What you need to know:

• REA Group took a bet on pairing a Tealium CDP and Braze's customer engagement platform – and it's paid off big time, driving personalisation at scale and smashing key metrics.
• Audience and Marketing GM Sarah Myers says that in August for example it helped to drive 30 million visits to properties on its sites, while click throughs and some key conversions are literally up orders of magnitude.
• But it was a five year overnight success – and required the marketing team to upgrade its technical capability and a lot of tweaking, iterating, and going again.

The economy may be anaemic but real estate keeps booming, powering REA Group to a market cap of $28bn, substantially larger than News Corp's own market cap (US$15bn or AU$22bn), with News owning 62 per cent. Bricks and mortar, it seems, remains the safest long-term bet even in digital form, and even for a news empire.

"Australia's obsession with property has never been stronger," says Sarah Myers, the firm's GM, Audience and Marketing. "We've just had 12 million Australians use realestate.com."

That equates to 200 million property searches a month.

"We work with pretty big scale. And when we set out to try and deliver personalisation at scale, we've got a lot of data that we need to be able get in order to fulfil that ambition."

Five years ago the listings giant bet big on a combination of Tealium and Braze to underpin the data strategy now delivering the big numbers. The payoff is a 10x improvement in some conversion rates, and the equivalent of millions of dollars worth of earned media each year. 

It's the same pairing that Wesfarmers-owned Kmart subsequently leveraged to massively increase its consent-based addressable customer set and build a model that has powered 20x improvement in engagements. Country Road is likewise on a similar track.

The group "generally" aims to identify for best of breed approaches rather than go for the bundle, or "one partner to do everything, end to end", Myers told Mi3.

"We identified that Tealium and Braze were going to be the optimal combination of CDP and omnichannel marketing for us, and we were the first in the Australian market to pair those two platforms together back in 2019."

The calculated technology risk is now delivering reward.

"Since we've implemented this, we've seen an eightfold increase in the visits from our owned channels over the past five years, which is massive. That's delivering over ten million [dollars] in earned media each year. In August alone these lifecycle channels delivered over 30 million visits to properties," said Myers.

"We're delivering over seven and a half million personalised recommendations through all the different layouts across the experience now, whether you're on the web or app. That's not something that we would have been able to do prior to getting the data into the CDP and piping that data everywhere."

Saved search

Access to real-time data has proven to be a particular boon.

"It allows us to be able to interact with the consumers depending on how they're interacting with us," says Myers.

Saved searches are now table stakes, but it wasn't always so. Nudging customers to save them seems a small step – but delivered a giant KPI leap.

"What we saw when we were trying to encourage consumers the first time they did a search, was that if we sent an in-app message to them suggesting that they save the search, we got a 23 times higher click-through rate and 10 times higher conversion compared to the historic scheduled email sends," she adds.

Myers attributes the increased click-through and conversion entirely to the systems' ability and agility.

"It is about the power of real-time event data allowing us to deliver," she says, adding that real-time messaging is now critical for campaign effectiveness.

"I think being able to provide that consistently personalised experience at scale is massive. It really ensures that consumers are highly engaged – and keep coming back for more."

Lessons learned

But it was a five-year overnight success – with a back catalogue of learning, tweaking, and going again. Myers says key to making everything work is not to try and boil the ocean.

"Start simple, start small and don't feel as if you need to have every data point in the first campaign and every channel in the first campaign."

Plus, bring in the right mix of people from the get-go – technical, marketing, product, commercial.

"A big component for us has been the power of people and the importance of having the right skill sets in the business to fulfil your ambitions," per Myers. "We started small, rather than trying to say 'we need this many heads' as part of a business plan. It's 'live and learn' along the way." 

Ultimately she says it became apparent that the marketing team would need to beef-up their own technical capability and that at the beginning of the project, there was simply too much distance between the technology and marketing teams.

"We couldn't speak the same language even if we wanted to get there.  At one point, we were working with an external group to help us bridge that gap [between the marketing and tech groups]."

But bringing the the work of the consultants in-house would allow the company to upskill more of the existing team both in terms of technical and soft skills. So that's what they did, reviewing the structure of the team every 12 months, and ultimately building a data Centre of Excellence.

Now it's pushing the data capability beyond it's B2C consumers, to its B2B customers, "the real estate agents; we've extended across our commercial businesses and other parts."

Governance

Addressing capabilities gaps also played a crucial role in ensuring sound governance as REA's CX environment evolved.

"Ensuring we have the right skills has been a massive learning. [You need to] have the right talent in the room, in the governance groups, who can confidently understand the levels of ambiguity that you're dealing with. These are complex multi-year programs, and it's not something that you get to just plug and play overnight. You need the right talent as you adopt and mature these technologies and build expert teams around them, to get to a point of readiness to bring other brands on board."

Shared goals are equally critical says Myers

"We learned along the way that when programs were going a bit slow, or that they were off track, or the momentum simply wasn't there, you need to interrogate ‘what else were these other teams working on? Did we have enough of the right focus on these programs to get the momentum that we needed, and make sure those shared goals were there?’ Sometimes it was just about going back to basics and trying not to be as ambitious."

It is better, she suggests, just to get a few runs on the board.

Bigger slice

Tealium VP Caitlin Riordan says REA Group has nailed it – without falling into the traps that can derail major martech projects.

"I’ve seen many big-name enterprise brands struggle with data residing in siloes and friction between departments that intersect with a CDP, which impacts their adoption speed of the tech... REA has well and truly quashed that challenge,” she says. “The proof is in their results."

Braze CTO and co-founder Jonathan Hyman, in town recently for customer visits, suggested that while the likes of REA Group are opting for best-of-breed solutions, consolidation more broadly may be on the cards – and naturally he’s eying a bigger slice.

"So if you're saying, oh, I've got using this company for SMS, this one's coming through email, or you have different data sets, different strategies, that are not talking to each other, we can have to help people consolidate that,” said Hyman.

"A lot of businesses started with us with push notifications, now they are sending to five, six, or seven channels with us. Over 65 per cent of our customers have used three or more channels with Braze, which is huge. And we have over 25 per cent of our customers using five or more channels with Braze."