strategy to handle updates so that registered users wouldn’t receive multiple emails from the site. This enabled the team to monitor email and site engagement metrics.
Moving Metrics
Ultimately, streamlining the method of delivering data to their ESP and customizing email send times generated an 18% lift in total open and click-through rates. Building on the success of the campaign, Move, Inc. is now developing additional triggered email programs based on other actions visitors can take on the site.
Saved search alerts generated an average: 60% total open rate; 36% unique open rate; 38% total click-through rate; and 32% unique click-through rate.
Saved listing alerts generated an average: 70% total open rate; 48% unique open rate; 49% total click-through rate; 43% unique click-through rate
The campaign also delivered insights into consumer behavior and preferences around email messages, confirming the team’s assumption that that the majority of users chose to receive daily alerts for the most up-to-date information.
More users save searches than individual listings, which bodes well for the potential length of engagement. Individual properties eventually disappear from the database when they are sold or otherwise taken off the market. But searches according to specific criteria are continually refreshed. Most clicks were generated by the graphics highlighting the specific piece of information that had been updated, such as price or new photos. Users who had registered accounts and opted in to email alerts were three times more likely than non-registered users to contact a realtor or send an email to a friend.