Company News

New Mover Program Evolution — 2011

by webmaster — December 3, 2010

For two decades, there have been “New Resident” programs available to supermarkets. For the most part, the programs included:

Mining a list of residents “new” to an assigned marketing area.
Mailing (direct mail/US Mail) a letter or packet from the supermarket, welcoming the new resident with a preformatted “welcome” letter from the store manager/owner along with some special offers to encourage repeat visits.
In some cases, tracking the response rates of redeemed offers to determine who isn’t responding to the initial offer.
In the case of a new resident not responding, determining if an alternate offer should be mailed.

Fast forward to 2010. Many of these programs have evolved, and some of the best programs are worth implementing as a way to increase your customer counts and sales per transaction levels in 2011.

If you google “new resident marketing program,” you’ll be overwhelmed with over 460,000 offerings. Many of the programs are pretty much identical. So what should you be looking for in a great “new resident” marketing program?

Here are seven suggestions to consider in your new program:

First, a warning about some of the new resident lists that some companies offer: be aware of the sources from which these “new residents'” addresses and names are mined. During the 1990s, for example, most “new residents'” addresses came from those who had physically moved into new homes or apartments in a defined marketing area. Typically, these addresses were obtained by tracking changes in utilities. When you move to a new address, you need to set up a new account with utility companies. This is good! However, many new resident programs began using public records of new home loans to “pump up” their mailing lists, and this included home refinancing. In many cases, a home equity loan triggers a “new resident” tag, adding a name to the list that doesn’t really belong. As a start, consider not including consumers that change their street address but not their zip code.Bottom line: Make sure that your new resident program is mining with selection criteria that you select!
Don’t have offer expiration dates beyond three months.
Minimize any special restrictions. Remember, you’re welcoming new residents to your store. Why would you want to restrict new guests from coming?
Make sure your store is easily identified, and include an easy to use map to your store. Keep in mind: if you’re communicating with a new resident, they may not be familiar with your store brand or know how to locate you. Tell them!
Personalize your offer. Sure, you can mail it to “Occupant,” but it doesn’t cost much to personalize your offer. For example, on the front of the postcard, say “Welcome to the Neighborhood Jane!”
Provide a great “teaser”. New residents normally receive lots of new invitations in their mailbox. Your program needs to be eye-catching in order to be effective.
Get going quickly! Your special offer should arrive between the second and 10th week of their arrival. It’s a pretty narrow window, but vitally important.

How about “best practices” and ways to make your new resident program more effective? We’ve been working with one of the national leaders in the development of new resident programs, and we’ve been intrigued by the ability to easily scan new resident coupon offers by having the redemption data feed into easy-to-use mapping systems and reports. Notice the smaller bar code on each coupon on the sample postcard. This barcode contains information such as the recipient it was mailed to, mail date, mailed store # and coupon code. With this data, we can easily tell you which coupons, and how many, have been redeemed at each store.

Why is this feature so important? First of all, it’s a very quick way of seeing exactly which of your new resident mailings are actually being redeemed. It’s also important to see a map of where these new residents are coming from. It may be that they don’t shop at your store that is only one mile away from their new home, but they do shop at your store that is 10 miles away, perhaps near where they work. On the sample map, the green dots represent the new movers that were targeted within a certain radius of their local store and redeemed coupons there. The red dots show the new movers that shopped at a specific store outside of their local store area.

We’re encouraging all our customers to upgrade their new resident programs in 2011 to include this important new feature (scanning the bar code to record the new resident address).

If you’re interested in a new resident program in 2011, just email me at jlukens@dwgreen.com or call me at 1-800-253-7146 and we can talk through some options. A quick phone call can work much better than “googling” over 460,000 websites, and perhaps get you moving towards attracting new residents in 2011.

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