A holistic approach to email marketing, resulting in over 1,300 new leads

McCarthy Stone is the UK’s leading retirement home developer and manager, offering award-winning homes for sale or rent across 200 locations around the UK.

The company specialises in making retirement living as simple and stress-free as possible, offering services to suit the needs of each resident.

Service overview

  • Email marketing campaign
  • Lead generation

The challenge

McCarthy Stone approached us to see if we could help them find prospective leads with an exciting and regularly updated email marketing campaign.

The sales and marketing team wanted to make people aware of new developments and encourage them to express an interest in buying or renting a property.

While the company had offered email newsletters in the past, they weren’t happy with the results.

The emails needed to share the branding and tone of voice that McCarthy Stone is known for – friendly and colourful with a desire for adventure.

Building an email campaign that delivers the right results

Our email specialists started by conducting extensive research, looking at previous email campaigns and data, as well as email marketing carried out by competing businesses. They were then ready to create an email marketing strategy with the goal of finding prospective leads that the sales and marketing team could qualify.

The first step was to create an email capture form for McCarthy Stone to promote, which connected to their customer relationship management system. This signup form added prospects to the weekly group newsletter and provided them with personalised information relevant to their local area.

Next, we planned a content calendar with McCarthy Stone, determining which emails would be sent when, and what they would cover. Our email experts designed and built the emails, with the marketing team at McCarthy Stone creating the copy. Regular communication ensured there were no issues or delays.

All email links contained detailed tracking, so McCarthy Stone could see which recipient clicked on which link, helping them determine interest in specific schemes. Our vivid emails and tried-and-tested subject lines resulted in open and click-through rates that exceeded McCarthy Stone’s expectations. The average email open rate for 2022 was 46.7%, while the average click-through rate was 10.5%. Given that the average open and click-through rates in the real estate sector in 2022 were 19.2% and 1.8% respectively, these are results McCarthy Stone can be proud of.

In the first 12 months:

Conclusion

This long-term email marketing campaign led to impressive results for McCarthy Stone. As well as more leads, the emails resulted in increased interest in the website, with website sessions rising by 83.3% over the course of the campaign.

The sales and marketing team are now hard at work converting qualified prospects into sales and nurturing warm leads until they are in a position to buy.

Want to see how our email experts can introduce new leads to your business? Get in touch today.

RELATED CASE STUDIES