Achieving great results by targeting home movers
Moving home is a key life stage. For many it is a regular occurrence. For everyone it is a time of high spending on a wide range of goods and services. It is a time when you should be talking to customers – a great opportunity to reach high potential prospects and what is more Royal Mail knows the mover market really well. Patricia Pasquali discusses.
People on the move – a market not to be missed
More and more people are moving home for new jobs, better schooling, to start a new family, the search for a more relaxed lifestyle or simply to settle into retirement. According to the last Census in 2001, around three million people relocated, accounting for over 11 per cent of the adult population. While volumes have dropped through the recession, the number of movers is already picking up pace as the economy recovers. Whatever the reason, it is always a key life stage. According to the Association of Directory Publishers, people on average spend more in the first six months of moving than in the following five years. This spend is on a wide range of goods and services, from home improvement to financial services, and presents an enormous opportunity for marketers and planners in both the public and private sector.
Maybe more important in recessionary times, when keeping hold of existing customers is vital, many people move to new areas. Movers of all types will be almost certainly looking at new suppliers of electricity, insurance, banking, new restaurants, shops and establishing new purchasing habits that will last for years to come.
Moving home: daily life is very local
Once they’ve moved, they mostly buy locally. Moving really is a time when you simply can’t afford not to be close to your customers making sure they keep buying from you.
This is equally true of businesses on the move. While the volumes are much lower, typically approximately five thousand per month, they are usually much higher value customers.
Royal Mail – the people who know who’s moving, when and where
We have a number of products and services that can help you to understand and reach the mover market. Already 65% per cent of all movers tell Royal Mail they are moving and ask for their mail to be redirected. Through our Redirection Services, we have access to approximately 125,000 home movers each month.
Importantly, Royal Mail records their current address, where they’re going to and when exactly they are planning to move. We ask for specific permission for their data to be used to update customer databases and/or prospect marketing campaigns.
The Home Movers Mailing Service allows marketers to identify and target movers at each stage of the lifecycle. Royal Mail is in a unique position to give you access to it is valuable redirection data allowing you to target this group at the right time with the right offer, supporting your brand values by giving you more confidence in your marketing message and more opportunities to engage. The Home Movers Mailing Service is ideal for a wide range of companies – from home-ware retailers and supermarkets to financial services.
Our data is regularly profiled against a leading geo-demographic classification system to identify the characteristics of movers. A high proportion of our home mover data come from affluent clusters. They are predominantly ABC1, 20-50 years old and property owners, so that allows you to target prospects with spending power. Additionally, we can also provide you with a detailed profile of your customer database. This enables an understanding of who your customers are, allowing us to highlight where you can find similar prospects within the Home Movers database. Data can be analysed by geographical distribution to determine “hot spot” areas and allowing you to visualise exactly where your customers live and are moving to.
Reaching people on the move and achieving outstanding ROI
The Royal Mail Home Movers Mailing Service offers companies the opportunity to communicate with individuals at this key life stage. A highly targeted campaign from Furniture Village saw Royal Mail undertake provision and analysis of home movers data, as well as print and fulfil the mailing on behalf of the retailer.
The success of the campaign demonstrates how, even during these recessionary times, a carefully thought-out direct mail venture aimed at a highly targeted audience remains a strong business proposition.
According to Navinder Thaliwal, direct marketing and PR executive at Furniture Village: “A colleague received a mailer in the post that had been sent via the Royal Mail Home Movers Mailing Service. Having not done acquisition via direct mail for a long time, we wanted an effective solution that delivered quick results while also generating insight into our ‘best’ customers and target markets and their potential.” They also wanted a partner who would facilitate the entire process and inspire confidence at senior management level. Thaliwal continues, “we needed to be able to build a convincing business case – one that fitted with management’s overall marketing strategy.”
Furniture Village achieved an outstanding ROI of 5:1, acquiring a considerable number of new customers due to the targeting of the activity, the quality of the home mover audience and the timeliness of the mailing piece.
The success of the test prompted Furniture Village to embark on a number of additional campaigns, using further refined data. Thaliwal says: “Based on the very positive results we received, we decided to move forward with a series of campaigns. For our most recent mailing campaign, Royal Mail carried out the whole job for us from data provider to print and fulfilment. The costs were very competitive and the results of the finished pack were very pleasing.”
An award-winning solution
The Royal Mail Home Movers Mailing Service picked up the award for “Most Effective Targeting” at the IDM Business Performance Awards in May 2007 and it was highly recommended in the IDM Business Performance Award in 2009 for the Furniture Village case study.
Future development
We continue to develop our valuable mover data assets to help our customers keep in touch with their customers, avoid wasteful mailings to former addresses and critically win new business.
The priority is to further improve coverage of the Home Movers Mailing Service, to be informed by as many people as possible when they are moving and importantly having their consent for their data to be used by marketers to develop multichannel campaigns.
In addition, we take the security of our data very seriously and we are using leading data governance specialist DQM Group to provide a complete end-to-end data distribution and monitoring service including the latest techniques in the secure transfer of data, seeding of all data feeds and regular audits of resellers.
To speak to the experts, please contact Patricia Pasquali, Product Manager on 07841 563039 (email: patricia.pasquali@royalmail.com) or Stefan Mills, Data Consultant on 07715 480565 (email: stefan.mills@royalmail.com) or for more information on Royal Mail Data Products please contact our Data Client Services Team on 08456 000 098 or email datasales@royalmail.com.
KEY POINTS
Six good reasons to choose Royal Mail’s Home Movers Mailing Service:
- The Home Movers Mailing Service from Royal Mail gives you access to unique and accurate redirection data, so you can reach individuals who have just moved home, when they are likely to spend money on their new home.
- We ask for specific permission for the data to be used to update customer databases and/or prospect marketing campaigns.
- You can opt for just a mailing service or an end-to-end solution that delivers the entire campaign.
- Access free profiling of your customer and prospect databases.
- The Service can potentially save money by identifying some of the best print deals available
- As part of the service Royal Mail will analyse response data to refine targeting for future mailings.
Patricia Pasquali, Royal Mail Data Product Manager
ROYAL MAIL DATA SERVICES
