The Eight

How can an email campaign stand out in an industry inundated by email marketing?

This was the question CBRE Calibre Creative Group asked ourselves when our client, Skanska, asked us to rethink email marketing for The Eight, a first-of-its-kind office building in Bellevue, Washington. Designed to appeal to tech and media firms, The Eight comprises 541,000 square feet and rises to 26 stories.

Marketing The Eight by email presented two big challenges in an extremely crowded real estate landscape:

1. Our recipients were flooded with a deluge of emails every day. How could we get them to open and read our emails out of hundreds?
2. The tech industry was at a standstill in the Bellevue market, resulting in slow leasing activity. How could we break through and craft a message that would move them?

How We Did It

We dove deep into our research to understand what was truly getting tech companies to return to the office in a post-COVID world. We had three major findings:

1. Tech and media firms have a strong preference for hybrid work. Our messaging needed to communicate how The Eight served to bolster hybrid work, not replace it, through an emphasis on intangible benefits.
2. For these firms, physical space was a means to an end—a culture that supports productivity, wellbeing and happiness. Our language needed to transcend the physical to focus on the experiential—including flexibility, celebrations, socializing and connecting.
3. Employee wellbeing drives company ethos—so we needed to emphasize how The Eight’s features and atmosphere infuse work with wellbeing in a new, refreshing way.

The “Why” Campaign

Leveraging the concept of the “why” behind work, we developed a seven-email campaign with a clear story arc about how The Eight creates the type of experience that's necessary to spark meaningful achievements.

While commercial real estate email campaigns are typically tailored to the hot buttons of real estate executives or brokers, we instead aimed to make an emotional connection with our audience of tech decision-makers—appealing to their own human desires to make their work meaningful in the presence of like-minded innovators.

To bolster our email open rate, we crafted compelling subject lines that left just enough to the imagination, enticing our readers to want to learn more.

The Campaign’s Performance

The campaign outperformed the industry benchmarks for click-through and open rates, created buzz and positioned The Eight as an aspirational, people-first workplace. It got people interested, and we received numerous responses from occupier brokers who wanted to learn more about The Eight.

As one recipient remarked, our storytelling stood out from the competition, underscoring how The Eight transcends space to facilitate purpose.

A few other people thought our storytelling stood out too—namely, the judges of the 2023 MarCom Awards. The "Why" Campaign landed in the top 17% of entries and took home a Platinum Award.