Interactive marketers who focus their tracking and measurement spyglasses on customer acquisition may be turning a blind eye to the potential they already have for customer retention.
That’s what Apartments.com was doing, according to Mike Ricciardelli, vice president of marketing and media sales for the online rental clearinghouse site. Until six months ago, the Web company had no tools for encouraging users to come back to its site, he told an audience yesterday at the Chicago Association of Direct Marketing’s DM Days gathering. Users were signing up to get e-mail listings of apartments, leads for which property managers and landlords were paying the site operators; but Apartments.com didn’t have a coherent way to maximize the lifetime value of those leads and user permissions.
But a desire to increase the lifetime value of users and to increase revenue from display advertisers on its site led Apartments.com to start thinking about online ways to stay connected to their rental visitors. And that led two months ago to the pilot launch of the Renter Relationship Management Program, a test initiative to use targeted e-mails to drive repeat visits, create additional leads for the site’s advertiser clients (property managers and owners), amass a renter base that could be segmented, and improve user satisfaction with the site.
In this early stage of deployment, the program’s aim has been to test the optimum frequency and content of retention e-mails, Ricciardelli said. The company felt a general newsletter to all permissioned visitors wouldn’t be of value and instead focused on five different types of content and they open rates and click-throughs they would generate among past visitors to the Web site. Ricciardelli and his staff divided a sample group of e-mail addresses into five “buckets” and test-mailed different content to each one at different periods after their last site visit.
“What do consumers who’ve been to your Web site want, and when do they want it?” Ricciardelli said. “We were finding out where consumers who’d already given us their e-mail addresses were in their life cycle. We weren’t testing creative, or calls to action, or whether titles should be bigger. We wanted to know how we could continue to add value for these hundreds of thousands of people who were already sending us e-mails.”
The results showed clear segmentation on the basis of both timing and content, he said. The first e-mail type-- a simple call to “come back and search again”—got the best opens when mailed four days after a visit to Apartments.com earning a 51.2% open rate and an 11.5% click-through rate. The “come back” appeal sent so soon after a visit sounds almost ludicrously basic, Ricciardelli said, but maybe the visitor left the site to go to lunch or to think about particular rentals. In any case, sending that e-mail four days after an initial visit produced a strong lead conversion rate of 17.8%; that is, almost one fifth of users sent off additional e-mails for property information as a result of these messages.
Another e-mail type tested showed the specific apartment listings the visitor had searched during a previous session. This content was most effective when sent immediately after the visit, Ricciardelli found, when it got a 69.9% open rate and a 6.7% click-through. And once again, the conversion rate for this retention e-mail was above 17%.
A third e-mail type offered coupons and deals on products that people contemplating a move or a new home were likely to need. These e-mails fared best 28 days after a visit to Apartments.com, when they received a 50.1% open rate and a 3.4% click-through.
E-mail type four offered moving deals and discounts. That one worked best seven to 14 days after the visitor had opted in to the Apartments.com e-mail retention program, when it got an open rate of 42.7% and a click-though of 4%.
Finally, the company tested the reception of a retention e-mail offering local information about neighborhoods the visitor had been investigating. For the test, this was delivered in the form of a simple link to the appropriate site on Yahoo! Local, and it performed best when delivered 28 days after the session, with an open rate of 49.1% and a click-through of 4.9%.
All told, this test phase of the renter retention program produced a lead conversion rate of 35.3%, with less than 1% of visitors unsubscribing. The test has allowed Apartments.com to begin assembling an editorial calendar for the timing and content of messages to permissioned visitors. That will in turn drive down the cost of acquisition, giving the company more leeway to spend to attract new users.
“This all seems so intuitive, but until recently we weren’t doing it,” Ricciardelli said. “We were traditionally in the business of getting someone and sending them off to our management-company subscribers. We were spending literally millions of dollars to bring people in from Google and Yahoo! [via search marketing], and yet we weren’t sending e-mails out to people who’d already become customers.
“Apartments.com has been on the Web for more than six years, but for the first time with this test we were getting lifecycle information about these users,” he said. “Now we were burrowing inside and getting deeper into what these customers we were monetizing wanted from us.”
