Build it and they shall come.

When your property development offers a more tailored proposition based on a lifestage choice. There are several key considerations when planning a marketing campaign. Who you approach, where they currently live and how you reach out to them. For McCarthy & Stone we developed a data lead, direct mail marketing strategy to attract those most likely to engage.

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The idea of a retirement home by the sea has been altered forever through the innovative approach to retirement living introduced by McCarthy & Stone. You might think that such a property, with such a view, would sell itself - but you would be wrong. Unless you know how to reach your ideal audience!

With a data driven marketing approach, the cost of qualified leads reduced by 60%. This improved ROI by driving carefully targeted house buyers to a weekend of showroom events across the country.

Attracting the right customer profiles.

As a specialist retirement homebuilder and services provider, McCarthy & Stone have a more specific customer profile than a regular House Builder. However, targeting Baby Boomers (the generation that is now looking into retirement housing) would still be too generic, so the firm needed a way of drilling down to a more granular profile of the McCarthy & Stone customer.

With heavy market research under wing, it was decided that the target customers were those who were looking to prolong the lifestyle that they had grown accustomed to and move to the next exciting chapter of their lives.

Trialing customer acquisition through Partially Addressed Mail.

The concerns of using named data in relation to GDPR guidelines was tackled with the use of Partially Addressed Mail. This service, offered by Royal Mail, utilises unnamed data profiles at household and postcode level with geodemographic modelling to reach the customers most likely to buy a business’ product.

It also delivers a massive 4p discount on the cost of advertising mail. Which could reduce postal costs to a remarkable 16p per item. This is especially advantageous, as a directly mailed product could now compete alongside e-mail and PPC from a cost perspective while still delivering a more impressive response rate in comparison to both email and PPC.

We were delighted that Precision immediately thought of McCarthy & Stone as a candidate for the trial. We worked openly and inclusively with Precision and MarketReach with the one shared intention of making the campaign successful. The Precision team delivered an opportunity to us, one of only seven businesses in the country, in a trial that not only delivered fabulous results but also at an unprecedented cost per unit
price. In addition, we will be featured as a MarketReach case study.

Mark Hart, Marketing Operations Manager, McCarthy & Stone.

Customer profiling to match attributes.

50,000 lines of existing McCarthy & Stone CRM data were analysed to create pen portraits from existing customers using Acorn segmentation profiles. This created an index of attributes that were most common within their existing customer database. We then matched those attributes to the whole UK data pool to create a UK-wide prospect list, which could be mapped to the location of each development taking part in the show home weekend.

Direct mail, digitally activated.

The campaign activation benefited from the efficiency and automation afforded through our Precision ConnectsTM platform. Once the segmentation work was completed, the data contact list was produced through the platform. Artwork was then loaded onto the platform, sent via an automated workflow directly to the printing press and into the mailing process.

Partially Addressed Mail in action.

The mailer was an invitation to attend an open day over the course of one weekend. The data needed to be split between the seven regions and 67 individual developments with separate response mechanisms for named and unnamed data profiles. The promotion included a free £20 Marks & Spencer voucher, conditional upon a tour booking, to provide extra value for attendees.

In total, 300,000 invitations were sent to potential retirement home buyers that fit the McCarthy & Stone customer profile. Each invitation pack was tailored to the nearest development to the invitee for greater relevance and likelihood of interest.

The campaign included an AB test to monitor the impact of named communication against unnamed. The results were surprising! Named communication was more effective, but only marginally, which proved that localising the marketing had a positive impact on results.

Saving on cost per lead.

Close to 1,000 qualified leads came from those that attended the weekend. That represented a saving of £105 per qualified lead compared to other cold campaigns, saving a massive £103,530 overall.