Success Story - S Immobilienpartner

The customer

S Immobilienpartner GmbH has been ranked among the top real estate brokers in Germany for years and is a leading provider in the Rhineland. Every year, several thousand private and commercial customers rely on the 100 percent subsidiary of Sparkasse KölnBonn to find or market real estate in Cologne, Bonn and Düsseldorf. More than 60 real estate experts within S Immobilienpartners and well over 200 experts in the branches and corporate headquarters of Sparkasse KölnBonn support their customers in areas such as new and existing real estate and investment. More on: https://s-immobilienpartner.de/

Property marketing outsourcing

Outsourcing operational sales activities has now become the standard for many property and project developers. They rely on the sales and marketing expertise of qualified partners in order to save on costs and effort. These marketing partners’ expectations have risen significantly in recent years, says Thorsten Mertens, Director Strategic Marketing & Controlling at S Immobilienpartner GmbH: “Above all, customers expect more transparency and speed. They want to know exactly what we are doing for them and our success in this, and they want quick responses to new requirements and developments.”

With more than 5,000 visits carried out, 8,000 consultations and a transaction volume of around 1.5 billion euros in the last five years, the S Immobilien group is one of the top real estate brokerage companies in Germany and is a leading provider in the Rhineland. The professional marketing firm optimises customer services in order to consolidate and expand this market position.

Sales dashboard as a service

“We wanted to make the new-build buyer's entire customer journey visible to the new-build developer. Our goal was to provide our customers with a marketing dashboard which they can use themselves to visualise up-to-date information about how the marketing of their product is going,” reports Thorsten Mertens. The aim was to also make this dashboard available to marketing and sales managers in our organisation.

The challenge of heterogeneous data sources

Data from different systems had to be connected in order to give customers insights into the marketing situation. “We identified 21 relevant external and internal sources,” recalls Thorsten Mertens. This includes a CRM system with master data for objects and a controlling solution, both based on MS SQL Server. Other sources include Google Analytics, the email software rapidmail and the real estate portals Neubaukompass and Immoscout. It also integrates data from Facebook pixels and from marketing service providers such as regional media – including the General Anzeiger and Rheinische Post.

The challenge was primarily to collate, analyse and visualise data in various forms from different sources on a daily basis.

“Traditional marketing tools are more channel-specific, so we very quickly realised that we needed business intelligence software to meet this requirement,” explains Thorsten Mertens.

Various solutions were evaluated. Three solutions made it to the short list. Qlik Sense prevailed, due to its data integration and visualisation strengths. .

Visibility over the customer journey

How many customers are we reaching with our marketing, how many then look at the project more closely? How many enquiries do we have and what is the current marketing status? These are the four key concerns which can be visualised on the dashboard.

The dashboard gives property and project developers a high degree of transparency about the performance of S Immobilienpartner GmbH as a sales partner. “Key figures can be directly retrieved, such as the number of customers reached, the number of enquiries and the consultations resulting from these enquiries and the number of products sold – also displayed over time. A benchmark is also available so that the customer can see how his project is doing compared to our overall project average. With these deep insights, you can go straight into a really targeted discussion.”

In the past, customers were sent a conglomerate of reports from the various S Immobilienpartner marketing service providers on a weekly basis, as well as a report containing internal, manually compiled data. Today, they can get up-to-date information at the touch of a button whenever they want. Data access is controlled via an authorisation concept.

Thorsten Mertens estimates that four to five hours a week can be saved by automating data provision via the Qlik dashboard. The dashboard helps S Immobilienpartner to see where countermeasures need to be taken much more quickly, for example because not enough attention is generated for a real estate project or customers are not interested in taking a more detailed look at a project.

“With Qlik in Facebook, for example, we were able to identify a campaign where relatively few interested parties requested further information. We simply swapped out the image and saw that this measure had the desired effect, that interested parties wanted to find out more,” reports Thorsten Mertens.

Qlik roll-out planned

The use of Qlik is to be expanded in the future: Within the next six months, a dashboard is to be set up for the entire marketing channel management of all of the S Immobilienpartners divisions. Informatec will also be supporting this project. There are also plans to map sales and shareholder reporting in Qlik Sense.