Reducing the cost per sale
by 45% for over 50s living

How we used data-driven lead generation to drive a landmark cost per sale for independent living property developer, Lifestyle Communities.

Campaign overview

With new and established communities across Victoria, Lifestyle Communities engaged Social Garden to take the charge in a data-driven lead generation campaign that would revolutionise performance marketing in the independent living sector.

To succeed, the campaign needed to:

1. Target over 50s prospects with high social media engagement but low property ad serving
2. Identify key drivers of enquiry across multiple different build regions
3. Set a cost per sale benchmark

The emergence of COVID 19 brought new challenges to the campaign, proving the importance of a fast response to changes in market sentiment and consumer behaviour.

5,891

Leads generated

1XX

Sales

$4,XXX

Cost per sale achieved

44.6%

Reduction in cost per sale (April - October 2020)

Services

“Working with Social Garden has genuinely revolutionised our approach to generating new homeowners for our communities! I love the detailed insights they bring and the ability to test different messages in market in real time”

- James Kelly, Managing Director Lifestyle Communities

Differentiated channel strategies

Our team set to work developing unique conversion strategies based on brand engagement.

We focused on creating specific ad sets and landing page experiences for prospecting, high intent prospecting and retargeting audiences. This ensured that the content aligned with expectations and was relevant to where potential buyers were at in their journey.

Landing page variants differentiated by channel in order to isolate split testing for Google and Facebook. In addition, we ran community-specific and corridor-specific campaigns to unique landing pages. Gathering these insights provided Lifestyle Communities with a critical view of the optimal conversion journey at specific community and regional levels.

Supporting the sales team

Our lead generation campaign captured important buyer information on profile pages to help better understand the purchase stage and support Lifestyle Communities’ concierge team.

We captured data from prospects on their:

Product preferences
Budget
Lifestage
Timeframe to purchase

This critical information assisted our client twofold with both future community planning and personalisation of the sales process.

Working closely with the Lifestyle Communities call concierge team to ensure the efficient handover of prospects, we advised them on how to use this additional data to prioritise call engagements and personalise their approach to drive improvements.

Our campaign team also leveraged this lead and sales data to optimise our audiences and target people based on their propensity to purchase. By building audiences based on their engagement with the campaign and specific data points that indicated high intent (such as finance status), we were able to continually reduce the cost per lead and cost per sale.

Data-driven performance insights

Given that we had 17 campaigns running across the campaign period, it was imperative that we accelerated our learnings via multivariate split testing and landing page A/B testing.

A high volume of testing led to accelerated learnings at specific regional and community levels to drive strong conversion rates. We focused on identifying opportunities to achieve incremental improvements in conversion that would have a ripple effect on our cost per sale metrics.

These optimisations were further fuelled by our focus on attribution. Working with the marketing team to drive bi-directional CRM integration in order to establish last touch cost per sale attribution by corridor, community, channel and audience type.

Outcome

Exceptional results

Off the back of the campaign’s huge success, we look forward to building on the momentum and continuing to reduce the cost per acquisition for Lifestyle Communities in FY21.

5,891

leads generated

1XX

Sales

$4,XXX

Cost per sale achieved

44.6%

reduction in cost per sale throughout campaign

“We love working with clients like Lifestyle Communities that embrace change! Using non-traditional over 50s marketing channels, we were able to effectively tap into new high intent audiences and efficiently build a large pipeline of sales opportunities across their portfolio.”

– Nik Sproal, General Manager