Tripling Email Response by Asking the Customer First
Consumer energy tech · 2024–2025
A 0.3% response, and the pull to just tweak the subject line.
Optiwatt had a California email initiative landing at roughly a 0.3% response rate, with an audience that was genuinely hard to engage. 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.
The turn
Ask the customer before you touch the copy.
Embedded with the team and reporting to the Chief Experience Officer, we did the opposite. 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. The creative changed, but the insight came first.
What compounded
0.3% to 1.1%.
Response climbed from about 0.3% to roughly 1.1%. The lift didn’t come from a cleverer tweak. It came from understanding the customer first, then writing to that. In a hard-to-reach audience, insight moved the number that creative alone couldn’t.
Strategies & tactics
Embedded marketing leadership, customer interviews, surveys, audience research, email messaging optimization
Industry
Consumer energy technology
Year
2024–2025