Using data and insights to target the home-mover market

How to target your customers at the very moment they want your products

Does your data tell you when and why your customers are most in need of your products and services? Can it deliver that insight right at the time the need arises? We explain how marketers can use data and insight to target home movers, ensuring they reach them at the time they’re most likely to engage.

Marketers are always looking for better ways to acquire prospects, retain and engage their existing customers. Each year, UK companies lose over 20 per cent of their customers, according to our research with nearly 200 of the UK’s leading marketers.

The research also highlights the fact that 45 per cent of UK marketers say replacing these losses with new customers is their biggest challenge. For the remaining 55 per cent, re-activation, up-selling, retention and cross-selling to existing customers are the biggest challenges.

Marketers can respond to these challenges by unlocking the potential of their customer data. Not only to identify who their customers and prospects are, and the products or services best suited to their needs, but more importantly to understand when and why they are in-market. This is the power of home mover marketing.

Why target home movers?

Moving home is a significant life-event for most people. It’s a time when existing relationships with suppliers, such as utilities, telecoms, media, insurance and financial services providers, are reviewed. Further research revealed that 65 per cent of home movers switch suppliers or engage with new brands during the home move period. It’s also a time when people go looking for new products such as homewares, furniture, or electrical goods. For some it’s a great opportunity to hone DIY and gardening skills. Others go looking for specialist services from interior designers, landscape gardeners and home improvement companies. The need for professional services also increases during this time, which can be good news for lawyers, financial advisers, and accountants.

Conservative estimates based on research from both YouGov and money.co.uk revealed that the average home-mover spends around £5,000 on move-related goods and services, and £8,000 on home improvements within 12 months of moving.

Whether upsizing, downsizing or moving from town to country, consumer spending – and borrowing – increases when people move home. From the moment people start looking for a new home or put their house on the market, movers are active purchasers, borrowers and switchers.

A market that’s always on the move

According to the Office of National Statistics, an average of eight per cent of the UK’s adult population move home each year. Understanding when and why people are active in the home mover market is the key first step to offering them the right product or service at the right time in the process.

Our Guide to Mover Marketing shows that almost a quarter (23 per cent) of home movers upsize to a larger home and 20 per cent move to a better area. These could be indicators of an intention to start or grow their family.

Opportunities for marketers

Targeting home movers helps marketers overcome challenges including:

• New customer acquisition: By targeting people at a time when they show a higher-than-normal propensity to spend
• Customer retention: By encouraging customers to remain loyal during the home-move process, a brand can help to reduce churn and prevent customers from switching to its competition
• Cross-selling and upselling: Brands can encourage existing customers to purchase new products and services that may be of current interest to them during a home move
• Re-activate lapsed customers: The home move is a perfect time for a brand to reintroduce itself and engage customers who may not have bought from them in a while
• Improve data quality and reduce data decay: The insight into when customers are changing address helps a brand to keep customer data accurate and up-to-date
• Improve final account settlement rates: Proactively communicating with home movers before they move helps to ensure final accounts are settled before customers move on to their new addresses.

Home-mover marketing in action

As I touched on in a recent interview with Smart Insights, reaching home movers calls for a combination of science and art. The science needed to analyse customer data and the art to develop relevant, meaningful, creative communications.

This data-driven approach to ‘right-time’ marketing is proven to work. One leading retailer of upholstered furniture found that 21 per cent of its sales were a result of people moving home.

The company now targets home movers on a regular basis to ensure that its market share continues to grow.

Make home mover marketing work for you

To determine the value of the home mover market to your business, the first step is to analyse your existing customer data against home mover data.

Using just three pieces of critical information – customer address, transaction value, and purchase date –we at Royal Mail Data Services analyse your customer data against our unique home mover datasets. We can then correlate wins and losses that are directly linked to the home move process.

The resulting Life Event Analysis Report helps to size and value the home mover market opportunity for your business. It also helps to provide guidance on where best to start. Whether that’s finding new customers, retaining existing ones, re-activating lapsed customers, improving data quality or improving final account settlement rates. Most importantly, the findings from this report will tell you when to communicate for maximum impact.

Getting started with home mover marketing

To help you get started, we’ve developed the Guide to Mover Marketing. Drawing on our experience of working with many of the UK’s leading brands, this free guide is designed to help B2C marketers improve marketing performance by answering the question: “How can I anticipate what customers need before they have to ask?”

Now is the time to make your move. You can request the Life Events Analysis Report or download the Guide to Mover Marketing.

Thanks to Jim Conning for sharing their advice and opinions in this post. A
Jim is Managing Director of Royal Mail Data Services, the specialist data business of Royal Mail Group.