Tripled · Marketing leadership, Retention and expansion
Optiwatt
Utility programs that needed customers to sign up, and email converting 0.3% of them. Every instinct said to tweak the subject line. We asked the customers first, then rebuilt everything around what they told us.
The situation
Energy programs run with utility partners, each needing enough customers enrolled to work, and an audience that was genuinely hard to engage. Email was turning roughly 0.3% of recipients into enrollments.
What we did
Went to the audience before touching the creative: interviews, surveys and research. Then rebuilt the email messaging on what we heard, and carried the same message into landing pages built on quick turnaround and a run of social ads.
What happened
Email enrollments climbed from about 0.3% to roughly 1.1%, more than three times where they started, and the programs became the first to reach 100% enrollment.
enrollment, the first programs to get there. Email, landing pages and social all rebuilt on what customers actually said.
01 / The problem
A 0.3% enrollment rate, and the pull to just tweak the subject line.
Each program needed a set number of customers to sign up, and email, the main channel, was converting about 0.3% of the people it reached.
The reflex in that spot is to keep tuning the creative: a new subject line, a new button, a new send time, and to call each small lift progress. Embedded with the team and reporting to the Chief Experience Officer, we did the opposite.
02 / The approach
Ask the customer before you touch the copy.
Before optimizing anything, we went to the audience: customer interviews, surveys and research to understand who they were and what actually moved them.
Only then did we rework the email messaging, now grounded in what we had heard rather than what we had assumed.
03 / The rollout
One message, everywhere a customer might meet it.
A better email only helps if the page it sends people to says the same thing. We built landing pages for each program on quick turnaround, so a new program could launch with its own page in days instead of waiting in a queue.
Then we took the message to social, with ads that reached customers who were not opening email at all. Every piece said the same thing in the customer’s own terms, and the programs filled.
The lift didn’t come from a cleverer tweak. It came from understanding the customer first, then writing to that.
What moved
Share of email recipients who enrolled in the program, before and after the messaging was rebuilt on customer research.
At a glance
- Email enrollment1.1%up from about 0.3%
- Program enrollment100%the first programs to get there
- Landing pagesDaysfrom new program to live page
Social ads carrying the same message to customers outside email.
What we did for them
- Embedded marketing leadership
- Customer interviews
- Surveys
- Audience research
- Email messaging optimization
- Program landing pages
- Social ad design
Your turn.
If this reads like the position you are in, the conversation is short and the first thing we bring is a point of view, not a questionnaire.