Home buying and selling are major life milestones that involve many steps, emotions, and variables. As one of the largest investments people can make, trends in home prices, interest rates, inventory, reasons for the move—like job relocation—and preferred locations are all factors in the decision making.

Redfin, recognizing the weight of these kinds of decisions, seeks to make home buying and selling transparent, easy, and favorable to consumers. Buyers can easily search for houses according to specific criteria—like sales price and location—all from the comfort of their home. To sell, homeowners can list their property with a Redfin agent to save thousands in real estate commissions. 

Redfin currently operates in over 100 markets across the United States and Canada and they are the #1 real estate brokerage site in the U.S. Since 2006, they’ve saved customers more than $1.5 billion in commissions, and grown to attract more than 50 million average monthly users.

But real estate is tricky. Not only does Redfin face serious competition, but the economy is also creating an unpredictable dynamic where people either want to sell homes to leverage their equity, buy if interest rates are favorable, or wait for things to stabilize. Redfin is challenged with trying to nurture buyers and sellers through a journey and effectively reach them at the right time, on the right channel, when they’re most likely to need Redfin’s services. 

Until recently, the retention marketing team focused on their active users, but they needed to shift that focus to engage more inactive users—a considerable portion of their overall customer base. Making this pivot, they could increase the probability of more customers exploring and using Redfin services.

Redfin Gets Their Foot in the Door With Inactive Users

While there are millions of Redfin users in North America, only a small percentage are active. Redfin defines active users as someone who engaged with an email or visited Redfin.com in the last 30 days, and those actions are usually early indicators that someone is ready to buy or sell. 

The emails sent to active users had performed well—with Iterable helping the team unlock their customer data to drive more personalized communications. “With Iterable, the sky’s the limit in terms of our segmentation and personalization with the massive amounts of data we can capture from a user profile,” explained Lisa. But, not knowing which inactive users to send conversion-oriented emails to—because they couldn’t predict who is likely to convert and lacked developer or engineering support to help figure it out—the marketing team needed help. 

They needed a solution to assess where their millions of users were in the lifecycle, narrow them down to a segment of the highest converting targets, and then unlock and activate that data—for example, what homes people search for or own, where they live, if they sold or bought before—with email. 

Iterable offers Redfin powerful tools such as advanced segmentation to send targeted, personalized communications, a flexible data model to maximize their rich user information, and AI-driven features such as Predictive Goals to inform messaging strategy and convert their millions of inactive users. 

Iterable’s Predictive Goals Increases Customer Retention: More Active Buyers and Sellers

Iterable offers several AI-driven features that have helped Redfin achieve their goals of nurturing, attracting, and retaining customers and staying top of mind when they decide to buy or sell a home. For instance, they leverage Send Time Optimization (STO) with all emails, which uses machine learning to analyze historical engagement behavior and select an optimal, per-person send time for communications.

Predictive Goals, also part of Iterable’s AI Suite, is the newest feature the retention marketing team has tested, taking the guesswork and manual labor out of predicting the highest converting users so they can move them from inactive to active.

To start converting their inactive users to active, the marketing team took a group from the seller and buyer side of the business—identified by Predictive Goals—and sent them conversion-oriented emails. For buyers, emails provided local market details, linked to a map of recent homes listed or sold, and encouraged them to review their home’s value. For sellers, the first email nudged them to check out their home on Redfin, a second mentioned data about potential buyers, and they were encouraged to schedule a consultation with an agent who knows the market extensively.

To assess if Predictive Goals made an incremental difference in conversions, Redfin experimented with hold out groups in Iterable. They took their group of inactive users, identified by Predictive Goals, and held off on sending emails to 50% of them on the buyer side and 10% on the seller side. It only took sending a few of the conversion-oriented emails to both Predictive Goals buyers and sellers before Redfin saw encouraging results: 

• A 72% lift in converting inactive sellers to an active state.
  • There was also a 9% lift in conversion (meeting with an agent) after the seller emails.
• A 15% lift in converting inactive buyers to an active state.
• Redfin also observed a directionally positive lift in seller consultations and tours booked by buyers. 

Marketing Team Curb Appeal: Testing, Creativity, and Insights Benefit Brand Engagement and Redfin Teams

With Iterable’s more predictive insights, marketing has the information to act quickly and easily to determine when and which inactive users to email, with minimal-to-no support from engineering. “We did it on our own. It was very, very flexible; we could add or delete Predictive Goals, pivot, and try ideas. It allows us to be creative, which is hard to do with data,” shared Lisa. In fact, the Iterable team was so transparent about the data used to build predictions, marketing started offering insights from Predictive Goals to other teams, which Lisa said “Is incredible when we’re not analysts or developers, but can deliver insights to help them get better at signaling, targeting, and engaging.”

After initial success, with encouragement of Redfin leadership, and putting their minds together with other teams, retention marketing is excited about the possibility of applying Predictive Goals in more use cases that benefit customer engagement and retention. They believe the sky’s the limit by having Iterable and Predictive Goals to relieve pressure from engineering, putting more control, flexibility, and creativity into marketing’s hands, and producing weeks of time saving.

On the horizon, they intend to use Predictive Goals to get more granular with segmentation to convert lapsed users and go bigger and smaller with conversion-oriented emails. They are also looking to  activate push notifications and SMS messages to enhance engagement with all customers—buyer or seller, active or inactive.