Making digital work for a real estate business using Oracle’s suite of technology

This case study describes how we used Oracle’s Eloqua and Maximizer platform to increase the contribution of digital to new property sales from less than 10% to over 30%. Work on both inbound and outbound marketing led to results which were amplified by Maximizer by driving the right consumer experience (CX) on the website. Integration with Eloqua helped the brand engage the user right through her purchase journey. The result has been improved campaign effectiveness, customer engagement and a significant impact on customer conversions.

Executive Summary

A leading, award winning and reputable real estate brand wanted to transform its media mix from the expensive and non-transparent ATL to a healthy mix of digital and ATL. The brand had been active on digital, but ROI was minimal and unclear. The need was therefore to take a holistic approach towards digital which is a) able to scale revenues significantly, b) improves the customer experience leading to more efficient sales, c) track ROI from digital spends.

GenY Medium deployed its understanding of the consumer buying behavior and insights in combination with Oracle’s Maximizer and Eloqua platforms to deliver results.

The interventions comprised: 1) working on inbound traffic through a new website design with better search performance, 2) A multi-channel advertising implementation to increase paid-traffic and 3) using Eloqua and Maximizer to drive CX and conversions.

The results from each of these interventions was an increase in organic traffic, improved customer engagement on the website and a continuous personalized communication with leads which led to significantly improved conversions.

The Brand & its context

The brand is a very reputed name in the real estate industry and perhaps one of the few which is vertically integrated into manufacture of construction material. Known for its timely delivery and quality of construction, the brand is a premium brand in every market it operates in. The brand is also seen as a trend setter in different ways, including in marketing.

The consumer context has been changing over the past few years. Customers, primarily belonging to middle and upper income households spend a significant amount of time on the internet and social media platforms.

Their readership of print has been declining steadily. Adverse traffic conditions imply that consumers do not embark on a ‘site visit’ unless they have thoroughly researched about the projects they are interested in and consider it worthwhile to visit the project location.

Prior to this engagement, the brand’s presence on digital was Web 1.0, a “we also do something on digital” than seeing digital as something which could meaningfully add to the business. The context and the trends thereof made it amply clear that winning digital would be critical to maintain market dominance, given that digital was emerging as the new battlefield.

Challenges

The challenges stemmed from both the brand’s context, the nature of the real estate business and the fact that this was a significant shift from the norm.

• The brand was starting from scratch, a clean slate. Everything needed to be defined, starting from understanding the new internet consumer
• The brand had a variety of new projects under development which needed to be mapped with the right consumers. Targeting and personalization of communication would be important.
• Real estate is a long lead-time, high involvement purchase category. A very intelligent and thought through nurturing program, mapped to different consumer segments would be critical.
• Challenge of orchestrating the implementation between multiple skill sets – strategy, creative, technology and analytics.

Approach

The approach used was one which started with the fundamental building blocks, starting with understanding the customer and going all the way to implementation and driving traffic through digital advertising

The effort started with a 3-day workshop with consumers to understand their context, what drives their choices and what role the brand could play in their lives.

This helped us come up with consumer segments based on demography and habits/attitudes. The website was completely redesigned. Oracle’s technologies were the most appropriate and therefore selected. Implementation brought together content creation teams, design teams, UI/UX experts, technology experts and business leaders together – a truly multi-functional team. After the foundation was firmly laid, targeted advertising campaigns were activated. More detail on each of these follows.

Execution

• Web presence

The primary consideration during the website design and development were the following:

• The design should be contemporary & mobile responsive. Truly Web 2.0!
• The website should have dynamic content rendered for different consumer segments to drive personalization.
• Personalization as means to create consumer connect.
• The structure should enable local SEO, given that real estate is a “local” business
• Enable easy lead-capture. Idea to move away from “landing pages” for campaigns
• The website design should evolve with user feedback as captured through technology.

The UI/UX, content, technology and performance marketing teams at GenY Medium worked together to deliver a website which met the needs outlined above.

• Technology to enhance customer experience

The brand is known for its customer centricity, wanted to deliver a superior customer experience through personalization. Oracle’s Maximizer was used for the purpose. Maximizer helped scientifically select features such as buttons, colors, banners etc. based on CX scores for different designs (a series of A/B tests with multiple variables). An illustration of how Maximizer helped deciding between using a hamburger style menu or a “Menu” button is shown below.

Maximizer was also used to deliver content dynamically based on the user type, her history of visits and previous interactions on the website.

The final website carried different content for each person – personalized based on various inputs. This was an industry leading feature, living up to the brand’s reputation!

• Technology to help engage the consumer through the sales cycle

Real estate purchases are high involvement. The decision binds you to a home for a long time, if not for ever. This is also a very emotional decision. Therefore, a brand needs to walk the customer through this long, emotional journey, providing comfort and guidance along the way.

Oracle’s Eloqua was used to engage the consumer through the journey, mapping content with a) the consumer type and b) the stage of the journey.

The hypothesis was simple – the better engaged the consumer, the higher the chances of eventually buying from the brand.

• Technology to enable tracking and remarketing through the consumers’ journey

GenY Medium deployed its own custom cookie which worked along with Eloqua to help track the user’s journey on the brand’s website, social platforms and other 3^rd party platforms.

Every user’s journey was tracked and digital interventions deployed accordingly. A typical consumer journey and engagements with the brand are shown in the illustration below. Look at the variety of touch points and how different brand assets help the user understand the product and proposition better. After all, better consumer education leads to be better conversions.

• Performance marketing

Cross-channel marketing method was used – increasing the number of brand touch points and also providing a better chance to optimize for ROI.

Impact

• Contribution of digital to business grew from less than 10% to over 30%
• 6x increase in website visits and sessions
• Organic traffic grew 2x vs. earlier
• Time spent and pages navigated increased significantly on the website (3 mins to 5 mins)
• Bounce rate reduced from 46% to 29%