Hey Neighbor!
By Kimberly Denman
W hat an amazing journey we have been on from the announcement of Neighborly™, through the launch and latest updates at Reunion. While the numbers Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer, Lisa Zoellner, presented during her main stage presentation are certainly exceeding our expectations, you may be asking, “how does this affect me and my brand?” PROMISES KEPT, PROGRESS FORWARD First, at last year’s Reunion, we said we would launch Neighborly in early 2017, and we did. The Neighborly platform websites in the US and Canada went live in early April. Second, we followed through with a full suite of Neighborly advertising materials, including vehicle decals, magnets, digital ads, direct mail programs and a new TV spot that was shared in brand meetings during this year’s Reunion. In total, Zoellner said we now have nearly a thousand pieces of creative available for you to use in your local markets. Third, we said we were going to grow our email marketing program, and we have. At this time last year, we had deployed less than 700,000 customer emails. At the time of writing this article, we are at more than 16 million! Our average customer has received about two emails per month which leaves plenty of headroom for more. Zoellner pointed out the good news that customer engagement with these emails remains strong. If you’re concerned about over-emailing, Zoellner reassured everyone at Reunion that we are 100 percent committed to following email marketing best practices. In fact, we have partnered with a company called Return Path, the leader in email marketing deliverability and compliance, to ensure our email program is best in class. And, finally, Zoellner said at last year’s Reunion that we were going to learn more about our customer. We are making meaningful progress toward establishing a baseline
understanding of our customer data. This effort has required 15 integrations across eight Point of Sale systems and 17 of our websites for more than 7 million customers. Quite an undertaking that is progressing nicely. KEY NEIGHBORLY UPDATES Several updates were presented at Reunion this year that are intended to increase the positive impact Neighborly can have on your business. New Neighborly Video The Neighborly anthem video, which we shared at Reunion last year, received universal accolade. We needed to also create a consumer facing, short-form spot that could be used nationally and in your local market and online. We worked with Bullish, the agency that helped us create Neighborly , to do so. The spot was tested with our targets Diana (a 45+ year old) and Elizabeth (a millennial) homeowners and scored very well! In fact, among the test participants, xx percent said they were more likely to purchase from a Neighborly brand after seeing the spot. GetNeighborly.com The websites for Neighborly , www.getneighborly.com and www.getneighbourly.ca, launched in early April and have been working hard ever since. In five months, we have created more than 2,700 pro pages, received over 100,000 site visits, consumers have created 6,500 accounts, and we’ve generated in excess of 2,500 leads. As a comparison, Neighborly is performing at nearly the level of our smaller brands that have been around for years. This is exciting news! Each new account created is another customer for us to market your brand to, who may have otherwise not known about your services.
38 PIPELINE® | EDITION 2 2017
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