August 11, 2021

Real estate 2.0: How Marshall White uses Lexer to boost conversions by up to 40% with intelligent lead scoring

6
minute read

An innovator in their industry, real estate business Marshall White is using Lexer’s Customer Data Platform to automatically assign lead scores to sellers and alert agents when it’s time to call prospects who are most likely to sell. This data-powered customer management solution allows agents to prioritize communications and personalize messaging across every stage of the home selling process.

Real estate, like most industries, has been shaken up by digital.

As online real estate portals gain popularity, the home buying experience is largely controlled by the buyer. As a result, real estate agents are increasingly challenged to find suitable buyers and provide stellar customer experiences without over-reliance on the online portals.

Rod Collins, Marshall White’s General Manager of Marketing and Digital, knew that operating independently of the online portals would provide Marshall White with an unparalleled strategic advantage—and that’s what led him to Lexer for help building a custom data management solution for real estate agents, IntelAgent.

“We are reinventing real estate,” says Rod. “The Lexer integration has provided us with an astonishing amount of data that has made a huge impact on our business. It allows us to profile and actively engage with customers at a micro-segment level through traditional, social, and digital channels.”

In this case study, you’ll learn how Marshall White uses Lexer to:

  • Increase customer attributes from just a handful to over 300 attributes, including custom real estate data such as vendor propensity scores, property value, and pricing preferences.
  • Increase conversion rates 567%—from 6% to 40% in select customer segments.
  • Achieve over 1,000 hits to agents’ pages with a Lexer-powered $150 Facebook campaign.

The context

Marshall White is a market-leading luxury real estate business operating in Melbourne, Australia. With a reputation spanning over 50 years and 120 agents in 6 offices, Marshall White knew they needed to take their business to the next level to continue growing.

“One of our strategic challenges was our increasing dependence on the portals,” says Rod. “About 20 years ago, agents shared ownership of their own data with the portals. We are trying to regain the strategic advantage that owning our data provides.”

With a background in IT, Rod believed that cleaning, integrating, and synthesizing their data into a single customer view would enable Marshall White to operate more intelligently and independently of the online portals.

The challenge

With about 400,000 contacts in their CRM and over a dozen systems in their tech stack, Marshall White faced integration challenges that seemed insurmountable.

All of Marshall White’s systems were provided by different vendors and were impossible to fully integrate. Although they owned first-party data, it was inconsistent, incomplete, and in many cases, out of date.

“There was no practical way of creating a single customer view,” says Rod. “We didn’t know much more about our customers than what we had in our CRM, which was very limited. We didn’t know what our loss rates were. And we couldn’t execute that notion of a customer journey, because we just didn’t know enough about them. There was no segmentation in a meaningful sense.”

To solve these problems, Rod started researching CDPs.

He knew what he was looking for: An accessible platform from an innovative company.

“I wasn’t interested in Salesforce,” says Rod. “It never works for small businesses. It’s too hard, too inflexible, too expensive. Lexer seemed like a better match for us, because they’re a bit funky, and Lexer has the best engagement model I’ve ever experienced in my life on the customer side. I thought, that’s going to work for us because we need different and better.”

The solution

After choosing Lexer as their CDP partner, Marshall White solved their foundational data challenges with a unified, enriched single view of their customers and prospects. By combining data from key systems into a centralized hub (Lexer) and using data enrichment tools to fill the caps in their database, Marshall White could use analytics and customer segmentation tools to draw never-before-seen customer insights that would inform their approach to acquisition, loyalty programs, and agent support.

Here’s an example of IntelAgent’s high-level architecture:

With all of their data in one place, including second-party data from online portals and third-party data from Experian’s Mosaic, Marshall White could begin drawing actionable customer intelligence to answer questions like:

  • What are sellers’ vendor propensity scores?
  • When did sellers purchase their home and how much did they pay?
  • When was a potential seller last contacted by an agent?
  • What suburbs are potential buyers interested in?
  • How much are buyers looking to spend?
  • What percentage of our database is classified as a buyer?
  • When did a potential buyer last make an inquiry?
  • What’s the Mosaic breakdown of our database?

These insights and segments helped skyrocket Marshall White’s understanding of their customers.

“We know an enormous amount about our customers now, over 300 attributes on each of them—up from just a handful,” says Rod. “We were also able to convince online portals to give us second-party data for every house in the neighborhoods where we operate. That integration provided an astonishing amount of data that we’ve been able to use in many different ways.”

In particular, Marshall White has created four new services with their new data and capabilities:

1. Vendor propensity score

Marshall White’s newly integrated data provided them with the opportunity to enhance their modeled propensity-to-sell data based on the behavioral insights captured with the CDP.

“The propensity to sell became really important in terms of score lead generation,” says Rod. “We get paid by the seller, so we need to find sellers, and the vendor propensity score allows us to provide agents with scored leads to help them prioritize their communications.”

To do so, Lexer helps Marshall White segment their entire database based on this revised propensity scale. Profiles move up or down on the scale based on certain actions—such as email clicks, appraisal requests on the website, or interactions with agents—captured by the CDP.

Here’s an example of how a new prospect might move up in the propensity score until they’re added to an agent’s priority contact list:

2. Buyer profiling

The next service Marshall White is able to offer with Lexer is buyer profiling.

With integrated data from Experian Mosaic, Marshall White can create buyer personas based on their Mosaic Group, household composition, life stage, affluence, and other key attributes that indicate their fit for a particular sale. This enables agents to find a buyer for every house and energize slow-moving campaigns.

For example, if an agent is trying to sell a 4-bedroom, 2-bathroom house in a particular neighborhood at a high price point, Marshall White can create a list of likely buyers for that property who meet that criteria.

3. Geotargeting

Using Lexer’s social activation and targeting tools, Marshall White can help agents market their services to buyers and sellers in their areas.

This precise, geotargeted agent marketing allows agents to build their local influence and grow their businesses over time. If they want to be known as the best agent in their area, they can set up efficient social media advertising campaigns to build traffic to their websites.

4. Inside sales

For agents who are too busy to call all of the leads identified in Lexer on their own, Marshall White set up an inside sales team for assistance.

“We create a sales model to say, ‘if you don’t call these leads within 6–7 days, we’ll call them for you,’” says Rod.

The results

Since implementing Lexer, Marshall White has:

  • Gained access to over 300 customer attributes for insights and analytics.
  • Increased vendor conversion rates from 6% to an average of 12%, achieving 40% in some segments.
  • Delivered over 1,000 hits to agents’ pages with a Lexer-powered $150 Facebook campaign.

“Lexer has made a huge impact,” says Rod. “The data really speaks. When I first did vendor propensity scoring, it was with a spreadsheet. We got about a 6% conversion rate with that. When we started using Lexer, we got to about a 12% conversion rate overall and in some cohorts, we got to about 40%. We are adding behaviors and intent to the modeling now and seeing further improvements. This is even more highly predictive.”

Additionally, Marshall White has started reporting leakage using Lexer’s Track. These leakage reports have helped them encourage agents to adopt the solution more fully.

“We’ve quantified the amount of opportunity we’re missing and leaving on the table, and that really changed agent behavior,” says Rod. “Trying to change the agents’ behavior has been difficult in the past, but the leakage insights started forcing people to make the calls.”

The future

Marshall White’s future plans for Lexer include:

  • Agent Support: Enhancements to the agent experience, including improvements to the way agents capture data.
  • Expanded Territories: Segmented nurturing journeys for new suburbs and municipalities using the geo-targeting tools.
  • Customer Experience: Additions to the vendor propensity score, including new intent data picked up from the website, to improve lead scoring and streamline sales.

“We’ve had great success with the current propensity models and now we want to take that to the next level to create a real-time score for every single profile within the CDP, moving scores up and down dynamically as we learn something new about each profile,” says Rod.

Lexer delivers more than revenue growth. Our tools and services help you weave customer-centricity into every aspect of your businesses, from the relevancy of the customer experiences you offer to the agility, efficiency, and proactivity of your internal teams. With hundreds of configuration options and collaboration from our team, you can adapt the solution to your current requirements and evolve your engagement as your business grows.

Interested in learning more about Lexer’s CDP and services? Use the calendar below to book a meeting.

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Elizabeth Burnam
Content Marketing Specialist
Elizabeth Burnam is a content marketer and a poet at heart. She has a degree in Professional Writing and experience developing high-impact marketing assets for a broad range of industries.Outside of work, she enjoys reading, painting, people-watching, and exploring the natural wonders of Vermont.