Our time working with Housing Hand
Feel Free to move in – The UK’s number 1 Rent Guarantor
Who are Housing Hand?
Housing Hand are a rent guarantor company. If you are a student or working professional and are unable to provide a UK guarantor to rent accommodation then you can pay Housing Hand to be your guarantor. It’s an amazing service preventing renters from having to stump up thousands of pounds in advance of renting in lieu of a UK Guarantor.
How did we help?
- Integrated Marketing strategy
- Onboarding Portal with database build
- Full Website build
- Blog commissioning and SEO
- CRM strategy and full migration
- Full Hubspot build (400 automated workflows)
- Email, SMS, landing page and chatbot implementation
- Customer Journey modification
- Rent quoting tool
- Full integrated sales Strategy
- Training sessions
- Facebook Ad campaigns
- Google Ad Campaigns
- Data Framework implementation
- Social Management
How did it start?
Housing Hand have been operating since 2013 and have gone from strength to strength. They are currently are the largest rent guarantor provider in the UK. When we met, they already had a number of agencies they worked with on different aspects of their marketing, sales and operations. We were meant to have a small slice of that pie but as it transpired, we had room for seconds.
Tip of the iceberg
Anyone that’s familiar with our case studies will know that our relationships often grow into quite the forest of work from the little seed of “We just need some Facebook ads” and so it was with Housing Hand. A large proportion of their trade comes from international students studying in the UK as they are most likely to struggle with having a UK guarantor for renting accommodation. This meant we could do some cool stuff with targeting whilst delivering a message that was clear and culturally agnostic to an international audience. We trialled different landing pages using Housing Hand’s existing branding. This meant the LP’s stayed consistent with the Housing Hand look and feel, even if that look and feel left a little to be desired… (more on this later). Little did we know the work was just beginning.
The bit that’s just past the tip of the iceberg
Where there’s ads there’s bound to be nurturing. So our next step was to construct emails within Sendgrid, triggered by Housing Hand’s custom CRM. This was no mean feat and required quite the workflow setup.
This was the first of many workflows that we created with alacrity and some minor frustration. It was at this point, with the prospect of further flows looming that we recommend a switch to Active Campaign for marketing emails. This decision was based on the ease with which Active Campaign can handle these tasks and how much easier it is to review and iterate campaigns. So switch we did and off we went building more workflows.
We also needed new creative for these emails, which were generated in house in-line with Housing Hand’s strict brand guidelines. As this work was happening, we expanded out the email remit from marketing to operations. This meant process emails and SMS to help with customer onboarding. To ensure Active Campaign operated smoothly we liaised with one of Housing Hands existing partner agencies to ensure an effective API hook-up between the existing CRM and Active Campaign.
A deep dive into the website
With ads, nurturing and onboarding processes in place we were now looking at how we could continue to deliver more customers for Housing Hand. A critical part of this was to create a quote tool for the site so people could find out the costs involved without having to apply or sign up. We supported this tool with further email and SMS nurturing that encouraged those that used this tool to sign-up and become a Housing Hand customer. This “softer” approach was ideal for engaging less sure site visitors and demonstrating Housing Hand’s value without having to commit immediately. Lowering this barrier and effectively nurturing opened up another great method for achieving sign-ups. To further help visitors understand the Housing Hand proposition we created How it Works videos and other video for the site, all shot and edited internally.
Remember what we said about Housing Hand’s branding? Well it wasn’t awful but we certainly felt there was room for improvement. So off we we went. New logo, new mascot (Percy The Pigeon – something of a legend), new custom illustrations, new copy and all implemented without compromising any of Housing Hand’s existing and impressive SEO positions.
We’ll let you decide which you prefer.
This icebergs huge….
From here our work with Housing Hand has grown and grown, next up we implemented the “House Finder Service” – allowing accommodation providers to be put in touch with potential tenants, all from Housing Hand’s website. Not only did we implement this, we implemented all the workflows required to automate all communication regarding this.
We then re-built their Irish website too, to keep in line with the branding. As well as this, we also built an in-depth knowledge base in Stonly to guide tenants through the process and requirements of getting a Guarantor. We then replicated all the remaining emails from their existing CRM into Active Campaign, fully migrating them. This might seem like the end but the truth is it’s far from it. The real meaty work was only just about to begin.
