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This transcript has been adapted from the webinar, Why Your Brand Should Invest in New Mover Marketing.
Larisa: Good afternoon everyone. Thanks for joining our webinar today. My name is Larisa Bedgood, and I’m the VP of Marketing here at Porch Group Media. Today, we’ll be discussing why your brand should invest in new mover marketing.
Host: Hello everyone! Thank you for spending time with us today. This podcast is the first in our Movers & Shakers series, which is meant to signify that we’re going to start pulling in guests from the world of marketing to help give all of us insight into how they look at the mover market, including strategies and tactics that they employ against the general role that movers play in the life of brands. This should be very instructive for all of us.
And to kick us off, I’m delighted to welcome Luci Rainey, who is a former SVP of Marketing at Comcast and CMO of PODS. Luci, I’ll ask you to just take us through a little bit of your background if you would
Luci: Thanks for having me today. I’ve largely spent my life in the cable, and telecom industry, 20 plus years, where I’m sure many of you can guess, movers are a very important segment and have a reason to reconsider that type of product. And folks in those industries have long been marketing to movers. And then, I was also fortunate enough to be CMO at PODS for almost two years. So thank you for having me.
Host: Well, and, and no one better than you to put movers in the appropriate context. And I think mover marketing is a big theme that we run into. It’s how can you do mover marketing well, but also why it’s important. So if you could just give us an overview here of your view, on the importance of mover marketing, it’d be a great way to start.
Luci: Yeah. When you look at the sheer number of tens of millions of people moving every year, you know, divide that by 2.3 for the average family. And you get a lot of people who are moving every year, and when people move, they open their wallets, they’re ready to spend on a lot of things, and that’s, you know, before their move after their move. And they may be doing home remodeling or purchasing things.
But, on average, those families open their wallets to about $11,000 as really specified discretionary income, just related to their move. That’s a big dollar amount. It’s an acquisition play and more importantly, I think it’s a retention play for companies to really keep their customers.
And when you move in, more than 50% of people move more than 50 miles from their home, they reconsider a lot of products that they use, and services.
Research has shown that over 90% of movers try new brands. They do research. Can they save money? Are they not really happy with a provider they have, or a product? Should they change? And this is a key moment, really, and a key life moment, a key life stage moment when they make those decisions.
Really, timing is everything. And some decisions are made pre-mover. But the big question for your company is, what is the size of your segment? It could be geographical, it could be based on timing. It depends on where you’re doing business if your national movers affect you everywhere. If you’re in the larger populous states, think California, Texas, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, New York. You definitely want to pay attention to movers, because lots of people are moving to and from there. But again, it’s just, what’s your size? What are the geographical considerations for you? There’s a lot to consider, and mover marketing for most businesses, if it’s not already, it should really be a primary segment.
Host: Let’s move on, and, and I guess the math, as you say, is incredibly compelling. So think 30 million moves a year, times $11,000. That’s a 70 billion opportunity, depending on how you look at it. Actually. it’s bigger than that.
But the economics matter, and I completely agree with you, if you’re a small business or a multinational that operates in the United States, the impact is the same. It is probably the biggest life moment and the biggest permission to spend life event there is out there.
And so, why are we at Porch Group Media, who are owned by Porch talking about this? Well, for those of you that don’t know, Porch Group Media and Porch, this is really kind of a bit of a dawn of a new era of mover marketing, if you’ve ever studied it, or ever participated in it.
If you’re a brand marketer, it has been sort of the same for about the last 20 or 25 years. Generally defined by USPS data, generally defined by limited insight, generally defined by limited channels. And what we’ve been able to do at Porch Group Media, powered by our parent company Porch, is really lend a new level of scale.
And maybe even more important than that is a new level of precision, and insight, to the art and science of marketing to movers. We’ve broken the move down into discrete phases. We’ve got really good and precise insight around who is doing what and who’s interested in what product and service when across that journey.
We have insight into 90% of US home buyers And so we’re now at the dawn of really being able to fully monetize the potential of the move for brand marketers like Luci.
Hopefully, we’re able to give a forum to people that have been really leveraging mover marketing for a long time. It isn’t just for the few, it is now for the many with a level of scale and insight, an activation that we’re able to bring to it.
So, Luci, I’ll pick up on some of these data points, but, I guess the one I would ask you to comment on is ROAS. In your career at Comcast and PODS and in your other jobs, ROAS is the thing that you measure your world by. So, just sort of curious as to your take on where mover falls.
Luci: Yeah, as I mentioned before, it’s really divided into two areas if you can predict your movers, which is why I love the Porch Group Media data, which wasn’t available to me in the previous roles I had.
But I think that it’s so important, especially using the premium data that you guys are able to provide companies. Because it’s so important to identify your current customer movers, who’s moving, who can you help move, who can you reach out to? Or if they’re calling into your call center, can you identify them as a mover or talk to them about your mover program?
And that is really very efficient because if you say, OK, if I lose a customer, it’s going to take me three new ones to replace them in terms of investment and spend. Your retention is so important. And so how do you identify your current customer movers, and how do you develop tactics and programs to really protect them? And so they don’t consider another business, remember, 90% of those folks moving will consider other brands. And if people are moving no farther than 50 miles from their home, they are extremely likely to consider a new brand. So how do you protect that retention? And then from an acquisition standpoint?
Again if movers are in that purchase mindset, how do you get in front of them with the right messaging at the right time? These are really, really attentive buyers, and so your ROAS is going to pay off if you can identify them and then serve them up the right offer and message.
Host: Right. To sort of center on a few of the other stats here – any marketer will want scale. I think 31 million moves a year is a pretty good scale. Movers spend on average $11K on each move. Then marketers want opportunity, and I think this is incredibly compelling and we’ll go a little deeper into this with some of the research that we’ve done later.
But the incredible amount, as you said earlier, Luci, is brand switching, that goes on in and around the move, and that makes the move in our view, if not, the most important, certainly one of the most important things that happen in any consumer’s lifetime, in any category, from auto all the way through the more well-known categories around the move, like home improvement. So, the metrics are incredibly compelling.
So, Luci, as a CMO, you’ve got to look at the opportunity, sort of back to some of the stats in a very scientific way. So, walk us through sort of how you would look at the opportunity.
Luci: Yeah, you know, I think, long ago or not so recently, people used to look at movers as only moving in the summer. And that’s true, about 65% of families move in Q2 and Q3, about 35% in Q1 and in Q4. However, people are moving every day. It’s not a seasonal thing, it’s a daily thing.
And so what is the size of your segment? What states you are in really defines the size of your segment and these consumers who are moving, what part of your business are they? That’s really important to discern. So, how many millions of households are those to you? What are those signals that you are able to identify for a mover? And those are different things, depending on your different businesses, and how you really look at your journey, and your marketing plan, to identify those signals, to leverage the data, and to be able to start to track your members.
Then, to me, it’s how do you measure your impact? And at previous companies, if we could do a match, how many did we retain on the retention side, how many came in on the acquisition side, and then vice versa. How many did we lose on the retention side? How did we gain on the acquisition side? As you’re implementing your programs, you can start to say what your growth is on, both sides of the house, from the retention, and the acquisition side of the house. And to me, that’s a place I would start. And I think once you do that, you’re going to see this as a sizable audience.
And I would say, even if you are a one-location, local business, the discipline is the same. The opportunity is the same. There are people moving into every neighborhood in America every day and they represent opportunity. They represent a set of activities. Certainly, the move is the big trigger, but they’re also doing things like shopping for the goods and services that they’re going to need locally, as they move.
Host: And now, just as Porch Group Media has looked at measurability, what we discovered was marketers don’t have the adequate means to measure the impact of mover marketing. Our team has done a great job at putting processes and data visibility in place so that marketers of all sizes can connect the dots and identify who that audience is, understand what they’re interested in and measure the outcome.
Luci, I know there are other questions here that you use to sort of fuel your thinking about any good mover marketing program. So, love to hear about those.
Luci: For you folks here at the webinar, it depends on what your product or services are. These are basic marketing questions. These are things I’m sure you’re asking on a daily basis when you are thinking about your marketing plans and how your numbers are going. When you’re looking at your customer, where in the customer journey is your buying decision made and if somebody moves, does that change their buying decision, or does that enhance their buying decision?
If you can say people are probably buying your product when they move, how do you measure that? How do you look at those numbers, and how does that affect your business?
Or, When somebody moves, does that create a new customer opportunity for you as your business primarily tied to moves? For example, if I’m in the mortgage business, obviously that’s a business a mover is thinking about. Or, the home insurance business or a car insurance business, or banking business. Movers want a branch that’s close to their house. And I know a lot of people do online banking now, but still, if you have to go to the branch, you want one that is somewhat close to your home. Or lawn care and other services.
Host: One of the things that I know you have opened my eyes to, is both the customer opportunity and also the risk of defection. I had really thought historically about moving as an acquisition event.
But I know particularly in the cable and telecom industry and others, it represents as much downside as it does upside.
And so, one of the things that we’ve done as we rolled out the mover product across Porch Group Media is to really stress the understanding of who’s moving in your existing base. It’s a process we call MoverMatch.
Luci, I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but I think in some of your jobs, you’ve really kind of prioritized retention over acquisition. Just because of the huge downside it can represent.
Luci: Yeah, if you can get in front of your own customers and help them recognize that you understand they’re going through a move, I think that’s really valuable. Now, of course, you probably want to balance a little bit of the invasion of privacy factor, and not be as I say, too creepy, as you’re talking to your customers, but, again, if they’re reaching out to you, and you have a program or offers for movers, how do you gently suggest these to your customers?
You’ll see some data later from Harris Poll that identifies some of these industries. I’ll go back to banking, home insurance, car insurance, and all these different areas. I was surprised that 24% say they consider purchasing a new automobile. So even the auto industry is touched by a move.
So how are you looking at your current customers and what are the life cycle changes that they are going though? The move will be a key one – can you find those customers? Can you find the data to find them? And then implement that data into programs?
Host: I want to emphasize something you said, which is all around the pre-move. I think timing is key here. And the mover industry has largely been dominated by post-move data, which is great and very important. A lot of purchases get made in the post-move.
But as we’ve looked at the market and the opportunity, getting in front of that consumer at the point when they are formulating their decisions is really important. So I would just encourage all marketers out there, if you are doing mover marketing, you need to be concentrated on the pre-move.
Let’s just kind of validate a data point or two here. So, I think this reinforces some of the things that we said in the early slide and I think that one of the things that we’ve tried to do at Porch Group Media and Porch, is to give the mover marketing ecosystem more insight into how they should think about moving, what the scale is, what the timing is, and so on.
Harris Poll partnered with us to do a research study. They really did do some terrific work at helping us size the market and get an understanding into consumers and what they’re interested in at each phase of the move.
And I think if you go back to mover studies of old, I think the last one was done in 2015 or something crazy like that. The spend was $8,000 or $9,000. So obviously with inflation and everything else, things were getting more expensive. It was good to get that validation.
But it does point out that there is more opportunity and you can see all the opportunities.
Luci: Just going to comment on some of the areas. When I first saw this research that you guys shared with me, I was surprised by it, for example pet supplies and automotive maintenance when people move and decided they need maintenance taken care of. And, it makes sense, once I saw it. But it’s not something that came to mind.
And so as the next slide goes, let’s just take a look. There is an enormous opportunity for new brand trial and purchase.
When Haris Poll asked how many movers were willing to try new brands, as you can see, it’s 88%, I mean, that is a marketer’s dream number. So, Luci, I don’t know if anything jumped out to you on this page. These are all pretty, pretty obvious, but, man, there’s a lot of money there.
Luci: If you are at any of these verticals, I’m going go back to the retention angle that I spoke of earlier. There are a lot of large-scale enterprise national companies but also a lot of regional and smaller companies who could be playing in this area. As people move, it’s a time for consideration,and they’re doing a lot of research on a lot of different things. It’s a time where they can say: look, I have to change any way. Can I save money? Can I get a better deal? Can I get a better rate? Can I get better coverage, can I get better service? And there’s a lot of questions they’re asking themselves. And if you have to, in many cases, change anyway, you might as well try to get the best deal that that you can.
Host: There is also, and I think this was the biggest surprise to me in in this research, is there is buying going on prior to the move, which sort of goes back to one of the key concepts that we talked about earlier, timing. So the premove may be more important then even the post move.
I like the data here in terms of timing of item and goods and service purchases completely validates that point and was surprising to me across almost every one of these categories.
I guess as an aside, the thing that blew me away was solar. That is the gigantic surprise to me, because the traditional, conventional wisdom is that solar is a post move purchase. That really does turn a lot of that conventional wisdom right on its head. But I’m sure there are findings across every vertical here.
Here is a high level summary of how Porch Group Media and Porch have put together a mover product that spans the entire move journey. And let me just describe each of these phases quickly.
Possible movers are folks who are simply doing research and we derive this intelligence from a product that that our team at Porch Group Media has developed over the last 5 or 6 years, called Signals, which monitors browsing activity and mobile location activity to understand consumer intent. So possible movers are people that are doing research on the move, on all the relationships that they’re going to have to change and things like that. So this falls well outside the traditional mover data definition and here is where we’re seeing a lot of responsiveness.
Likely movers have listed their house and you can see the timing’s underneath these. Any one of these timing segments is critical, depending on the product or service you’re selling.
Verified pre movers are key because this is where we see the commerce happening. When you’re down to 2 to 6 weeks out, movers are starting to make decisions and spend money. And here is where there’s a massive distinction between what Porch Group Media does and the rest of the industry does.
So, there’s a black or a gray box at the bottom that says we’re reaching 80% of US. Home buyers. Verified pre movers are where those homebuyers show up in the move product. They exist all throughout it but but with our collaboration with Porch, with all the work that our team has done to build out that dataset, most of the available data in other mover products amounts to about a million people per annum.
In this stage, we’re at five and that is 80% of the houses bought in the US in a given year. So we have put our money where our mouth is in terms of identifying those pre movers stages, being very deliberate about timing and insight.
And then as you’ll see in the boxes below, coupling that insight across pre mover and post mover with a whole bunch of other data elements that are really important.
So Luci said a little bit ago that you need to know who the mover is, but also what their interests are and what are they shopping for in the moment. We’ve coupled or mover dataset with billions of active shopper signals.
So, a tangible use case: Lucy Rainey is a verified pre mover and she is shopping for a service XYZ out there online. We are able to triangulate that and pull that data together so that our clients can get further down the funnel and not have to waste marketing dollars. So, this precision and insight is, is really important.
Then, of course, who is this household? Who is this consumer? What kind of a family are they, what are their demographic characteristics, their financial status? And so on. These are all really important data points to understand.
And then property data. Understanding in about half the cases, where consumers are moving from and where they’re moving to is crucial, and, uniquely, the product that we built, called MoverTech with Porch Group Media and Porch, is able to do that.
So that is kind of a quick summation of how we have built our mover marketing product, and I think our team’s done a fantastic job at building this product out to be very multi dimensional, and not just to say, well, Lucy Rainey is moving. It’s Lucy Rainey is moving, and here is all the context that the marketer is going to be able to put to work.
Luci: If you’re not already addressing the mover segment specifically, I would really look at the data, look at the numbers, look who’s moving, figure out who that is in your customer base, and evangelize that in your company. One of the places I formerly worked really just thought of moving as a summer event. I really give the credit to my team at the time who started to evangelize the importance of movers and that it was a year round event. So keep remembering that movers move every day. It’s not seasonal. It’s actually important to companies every day.
New Mover Trends Report from Porch Group Media
The New Mover Trends Report from Porch Group Media explores the profile of today’s new movers and provides valuable insights into movers’ life events, spending behaviors, attitudes about moving, and much more. Download your free copy here!
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