Welcome to the Movers and Shakers podcast. Join us as industry leaders and experts discuss important marketing topics and share actionable insights and unique perspectives on the latest marketing, strategies, technology, and trends.
Meet Michelle Taves
Michelle Taves serves as Group GM of Porch Marketing, leading the integrated marketing strategy of Porch Group Media and fellow Porch company, Welcome Wagon. Along with serving as the Group GM, Michelle serves as General Manager of Porch Group Media, overseeing the company’s strategic direction and day-to-day operations. Following the acquisition of Porch Group Media by Porch Group, Michelle played a key role in establishing Porch Group Media as a leading product innovator in mover marketing and today is a member of the Porch Group’s senior leadership team.
With over 30 years of product, marketing, and leadership experience, Michelle has developed an in-depth knowledge of product strategy and development, operational efficiency management, omnichannel campaign execution, first-party marketing solutions, and audience development best practices including sourcing, privacy, availability, and reliability.
*The following content has been adapted from Porch Group Media’s Movers and Shakers Podcast
How Can Brands Take Advantage of Mover Marketing? | Porch Group Media Leadership Insights with Michelle Taves
Michelle: How Can Brands Take Advantage of Mover Marketing?
There are a variety of ways, but I will give you some indicators as to how we think of it at Porch Group Media and Porch.
Identifying & Retaining Your Moving Customers
The first way to leverage mover marketing is through a process that we call MoverMatch. MoverMatch is a process that we’ve created to flag our clients’ CRM databases with movers. MoverMatch identifies which of your current customers is in the moving process. Being able to know when your customers are moving presents an enormous amount of untapped opportunity is and critical from a retention standpoint.
A lot of marketers think about mover marketing as acquisition only. That is not true. The CRM or existing customer discipline around mover marketing presents maybe a larger dollars and cents opportunity than the acquisition kind of discipline does. Think about how expensive it is to acquire a customer. Think about all the spending that goes on during a move or could go on from your existing customer base that you’ve spent a lot of money securing. There are a lot of opportunities on the customer retention front.
Reaching Consumers Throughout the Entire Move Journey
The move journey is comprised of four key phases.
1. Possible Movers
The first phase is possible movers. These are folks who aren’t moving yet but are out there simply doing research on moving. This segment is created from Porch Group Media’s in-market behavioral data, derived from browsing data that we harvest from the internet, mobile location, data, and so on. We link this data back to consumers so you can understand who in your customer base is actively shopping for move-related products and services. There’s a lot of scale in this database.
2. Likely Movers
The second phase is likely movers. These consumers have entered the real estate funnel. They have listed their home for sale and are actively moving toward the next place, so you’ve got to be able to work with those consumers and understand how their needs are changing from one phase to the next.
3. Verified Pre-Movers
The third phase is really where our ownership and partnership with Porch comes to into play. Verified pre-movers are homebuyers who have their homes under contract and are in the moving or financing process. These folks are 2 to 6 weeks out from their move. They’ve gone through the early stages of the process and are now getting ready to move into their new homes.
In this phase, consumers are doing their due diligence on what they need and what they are going to buy. And in many cases, about half the cases they are transacting. This is where the ability to secure the renewed loyalty of consumers is massively important.
With the old mover marketing, marketers didn’t really have a lot of visibility to folks at this phase of the move. And if they did, they weren’t getting a lot of scale out of it.
So, this is the phase that is really enabled by Porch. And the net of it is for marketers is in this phase of likely movers, we are able to see 80% of US homebuyers, which is sort of unheard of. It’s the new way of doing mover marketing as brought to you by all of the data and all the insights that we’re able to get from Porch. We’ve got a lot of information on who buys what, and how to talk to consumers in this really critical phase of the pre-move.
4. Post-Movers
Then the fourth and final phase of the move journey is post-movers. This phase includes both homeowners and renters. There’s a lot of commercial activity that goes on during this period. This data is more prevalent out there in the marketing ecosystem. We are a leader here and have more routes to market regarding channels and ways to engage with consumers, as well as insights into what they’re buying when.
So, the post-move is a critical phase. You’ve really got to think about this as a four-phase journey. But really, our hypothesis as we’ve transformed mover marketing is to focus on the pre-move in the first three phases that I covered – and the post-move as sort of a contiguous journey.
Mover Marketing Programs
So, the next way that brands can take advantage is through marketing programs that typically take the form of acquisition programs. We operate acquisition programs for marketers, across numerous categories, from retail to financial services, to home services, and so on.
I’ll take this opportunity to sort of go back to that fundamental finding that we had with our Harris Poll research. We found that moving represents the biggest brand switching opportunity there is in marketing. Again, 90% of consumers want to switch brands and will. Regarding your CRM, this is important to preventing attrition that might happen in the move. But, acquisition is just as important because you’ve got to put yourself in front of that consumer when they are in brand switching mode.
What we do at Porch Group Media is couple mover insight with all the household demographic insight that our consumer data products have. Then, we combine all of that with our signals and active shopping data to really help marketers get down the funnel.
And this goes for both CRM and acquisition use cases, but if you know that person XYZ is moving, you know all about their household, you know how to reach them across channels and you know what they’ve been actively shopping for yesterday either online or in-store, you’ve put yourself in a really good position to capitalize on the obvious economic opportunity that that consumer demonstrates.
Lastly, to sum up, I think that mover marketing has become much more than a one size fits all. We have put ourselves at Porch Group Media and Porch, in a position to really assist marketers to put the right mover marketing programs and audiences in place.
If you’d like to learn more about our mover marketing solutions, we look forward to hearing from you and showing you how this gigantic opportunity can help your brand acquire and retain customers.
Learn More About How Mover Marketing Helps Brands Boost the Success of Their Customer Acquisition and Retention Campaigns
Be sure to subscribe below so that you don’t miss future episodes with other industry-leading marketing executives as they look to transform the future of mover marketing.
Stay up to date with the latest news and resources:
The 2022 Marketer’s Perspective on Mover Marketing
Download the 2022 Marketer’s Perspective on Mover Marketing Report to learn more about how brands are using mover marketing to boost the success of their customer acquisition and retention programs.
