Behavioral targeting may be a controversial topic, but many marketers use it to add customer intelligence behind their companies' sales efforts. And in the rarefied atmosphere of commercial real estate, the C-level executives that Denver-based Rare Space aids with sales and leases do seem to appreciate a more informed approach.
That's what Liz Iracki, director of marketing and business development at Rare Space, says her company has discovered during the past three months—since hiring Golden, Colo.-based Net-Results, a sales and marketing automation provider, as its new e-mail service provider.
Iracki first built a foundation of increased e-mail-to-Web page traffic so Rare Space could start monitoring what customers cared about. By simply including teasers instead of full stories in the company's last e-newsletter, she saw site traffic spike by 400 percent because recipients had to click through to read more. And now Rare Space is moving on to new territory.
Target Marketing: How does this type of behavioral targeting aid in trigger-based campaigns?
Liz Iracki: Rare Space has been using e-mail marketing campaigns for about five years. So we've built up a large database of business owners and decision makers of businesses throughout the Colorado region that could potentially be interested in our services. ... By us linking in our database with Net-Results, now those ISPs [of our e-mail subscribers] are known through Net-Results. We know who those people are. We can track their behavior [on our site] going forward ever since we first sent them that first e-mail campaign. ... So what's great is we're able to see which components of our Web site that people are going onto. ... We have a general idea of what they're looking for ... We have other tools on our Web site. One of them is a space needs calculator ... [which] helps [businesses] decide if they have the right square footage. ... That information, just knowing that they're thinking enough about their real estate enough to input that information on our Web site and to know who they are, that tells us that they're thinking about it. ... So that sort of behavior takes us off our regular [lead follow-up] timeline. ... One of the great features that we're going to take advantage of with our next campaign is the ability to set up parameters. So, say someone ... clicks on our Web site more than three times, we can set up an automatic e-mail that will go out to them as a follow-up. ...
TM: How does monitoring who visited the Rare Space site and what they viewed after receiving an e-mail eventually lead to a conversion? How does Rare Space follow up in order to achieve the conversion?
LI: So what we found ... [is] that the ROI is about 5,000 percent ... That's kind of what we're looking at in the future. I wouldn't say that we're at 5,000 percent right now. But [that's] because real estate is such a long cycle. So what I would say at this stage right now is we already have information and activity that we're able to monitor. So one of the other things we've set up is we have a scoring system. So based on people's activity and response to our e-mail, we know where to put them on our radar. So sort of looking at really just increasing the utility of our time spent out there and who we chase. ...
TM: How does this intelligence help Rare Space segment its e-newsletter recipients? Has this intelligence led to other forms of customer contact?
LI: I guess I was getting into that with that scoring system that we have. So the scoring system, again, is just based on activity. So based on the amount of time spent on our Web site and number clicks on our Web site and going forward, it kind of increases the scoring system for us, so I would say, and that leads to what type of contact we'll take next.
TM: What sort of results has Rare Space seen from adding this intelligence to its e-mail campaigns?
LI: I would say, first of all, we've had some really good conversations. ... We have had numerous instances of actual contact with potential clients that are not former clients of ours that have just somehow been in our system and we've been trying to reach. In addition, it has helped us monitor activity of current clients. ... The people that we're working with are really top of the food chain. So they're C-level people that have a million things on their mind. So it's a very precarious ground to walk where we don't want to bother them and bug them, particularly if they're in the middle of their lease term. If they've got a couple years left, we wouldn't be calling them. But having the knowledge that the customer that we know, we've worked with in the past and they're still looking at our data, that gives us a little more assurance that it's OK to check in. And they might have big changes going on. ...
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