Springside: email marketing strategy

Long before construction began on site at Springside, we created and managed a lead generation email marketing campaign that grew to over 1600 contacts, actively seeking property to buy in Edinburgh. When phase one of the development was released for sale, 70% of the buyers came from the database we built.

Introduction

Our client wanted to know that the money being spent on marketing an unbuilt development, was being spent wisely. How could they be sure they were getting value for money?

Objectives

• Devise a way to use digital media to generate sales leads
• Build a permission-based database of email subscribers
• Manage and monitor email campaign effectiveness and Return on Investment (ROI)
• Create engagement over time with high quality editorial content

Strategy

We had already presented our digital strategy for Springside which placed the website at the centre of the marketing effort. We advised that an opt-in, permission-based email campaign would enable us to build a qualified database of contacts that could be used by the sales agents, Savills, at a later date.

Insight

There was no shortage of new property in Edinburgh, but there was a distinct lack of creativity and distinctiveness in the marketing of that property. We identified the desire for a more conversational approach as a great opportunity for our client.

Solution

We created a series of regular email updates that were distributed to potential buyers that subscribed via the website. The content focused on progress updates and human interest stories that reflected the interests of the target audience and the richness of Edinburgh's culture. Each message contained links back to main website.

We were able to measure and report the performance of each email using an analytics package, which we provide as part of our service. This enabled us to report on who opened each email, click-through rates, number of web pages visited, whether a subscriber forwarded the email and how many times they returned. Monitoring performance in this way enabled us to segment and target the most engaged leads and develop the relationship further.

Results

The list grew steadily over the period of pre-sales. We achieved very high open rates and very few people unsubscribed. The level of online engagement and forwarding to friends had a positive effect on the general SEO performance of the website and Springside consistently occupied top three page rankings for natural search results.

The real proof though, was that when phase one of the development was released for sale 'off-plan', 70% of the buyers had received all of their information about Springside via email and the website.