The challenge
Realestate.com.au, a digital advertising business which specialises in property, had been using website behaviour to drive personalisation in its cross channel marketing.
Due to significant audience and visitation growth, the site required a communication strategy with its users that was relevant and timely to each individual visiting, rather than a ‘one size fits all’ approach.
The strategy
To address the issue, realestate.com.au decided to build an ‘Inspection & Auction Planner’ as a practical and personalised tool for its audience.
It selected Oracle Marketing Cloud to partner with them, to design a professional and personalised email which uses a number of dynamic rules to display relevant properties and content to each individual user who has visited the website, regardless of whether they are looking to buy or rent. The email is sent every Friday afternoon and only includes properties that have an inspection or auction on the upcoming Saturday.
Haydn Ellis, cross channel marketing manager, REA Group, says: “The business logic that sits behind the email and selects the most relevant properties is really exciting. We include properties that a user has tagged ‘favourite’, as well as properties we know they are engaged with.
"We calculate this using an engagement score which looks at over 100 behavioural variables to determine how engaged a user is with a particular property.”
The results
The results have been "very interesting and exciting" according to Ellis.
"We now get an additional 30k visits to listings each week – around 150k per month – since the email. This extra traffic is also driving additional leads to agents," Ellis says.
He says not only has it seen great open and click through rates for this email, but the "exciting metrics" are the volume of relevant property listings it is now sending to its users.
"Overall, this email puts one million on-market listings in front of our engaged user base every week which is proving to be a great value-add for our real estate agent customers," he says.
"Critical insight for realestate.com.au has been the finding that frequent engagement by a person with a property (e.g. page views, photo views, returning to the same property listing), leads to a higher click-through rather than a one-off tagged ‘favourite’ property.
The company also trialled sending emails to its ‘unengaged group’ (users who haven’t opened or clicked on an email in six months).
“The response rate from this group was really strong, proving if you send targeted and relevant communications to users who have previously been unengaged with email communication, it is possible to ‘re-engage’ them,” Ellis says.
Overall there was a 40% lift in unique open rates compared to its average send, a 140% increase in unique click throughs and a 50% increase in average time on site from each visit.
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