NZME’s OneRoof grows with personalisation, automation, and AI tools
Ideas Blog | 10 May 2021
OneRoof is NZ’s newest (and we’d argue best!) way to buy and sell property. It has grown from a standing start to attracting 1.5M+ users a month in just two years, successfully establishing itself as a competitor to long-established property platforms.
After its launch, OneRoof needed to dramatically increase e-mail and app engagement with relevant content delivered at the right time. Its marketing automation, data capture, and profiling tools to create and personalise multiple e-mail and newsletter touchpoints for customers have been crucial to the platform’s growth and success.

Strategic segmentation
To execute its goals, OneRoof developed a data strategy to improve customer segmentation through declared and inferred customer data collection. The data was used to localise and personalise listing recommendations, therefore building relevant customer experiences.
In addition to capturing inferred data based on a user’s on-site and in-app behaviour, we provided a Profile Builder. Customers can declare whether they are in the property market, if they are buyers or sellers, and their preferred locations.
Finally, we used our marketing automation platform to trigger personalised communications across all touchpoints, using machine learning to continue to improve the customer experience with every return visit.
Data-driven success
The data, automation, and personalisation tactics drove the following successes:
- We scaled our marketing automation platform to seamlessly connect to our OneRoof APIs and databases. The use of AI features to determine the best time to send an email at an individual customer level achieved a 23% increase in email engagement.
- Our Profile Builder now feeds into those databases. The data includes customer-declared information such as where users are in their property journey – whether it’s buying, selling, homeowners, or a combination of those statuses, and also to declare which locations are of interest.
- The creation of a “suburb sequence” allows us to target customers at a suburb level, using declared and inferred data.
- The launch of new, personalised, listings-focused e-mail touchpoints. They include Local Insights property market newsletters; OneRoof’s flagship quarterly Property Report, with regional content and insights; Property News e-newsletter, with localised listings; and a new Recommended Listings touchpoint that’s personalised at a customer level.
Our ultimate aim was to sustainably drive more traffic to OneRoof property listings.

Utilising cutting-edge tools, OneRoof has taken its communications from generic to targeted and localised content, delivered at the right time using smart delivery technology. Coupled with efforts to increase e-mail sign-ups, the e-mail channel is now a significant contributor to OneRoof’s success.
This underpinned listings audience growth of 48% YoY, with audience from the email channel alone increasing 440% YoY.