5 Tips for Improving Marketing Campaigns to Home Sellers

Consumers selling their home are a highly lucrative target for marketers, spending an average of $6,000 to $7,000 throughout the event. For retailers that sell furniture, home improvement tools, bedding, dishware and other moving-related products, it's essential to capture these consumers when they're most likely to be spending money.

The difficulty with marketing to movers is the limited time frame. As the housing market improves and homes sell faster, the window of opportunity continues to shrink. More companies are recognizing the need to reach consumers before the move, when the most spending occurs.

What can marketers do to reach the lucrative "pre-mover" group with the right message at the right time? Using online real estate listing data, retail marketers have more access to information about their current customers and potential customers than ever before. Using these five steps, retail marketers will see a boost in spending from consumers preparing to move.

1. Identify current customers who are preparing to move. By matching up housing and company sales data, retailers can identify if their customers have listed their homes for sale. Before pre-mover marketing, companies were stuck waiting for a Post Office change of address or until their customer sales data showed a discrepancy. With a proactive pre-mover marketing plan, companies can reach their current customers before the move — and ahead of the competition.

2. Determine which customers are most lucrative. The best pre-mover campaigns focus on the most lucrative customer segments with the highest potential return on investment. Are you a high-end retailer who only wants customers who have listed their homes on the market for more than $400,000? Or are you willing to take someone who has a lower price point? Before you can embark on a mover marketing campaign, you need to identify which customers will yield the best results.

3. Add prospects to your marketing list. If a retail company wants to reach prospects, housing data is the answer. Overlaying customer sales data with housing information and geo-demographic segments lets marketers hone in on consumers likely to purchase their products, and produces a list of addresses for homes on the market that match their criteria.

4. Send direct mail to consumers. After determining your targets, think through your unique selling proposition and come up with an offer that encourages prospects to respond. For instance, a retail store can offer 20 percent off to a customer who buys within two weeks of their move date. It's important to try different messages through A/B testing to figure out what's most effective. Each segment is different, so no retailer will perfectly nail the messaging on the first try.

5. Track ROI for your pre-mover marketing program. Retailers can track ROI by comparing years of housing data with customer sales databases to match up addresses and see where past purchases were made relative to listing or sales dates for homes. Those insights can also be used to improve the timing of future campaigns.

Using a pre-mover marketing campaign, retailers can capitalize on the large chunk of money spent throughout a move. Waiting until consumers complete a change of address form is too late for most retailers to capture the spend.

Scott Bailey is executive vice president, strategy and analytics at Target Data, a company that specializes in marketing to pre-movers using data and analytics.