Winning back cold prospects with Engagement Studio

Matching private room rentals in thoughtfully-designed shared housing, with renters seeking a friendly, fully-serviced and affordable city home, Common is a business with a large database of past, current and potential members.

Like many businesses with a large pool of data, much of the Common prospect database was inactive.

After reviewing their Pardot (Account Engagement) account, MarCloud pitched the client with the idea of a re-engagement campaign, which the client was happy to run with.

Campaign goals and objectives 

The main marketing goal for Common was to ‘win back’ the attention of potential prospects who had not engaged for a long time—in many cases 2+ years—and those who had never engaged at all. The business goals were to keep leads, sales, and revenue coming in.

Doing so would give Common a more highly engaged audience to market to and help them to clean up their prospect list for more accurate reporting. The original brief from Common to MarCloud Consulting was to provide a list of “engaged prospects” from their account so that the client could then send some emails to them.

With more than 150,000 prospects disengaged, the objectives of the campaign were to:

• Re-engage prospects with Common and what they offer.

• Clean up a largely inactive database.

• Generate leads for the business.

We set to work planning and managing an automated campaign for Common that would exceed these goals. With these objectives in mind and plenty of powerful Pardot tools on-hand, we set to work on planning and rolling out a strategic, automated lead generation campaign.

Keys to success

In order to generate the best results, we knew we couldn’t treat the entire database as equal. Those who were previously engaged but turned cold were different from those who had never engaged despite joining the list. With Common, we knew that there was plenty of potential to meet the campaign objectives set and give the client more than a short-term fix.

We also knew a re-engagement email campaign needed to say more than simply, “do you still want to hear from us?” Run strategically, the ‘Remote Services’ campaign could actually generate long-term revenue for the client and new business beyond the lockdown period.

There was an opportunity to remind prospects of the Common value proposition and inspire them to make a micro-conversion, such as booking a tour of a home. The campaign method was, therefore, to use Engagement Studio combined with segmented Lists, to automate a sequence of ten emails, all tailored towards the services that the client wanted to push.

For this reason, we:

• Created two lists; one of ‘inactive’ data and the other of ‘never active’ data based on Tags.

• Built a tailored Engagement Studio with email content that prompted prospects to click a CTA button and confirm they still wished to hear from Common.

• Went one step further and designed the email content to contain some new homes promotion and news.

• Set up Salesforce Campaigns to be able to report on the campaign seamlessly and demonstrate how many marketing-qualified and sales-qualified leads were generated.

• Sent three ‘win-back’ emails to the various Lists.

Following the campaign, we then:

• Created a List of ‘revived prospects’ that we could analyse.

• Created a List of ‘inactive/never active’ prospects that we could analyse and eventually move to the Recycle Bin.

The payoff

While the exact results of this campaign are confidential, what we can share here is that the re-engagement campaign we suggested, planned, and managed for Common:

• Achieved a significantly more engaged database of prospects and generated lots of tour bookings, opportunities, and new contracts.

New contracts for Common mean recurring revenue for months.

In a nutshell, the campaign was hugely effective.