The Company
HomeGain® is a leading provider of online marketing solutions that connect real estate agents and brokers with homebuyers and sellers. HomeGain offers free services to find and compare real estate agents, research home values and view homes for sale. Real estate agents and brokers use HomeGain's real estate online marketing solutions and real estate lead-generation tools to connect to consumers, promote their services and grow their businesses. With an average of over 5 million Web-site visits per month, HomeGain is the second most visited real estate Web site.
The Challenge
Collecting information about home sales from every ZIP code across the country, HomeGain has a database that grows in size and complexity daily. "There's so much data, and because we deliver detailed information to so many consumers, the complexity of HomeGain's email program requires a sophisticated approach," said Amy Gitson, the company's online communications manager.
HomeGain sends data-rich messages to registered users, providing them with listings of homes for sale in targeted ZIP codes as well as prices of homes previously sold in those areas. The company needed an application that could create highly dynamic messaging and deliver it quickly and effectively. "There's so much data, we didn't want to take up in-house engineering resources to handle it," Gitson said.
They had outsourced the project to another email service provider. However, running huge amounts of data through a traditional ESP solution took much longer than HomeGain found acceptable-typically a full week. With the housing market changing on a daily basis, it was important to be able to pull the appropriate data, populate a template and send hundreds of thousands of individualized messages quickly.
The Solution
When HomeGain switched its complex program to run through Silverpop Engage Transact, the change was dramatic. Messages that had taken days to create and send took Silverpop a few hours. Utilizing recipient data concerning preferences, Silverpop Engage Transact creates and triggers mailings containing multiple dynamic content elements, including:
- Recent homes sold in ZIP codes targeted by the recipient
- All homes currently listed for sales in those ZIP codes
- Other personalization based on the recipients' email address, city, state and ZIP code preferences
The Results
HomeGain's highly complex engagement marketing campaign is created and delivered flawlessly through Silverpop Engage Transact. Instead of the week the company's previous ESP took to complete the task, Silverpop typically handles the project in mere hours. "It's amazing how quickly Silverpop Engage Transact can process all this data," Gitson said. "Silverpop is the only company that had a tool in place that could handle this type of complex program."
