Case Stories - DelWebb
As Coca-Cola is the quintessential American soft drink, so Del Webb is synonymous with the active adult community.
In late 2007 – as the U.S. housing market was slipping into an unprecedented decline – Del Webb was looking for leads. But they weren’t looking for any and all leads. They were looking for highly qualified prospects – baby boomers with the assets to purchase a Del Webb home without selling their existing home and boomers who have a personality that fits the Del Webb lifestyle. They approached us to plan, implement, and optimize an online campaign that would build their war chest of prospects for the spring sales season.
To achieve the desired results in such challenging times, we knew we needed leverage our understanding of mature adults to make a deeper emotional connection and show these consumers how Del Webb could help them to lead their lives to the fullest. To do this, we first identified the two primary sets of core needs (based on principles of shared human behavior) that are fulfilled by the Del Webb experience.
Based on those needs, esteem-seeking and self-actualization, we developed an integrated campaign that included email, display advertising, and a micro site centered around an interactive “Lifestyle Advisor” – an objective, research-based, tool that served as the ideal lead generation offer and helped boomers decide if an active adult community was right for them. Each of the campaign elements were tailored to provide messaging and imagery that resonated with either esteem-seekers or self-actualizers. This needs-based approach played out in both our media plan and creative, which then drove the different consumers to a personalized micro site that showed how a Del Webb community meets that core need.
Finally, by conducting split testing on the various creative, we were able to continually optimize the campaign as to make the best use of Del Webb’s marketing dollars.
Over a twelve-week period, the campaign yielded over 13 million impressions and a click-through rate 3 times the industry average. As expected, the email campaigns performed at an even more effective rate, validating the power of email (done right) with an older consumer. And most important, the campaign delivered 5,000 highly qualified leads (ten times the expected number of leads without increasing their budget).
Do you know what core need your product fulfills for boomers?
What's made our work with
Del Webb interesting is that, despite the poor economy, they've come to us looking for not just any leads — but highly qualified ones.
Kathi Scharf
Director of Strategic Solutions
