It’s the height of New Movers’ Season–that time of year when neighborhood streets seem clogged with moving vans, rental trucks, and variations on Uncle Harry’s enormous station wagon.
In 2024, as in years past, New Movers Season gets going in the late spring and runs into the early days of fall. It’s a period of significant opportunity for you, as a marketer, and your brand.
During this time, millions of families and individuals change residences, prompting a flurry of buying activity–as much as $170 billion on new items and services–often from new brands. On that, the items or services new movers would likely try a new brand for are, in order of likelihood:
- Internet
- Furniture/home decor
- Cable/streaming services
- Appliances
- Utilities
- Home security
- Home insurance
- Automobile
- Pet care
- Moving Services
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, about 27.1 million Americans moved in 2022, most relocating during these warmer months. Impressively, consumers finding new places to call home often spend thousands of dollars on everything from home services to furniture, making them a prime audience for businesses aiming to boost sales and brand loyalty.
These new movers are in a unique position: They are establishing new routines, seeking new service providers, and making purchasing decisions that will shape their lives for years to come. This transition period represents a rare window when brand loyalty is malleable and spending is higher than usual.
You’re right if you think this also means new movers could leave your brand and no longer be the frequent-buying, loyal customers you’ve come to adore.
On the one hand, you can reach some of the new movers to establish new relationships. And on the other hand, you need to keep those folks who’ve been faithful to your brand–whether they’re moving across the country or town.
For marketers, the challenge is to reach these new movers and engage them in a way that builds lasting relationships. Here’s how B2C marketers can make the most of this season.
Know Before They Go
Data is the backbone of any successful marketing strategy, and new mover season is no exception. By leveraging new mover data, you can identify households that have recently moved or are planning to move soon. PebblePost gets this data from various sources, including public records, utility hookups, and subscription services.
According to the Direct Marketing Association (DMA), households spend over $9,000 on goods and services within the first six months of moving. With such significant spending at stake, targeting these households with personalized offers and messaging can lead to substantial returns.
Get Personal or Stay Personal
One critical factor in winning over new movers is personalization. These consumers are more likely to respond to offers directly relevant to their current needs. For instance, a family that has just moved into a new home may be looking for furniture, home improvement services, or local childcare options.
You should tailor your campaigns to address these needs with timely, relevant offers. For example, a home improvement chain might send a welcome package to new movers with a discount on their first purchase, while a fitness center could offer a free trial membership to encourage new residents to join.
For customers who change their living locations, let them know about your nearest location where they can continue to enjoy what brought them to your brand in the first place.
Use Online and Offline Channels
To effectively reach new movers, there’s a good chance you’ll adopt an omnichannel marketing approach. You’re smart enough to recognize that lots is going on in the lives of those new movers. So much change, often chaotic, depending on a couple of channels to reach and move these consumers to action is risky.
If you believe omnichannel equals omni-digital, you’re doing your brand–and your customers and those who should be–a disservice. An omnichannel strategy that includes offline will outperform your expectations.
Specifically, incorporating PebblePost Programmatic Direct Mail (PDM) can work wonders. To begin with, receptivity to direct mail is surprisingly high among new movers. It’s a moment of significant change in their lives. Our research has found that 41% of new movers pay more attention to postal mail than email during this transition, and 69% say they enjoy checking it.
PebblePost Moves New Movers to Action
PebblePost Optimized New Movers, one of our PebblePost Audiences products, can help you prospect new customers among new movers or retain past buyers who changed residences.
As with all PebblePost products, Optimized New Movers is powered by a unique aggregation of identity, intent, and transaction signals, AI, and machine learning to maximize relevance and performance.
Unlike standard New Mover audiences, PebblePost reduces waste and increases relevance and performance by refining the audience down to only consumers who are most likely to be receptive to your brand and ready to buy. With Optimized New Movers, brands can power greater efficiency and performance by identifying and engaging decision-ready new movers who share attributes and behaviors with their most valued customers.
We start by looking at the total universe of current movers. This audience is refreshed weekly using several definitive signals that tell us someone has recently moved. including:
Automated machine-learning algorithms then optimize the new mover audience based on:
- Your most valued customers’ attributes and behaviors
- Real-time intent (online intent signals from across 500+ brands participating in the PebblePost Graph, a proprietary and uniquely powerful data resource)
- Your performance goals and budget
That information is assessed. Then, within 24-48 hours, a beautiful, high-impact piece of physical mail is dynamically printed, personalized with the local store address (if applicable), and on its way to the new homes of the new movers you want. PebblePost then closes the loop by providing performance data across all points of sale to power address-level performance and lift measurement.
National Furniture Retailer Moves Movers with PebblePost
Furniture is not a frequent purchase. That changes when the consumers involved are new movers. A national furniture retailer took advantage of that sales opportunity by partnering with PebblePost.
They sought to engage with new movers in the market and were ready to buy new furniture.
Unlike traditional new mover campaigns, PebblePost used attributes and behaviors of the brand’s most valuable customers and real-time online intent data to identify new movers with the highest purchase intent.
The retailer engaged this audience with a personalized postcard, using PebblePost’s creative workflows to print the nearest store location for each recipient dynamically.
Initial results showed a 25x improvement in incremental ROAS and a 79% conversion rate lift. Seeing the success of PebblePost’s Optimized New Movers product, the retailer decided to use an incremental budget to implement an always-on approach to engage with new movers.
Let’s discuss how PebblePost can help you attract–or keep–new mover customers.
