Kiwi real estate portal OneRoof has built a user base of more than 1.5 million with the use of personalisation, automation and AI tools.

Head of customer engagement Helen Hill says the NZME platform has successfully established itself as a competitor to long-established property platforms.

In an INMA Ideas blog, she tells of the need to dramatically increase email and app engagement, delivering relevant content at the right time.

“Its marketing automation, data capture and profiling tools to create and personalise multiple email and newsletter touchpoints for customers have been crucial to the platform’s growth and success,” she says.

A data strategy to improve customer segmentation uses declared and inferred customer data collection to localise and personalise listing recommendations, building relevant customer experiences.

“In addition to capturing inferred data based on a user’s on-site and in-app behaviour, we provided a profile builder where customers can declare whether they are in the property market, if they are buyers or sellers, and their preferred locations.

“Finally, we used our marketing automation platform to trigger personalised communications across all touchpoints, using machine learning to continue to improve the customer experience with every return visit.”

Hill says the marketing automation platform was scaled to seamlessly connect to OneRoof APIs and databases. “The use of AI features to determine the best time to send an email at an individual customer level achieved a 23 per cent increase in email engagement,” she says.

The profile builder now also feeds into those databases, with customer-declared information such as where users are in their property journey and which locations are of interest. Creation of a ‘suburb sequence’ uses declared and inferred data.

New, personalised, listings-focussed email touchpoints include ‘local insights’ market newsletters, a quarterly property report, and an e-newsletter with localised and personalised ‘recommended listings’.

Using the cutting-edge tools has taken OneRoof’s communications from generic to targetted and localised content, delivered at the right time using smart delivery technology.

Hill says the email channel is now a significant contributor to OneRoof’s success, underpinning listings audience growth of 48 per cent year-on-year, with audience from the email channel alone increasing 440 per cent.