NZME’s OneRoof Boosts Email Engagement by 23% With Braze Intelligent Timing

New Zealand Media and Entertainment’s property platform OneRoof provides listings, housing trends, insights, and commentary for buyers, sellers, and renters. When OneRoof wanted better control of content and deeper access to location data, they turned to Braze for a cross-channel solution—boosting their email click-to-open rate by 23%.

OneRoof is a complete property destination where users can find what’s for sale and what it’s worth, as well as gain a better understanding of housing market trends across New Zealand. The platform has thousands of listings across the country, accurate property estimates, detailed housing market news and insights on school zones, crime stats, and commute times.

OneRoof aims to help make property decisions easier for their users and help them find their perfect place. Knowing that time is often of the essence when searching for a property or selling one, OneRoof wanted a way to speed up and personalize communications with email, delivering relevant insights and listings to the right users at the right times.

Landing More Targeted Listing Views

OneRoof’s marketing team was already working with email, but any customization was built by the development team and triggered via API, so on top of automation and customization, they needed a multi-channel solution that the marketing team could control in order to take pressure off of dev resources. The team was also unable to test content across different audiences and had difficulty engaging users with listings and insights specific to their on-site and in-app behaviors, or geographic location. Before Braze, there were no existing data integrations and no custom attributes to personalize emails or other communications with. For example, a user searching for a $950,000 property in Auckland might have received a generic listing for one in Wellington—a nine-hour drive away—in their weekly newsletter.

To better leverage user data and add personalization to their communications, OneRoof looked to create a data strategy centred around better customer segmentation through declared and inferred data collection in order to build relevant customer experiences and localize and personalize listing recommendations.

To solve this, OneRoof started by creating a Profile Builder for users to declare whether they were in the property market, were a buyer or seller, and their preferred locations and passed these attributes through to Braze. Then, OneRoof used the Braze Intelligent Timing feature, which calculates the optimal send time based on a statistical analysis of a user’s past interactions, to trigger personalized communications based on Profile Builder data—and more—across all touchpoints, using machine-learning to continue to improve the user experience across customized email newsletters and in-app messages (IAMs). These efforts included:

  • Local Insights, a new weekly newsletter with new listings and recent sales in customers’ suburbs of interest, as well as personalized listings content.

  • Property News, a newsletter featuring curated editorial content alongside automated personalize listings content, which used data capture, marketing automation, Connected Content, our dynamic content tool, and Liquid Personalization to populate personalized content

  • Enhancements to their flagship quarterly report, The OneRoof Property Report, to move from nationwide content to reflect insights and content at a user’s regional level.

  • And the creation of Recommended Listings, a new e-newsletter featuring a list of recommended listings per-user serving as an email wrap-up each week and triggered using Intelligent Timing, the AI functionality that delivers an email when a customer is most likely to engage in it.

  • Using Machine Learning (ML) for the recommended listings email API, which serves up a list of recommended listings per user for an email wrap up each week. This ML strategy is based on a mixture of declared and inferred data and onsite behavior in the Profile Builder. From there, they use their suburb sequence liquid logic in Braze to serve up emails and IAMs with relevant listings to users in their inferred suburb search if they do not have a declared one. The suburb sequence allows them to send more dynamic versions of emails and IAMs, which dramatically improves engagement—in fact, the move from generic nationwide listings content to localized experiences drove a 218% uplift in total clicks to property listings and a 57% uplift in unique clicks.

But OneRoof isn’t stopping there. The team is already beginning to leverage the Braze platform’s IAM survey template to deepen the collection of user profile preferences, including information around each individual users’ current place in the property journey.

Stronger Engagement, Stronger User Growth

Using Braze Intelligence Suite helped OneRoof to define new segments and target them at the right time, with the most relevant content. By reaching users with targeted email content, OneRoof was able to increase their email click-to-open rate by 23% and, with its new Profile Builder boasting a 77% completion rate of transforming Prospects into Registered Customers, send campaigns to more users. In addition to volume, now that more users could choose a suburb via the Profile Builder, more users received dynamic listings based on their suburb rather than generic ones. This is fantastic for OneRoof because for every one dynamic newsletter email sent, they would need to send seven generic versions to get the same number of users to listings pages.

"Braze has been a game-changer in transforming our customer communications from generic to dynamic, enriched, and personalised, as well as growing the sheer volume of helpful campaigns we send out. Both are things that have been instrumental in OneRoof providing Kiwis with the best resources to find their dream home (with all the bells and whistles they want) faster."
—Becky Barnett, Customer Engagement Manager, OneRoof

Final Thoughts

Housing and property decisions can often be emotional ones. For a brand like OneRoof, delivering quality recommendations, trends, and data quickly helps users make qualified real estate decisions. Personalizing that information based on users’ behaviors can also provide much-needed peace of mind. Through their work with Braze, OneRoof did just that.

Want to learn more about email marketing engagement strategies that work? Check out the Braze Email Inspiration Guide.