Work

No two seniors are exactly the same. Each one has different health, financial, and family circumstances. Same goes for their technological know-how — a key factor for the businesses that want to reach them.

Carlton Senior Living, a respected senior living provider in Northern California, has met seniors’ diverse circumstances for decades across its Independent Living, Assisted Living, and Memory Care communities.

For Carlton, attracting new residents requires the same broad-yet-tailored approach to meet its diverse clientele wherever they’re at.

Carlton recruited Ideas Collide in 2023 to execute a vast email nurture campaign. The end goal: increasing communication opt-ins, facility visits, and eventual move-ins. This campaign needed to reengage approximately 2,000 of Carlton’s previous contacts and funnel them to the community that matched their care needs.

It also needed to attract and funnel brand-new contacts who weren’t already in Carlton’s database. And because Carlton’s audience isn’t just seniors, but also those who oversee their care, the campaign needed maximum accessibility in both its messaging and UX design — no easy task given this audience’s far-ranging needs and technological expertise.

“The accessibility piece is huge, and something that [Carlton] didn’t have before,” said Sabrina Drummond, Senior Account Manager at Ideas Collide. Drummond oversaw much of the project, and explained that Ideas Collide did tons of research on UX design and accessibility to determine how certain groups within Carlton’s audience would respond most positively. These findings shaped our strategy as we built the campaign.

“And we found in that group of seniors, a lot of them had more technical capabilities than we expected — but that didn’t eliminate the group of them that did not — so we had to find that happy medium,” Drummond added.

Ideas Collide developed three email funnels, matching the three types of communities Carlton offers (Independent Living, Assisted Living, Memory Care). Each funnel featured a series of unique emails designed to teach recipients more about these communities and about senior living as a whole.

The accompanying paid media outreach, meanwhile, drove new folks in the target demographic to a landing page, where they could subscribe to email communications.

This campaign wasn’t just about finding good leads — it was also about educating and empowering them. For those considering senior living, it’s a huge decision with lots of emotional considerations and logistical details to process. Across its three funnels and 30 distinct total emails, this campaign showed Carlton’s audience what life is like at its communities and walked them through the most important parts of planning their senior living transition.

Carlton Senior Living has been operating since the 1980s. As such, the company has spent decades building its own knowledge base about its customers.

This includes finely tuned wording and tone preferences throughout all customer-facing communications. By learning these vast do’s and don’ts, incorporating them into the copy, and joining that copy with highly accessible design, we shaped the multifaceted campaign.

Its first phase launched in December 2023, with successive phases launching throughout January and February 2024. And its recipients aren’t the only ones who are learning: As the campaign rolled out, we also leveraged a centralized reporting dashboard, which provided paid media analytics and email marketing analytics all in one place. This dashboard gave Carlton and Ideas Collide continual insights on each specific piece of nurture content.

Across both the paid media and email nurture campaigns, the impact was immediate. The paid media campaign ran from December 2023 through July 2024 and brought enormous increases in generated leads and occupancy, with a significant reduction in cost per acquisition.

The email nurture campaign, meanwhile, has achieved exceptional performance across all three funnels, significantly surpassing industry benchmarks in key metrics:

These metrics confirmed the campaign’s effectiveness not only in capturing the audience’s attention, but in motivating them to interact with its tailored content. Additionally, it proved how well the tailored multi-funnel approach addressed a diverse audience’s unique life circumstances as they considered senior living.

By educating and empowering potential residents, we drove truly meaningful engagement and achieved significant business outcomes for Carlton.

It has fostered additional collaborations between Ideas Collide and Carlton Senior Living, including a full website redesign.

No two seniors are exactly the same — neither are any two nurture campaigns.

*Email Benchmarks are based on reports from industry averages such as Healthcare, Medical, Family and Social Services.