Customer Engagement Archives - Page 16 of 20

Webinar: How to Build Engagement with New Customers

As the old adage goes, “You never get a second chance to make a good first impression.” This is especially true of the first interactions between energy utilities and engagement with their new customers.

In Questline Digital’s Plugged In webinar, “How to Build Lasting Engagement with New Customers,” Questline Digital’s Josh Hanna and Sigma Computing’s Danny Codella provide insights on the value of implementing a Welcome Series to create a positive first impression and how this best-practice solution can transform digital customer relationships.

Make a great first impression with utility customers

A welcome email is the first impression your energy utility has with a customer after they sign up for service. According to Hanna, this is a great opportunity to acknowledge customers and educate them about your energy utility’s offerings. With digital engagement expectations already set by retail brands and other industries, your customers expect to hear from their energy utility. In fact, 74% of email subscribers expect to receive a welcome email from a company.

“Imagine yourself shopping at an online retailer where you get 20% off your next purchase if you join a loyalty program or submit your email address,” Hanna says. “As a customer, you already know that within minutes you’ll receive a thank-you email with the promo code. It’s a norm, not an anomaly, that customers want to hear from you.”

For energy utilities, a Welcome Series of three to five automated emails is a best-practice solution that creates multiple touchpoints and engages customers with valuable information. This is an opportunity for energy utilities to continue the dialogue with new or moving customers, become a proactive advisor and answer questions your customers don’t even know they have yet.

Each Welcome Series email should touch on a different topic:

Welcome message
Billing and payments
Outage resources
Community involvement
Safety or energy savings

The top-performing Welcome Series topics are billing and payments. Your customers are looking for information on when they can expect their first bill, how to understand their bill and information on available payment options. This message is also an ideal time to encourage customers to sign up for paperless billing.

In the energy savings message, Hanna recommends incentivizing customers to shop at your energy utility’s marketplace. In a study of energy utility customers, 56% didn’t know their energy utility offered a marketplace to purchase energy-efficient products. Keep in mind, the most important information should be included in the beginning and middle of the series.

Key benefits of Welcome Series:

Increases credibility of your energy utility
Potential for increasing program conversions (i.e. paperless billing and outage text alerts)
Incentivizes customers to shop at your energy marketplace
Provides background on your energy utility
Introduces customers to other programs/services offered by your energy utility

Exceed expectations with new customers

According to Hanna, 8 out of 10 customers expect to receive welcome emails after they sign up for a mailing list, such as joining a loyalty program. This expectation is happening outside the energy utility industry and is important for energy utility marketers to be aware of. In fact, 51% of all Welcome Series messages are opened and achieve high customer engagement (21.9% CTOR), according to Questline Digital performance metrics.

Codella shares that welcome messages will typically have the highest open and click-through rates of any communication you send. In fact, welcome messages have five times the number of click-throughs as standard marketing emails. “A welcome email series is absolutely critical for establishing customer relationships,” Codella says. “It’s a huge opportunity — the momentum is high and your brand is top-of-mind to customers.”

Welcome Series also has a profound impact on customer engagement with future marketing communications sent by your energy utility. Questline Digital’s performance data finds that Welcome Series graduates — customers who engaged with at least one Welcome Series email — engage with future utility emails at a 30% higher rate.

Codella adds that to be successful in building engagement with new customers, there are six components that your welcome emails should have.

Six components of an effective Welcome Series:

Have a clear sender name and email address, subject line and preheader text
Make the email personalized
Say thank you
Set expectations
Give rewards
Tell customers what you want them to do next

Beyond educating customers about your energy utility’s resources, each Welcome Series message should communicate next steps for customers. For example, do you want your customers to enroll in a program, download an app or click on a link to learn more information? A clear call-to-action is essential to increase program conversions.

Game plan for personalization

According to Codella and Hanna, segmentation and personalization are key to a successful Welcome Series. Welcome emails with personalization have six times higher transaction rates. However, before personalizing your messages, you need to understand who your customers are.

For example, are they residential or business customers? Renters or homeowners? Are they new customers or existing customers moving within your service area? Your energy utility can personalize emails by a customer’s geography, job title, purchase behavior, interests, anniversaries and more. Personalization is also beneficial in subject lines, helping to increase open rates by 26%.

“In the old days, you put a customer’s name on their email and that was considered personalization,” Hanna says. “Today, it’s about understanding the individual and who they are. From a customer experience standpoint, what information do they want or need to know?”

An investment in long-term engagement with new customers

To emphasize the importance of welcome emails, Codella notes that it takes 12 positive impressions to make up for one bad impression. First impressions are essential, as 51% of customers will never do business with a company again after a bad experience.

“A well-planned Welcome Series builds trust, gives customers valuable information, helps with upselling and sets the tone of your energy utility’s customer relationships,” Codella says. “First impressions are hard to shake — that’s why an investment in a Welcome Series is a must for energy utilities.”

Welcome new customers to your energy utility with an automated Welcome Series campaign from Questline Digital.

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How to Accelerate Digital Customer Relationships

Our world revolves around relationships — from romantic love to rapport with coworkers. For energy utilities, digital customer relationships are vital to grow customer engagement, increase program conversions and improve customer satisfaction scores. In fact, brands that lead in great digital customer experiences outperform the competition by nearly 80%.

How does your energy utility build stronger digital customer relationships?

Just like you need to join a club to make new friends or download a dating app to meet someone special, your energy utility needs the right tools to connect with customers. Questline Digital’s 2021 Energy Utility Benchmarks Report provides industry trends, insights and data to help energy utilities build digital relationships through consistent customer touchpoints. Read on for key takeaways from this year’s report.

Infographic showing how energy utilities accelerate digital customer relationships with performance metrics

Digital engagement is booming

The coronavirus pandemic has forever changed consumer behavior — and customers in 2021 expect to have a digital relationship with their energy utility.

This relationship goes beyond transactional messages like billing notices, outage alerts and other generic emails. Your customers are looking for ongoing touchpoints that address their unique needs and interests, such as relevant program promotions, educational eNewsletter content and behavioral emails based on their actions.

With record-high email open and engagement rates last year, it was clear that customers wanted to hear from their energy provider during the pandemic. In fact, the average open rate of 40.4% in March 2020 was 49% higher than Questline Digital’s previous benchmark rate. Even customers who are less digitally savvy opted for the convenience of digital communications. For example, paperless billing promotions experienced a 7.5% CTOR in 2020, more than 53% higher than the previous year.

In 2021, as life begins to return to normal, maintaining strong digital customer relationships will continue to be a driving force of energy utility communications.

Personalization is powerful

Today’s consumers are accustomed to a world of personalization and expect a similar experience from their energy provider. Personalization is a must-have marketing strategy to drive customer engagement and build stronger digital relationships.

The latest research finds that personalized emails deliver six times higher transaction rates, and targeted emails generate 58% of all revenue for marketers.In 2020, energy utilities took advantage of personalization in virtually every touchpoint, including Welcome Series, eNewsletters, program promotions and ancillary messages. For example, many energy utilities now use abandoned cart emails, popular in the retail industry, to boost traffic to their marketplaces.

Segmentation is a popular tactic in the “personalization” bucket, especially when looking to capture attention with program promotions and eNewsletters. Instead of sending a generic message to an entire email list, many energy utilities are now sending relevant messages to a targeted segment. Whether creating marketing personas for paperless billing campaigns or industry-specific eNewsletters to reach business customers, energy utilities have successfully utilized segmentation to increase conversions and engagement.

Digital engagement: The gift that keeps on giving

Digital engagement with one customer touchpoint offers far-reaching benefits and extends to other types of energy utility communications.

For example, Welcome Series graduates — customers who have opened at least one Welcome Series email — engage with future email communications from their energy utility at a 29.8% higher rate compared to non-graduates. The higher engagement from relevant, consistent eNewsletters is another benefit of ongoing customer touchpoints. Our Benchmarks data finds residential eNewsletter readers open promotional emails at a 16.1% higher rate.

In 2020, energy utilities discovered the true value of digital customer relationships, in good times and in bad. Engaged customers with an established digital relationship with their energy utility were much easier to reach than unengaged customers. That’s why it’s essential for energy utilities to start building stronger digital relationships now, so they can easily connect with customers when the unexpected happens.

Accelerate your digital customer relationships

Two-way communication is key for any successful relationship, and this is especially true between energy utilities and their customers. It’s all too easy for customers to lose interest in their energy utility’s marketing messages if they aren’t relevant or don’t provide some benefit to their daily lives. To accelerate your utility’s digital customer relationships, start planning your engagement strategy for every touchpoint throughout the customer journey.

Download the Energy Utility Benchmarks Report to discover more industry trends, data and insights to build stronger digital customer relationships.

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Top 5 Email Marketing Trends for 2021

In digital marketing, continuous change is the one thing that will never change. After a tumultuous 2020 that showed us how critical it is to maintain strong customer relationships, it’s more important than ever to stay ahead of the latest email marketing trends. Sure, the tortilla wrap TikTok trend might not prove valuable for our work, but there are plenty other marketing trends that are important for energy utilities.

Let’s review some of the top email marketing trends we see for 2021. With these ideas in mind, your energy utility is sure to keep your brand ahead of the curve and on the path to greater customer engagement and satisfaction.

1. Personalization

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again — customers expect communications that are tailored to their specific needs and interests. Customer segmentation has been proven to increase digital engagement, with research showing that personalized messages improve click-through rates by 14% and conversions by 10%.

Maureen Huss, Questline Digital Group Account Director, has seen exciting growth in customer engagement by using targeted, industry-specific content in solutions such as eNewsletters. “We’ve seen dramatic increases in engagement specifically from business audiences in education, healthcare and manufacturing by segmenting content that speaks directly to their needs,” she says. “When comparing these metrics to communications without targeted content, our clients are seeing the impact that personalization truly makes.”

We suggest:

Segmenting messages and promotions by audience
Recommending programs or products by audience
Sending automated, triggered emails based on user behaviors
Recommending content tailored to individuals

2. Automated campaigns

Automated campaigns, also known as “drip” campaigns,go hand-in-hand with personalization as they are tailored to the actions of an individual. Emails in these campaigns are triggered when a customer performs a certain action, such as sending the customer product recommendations after they purchase a smart thermostat from your energy utility marketplace.

These emails give the customer a better sense of control over their overflowing inbox. When customers receive emails based on topics they’ve been looking for, they connect with the message, instead of feeling fatigued by one-off promotional emails.

We suggest:

An automated Welcome Series campaign to say hello to new or moving customers, triggered when they sign up for service. Our 2021 Energy Utility Benchmarks data shows 2020 had the highest engagement rates in Benchmarks history with a 51.3% open rate and 11.2% click-through rate.
Anniversary emails celebrating a year of service for your customers. These emails let customers know that their energy utility is thinking of them, and that they are more than just another bill payment.
Send recommended products or cart-reminder emails to customers depending on their behavior on your energy utility marketplace.

3. Interactive emails

Interactive elements within an email tend to boost customer engagement as customers can find exactly what they’re looking for within the email itself. They no longer have to go through numerous clicks to reach the right page — interactive elements create a seamless user experience right in the email itself. When you make it easier for customers to complete an action, you increase the likelihood of them actually doing so.

We suggest:

Animated buttons and CTAs
Rollover effects to show products or services
Interactive image carousels that can be controlled by the customer
Quizzes or games within the email

4. Email design trends

As fashion trends change each year, so does email design. In 2021, customers are looking for bold and bright colors that help your message stand out. Color attracts attention and is also a great way to evoke emotion and drive action — you can make a customer feel excited about a new product using a bright yellow or feel calm about a change in billing plans with a light blue.

Customers also want clear and concise copy that makes emails easier to read. As we all know, attention spans are shorter than ever, which means copy needs to be shorter as well. Get to the point quickly using bullet points or icons.

In addition, dark mode has stood out as a major trend this year, allowing customers to adjust the brightness of the content they’re consuming. Many customers use this feature for low-light or nighttime environments, as it is easier on the eyes and can improve content legibility. (Or they simply like the look of it better.)

“Users want to look at their phone or computers the way they choose,” explains Joe Pifher, Questline Digital Creative Director. “If we dictate how they see it, and not allow them to personalize it to their liking, it won’t be the best user experience.” Dark mode needs to be considered in the design of your emails to ensure copy and imagery can still be read easily no matter what mode they choose.

We suggest:

Using your brand colors in bold ways to make your content stand out, evoke emotions and drive action
Adjusting email design to be compatible with dark mode
Un-cluttering your copy with the use of bullet points or short paragraphs

5. Multichannel marketing

Although digital marketing is critical, traditional marketing is still alive and well and should be utilized to expand your promotions beyond smartphones and laptops. Multichannel marketing works because it meets customers where they are, including through email, social media, video, direct mail and more. Through cross-channel engagement, you can feel confident that your energy utility’s message is reaching customers.

“It’s not only about deciding where to share and promote your content,” advises Alexandra Greenberg, Questline Digital Content Strategist, “you need to keep your strategy in mind as you plan and create, too. Consider your target audience as you write to ensure your content is relevant and accessible across multiple channels.”

We suggest:

Creating a strategy for each unique campaign that repurposes elements of the campaign to be used on multiple platforms

Email marketing trends get personal

What do personalization, automation, interactivity, design and multichannel marketing all have in common? People.

The main takeaway for this year is that it’s all about your customers. If the coronavirus pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that people crave human interactions and connection. By focusing on a customer-centric experience and their needs, it will set up your energy utility for digital marketing success.

Download the 2021 Energy Utility Benchmarks Report to see how your email performance metrics compare to industry trends.

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Digital Customer Relationship: The Key to Lasting Engagement

Does your energy utility have an effective digital relationship with customers? The answer may surprise you. Most energy utilities email program promotions to customers, text them outage alerts and offer electronic billing options — creating the impression of a strong connection. However, these transactional tactics actually fall far short of a true digital customer relationship.

To effectively build engagement, energy utilities need to think beyond the monthly bill and generic notifications. A digital customer relationship requires consistent touchpoints, relevant content and messaging that responds to each customer’s specific interests.

What is a digital customer relationship?

A digital customer relationship means that an energy utility proactively uses two-way communication channels to connect with customers, listen to their needs and interests, and deliver targeted, personalized messages to build long-term engagement.

The “digital” part indicates how you reach customers — through email, text, web and social platforms. But the “relationship” in this equation is about much more than which channel you use. Customers expect a digital relationship to be responsive and relevant to their interests.

An energy utility can’t simply replace its old snail-mail outreach with email and consider that to be a digital relationship. Likewise, most digital marketing efforts do not constitute a digital relationship. Those are one-way channels — pushing messages or promotions that are only important to your energy utility, not your customers. An effective digital relationship is built on two-way communications: listening to customer needs and delivering messages that are important to them.

The Netflix secret to a successful digital customer relationship

You probably get at least one email from Netflix every week with movie recommendations you might enjoy or gentle reminders to finish watching a series you started. You might get one of these emails every day!

Are these emails simply marketing messages? After all, the objective is to get you to watch more Netflix so that you won’t cancel your subscription. Or, are these recommendations also a type of customer engagement, helping you get more enjoyment out of your free time by guiding you toward entertaining Netflix content?

Of course these messages can be both a type of marketing and effective customer engagement. The key is personalization. Netflix isn’t promoting the same program to all its customers; the streaming service is making a targeted recommendation, promoting specific content that it thinks you will find relevant and useful. That’s not just digital marketing, it’s a digital relationship.

Importantly, Netflix doesn’t just contact customers when a payment is due at the end of the month. Netflix doesn’t wait to reach out when its rates are going up or to provide restoration updates about streaming outages. Netflix connects with customers all the time, sometimes every day, to make sure customers are enjoying its service.

Does this strategy work? Well, Netflix has built a pretty successful business around its 200 million subscribers. Being part of customers’ daily lives, through continuous digital engagement, is a big part of that success. If you are a Netflix customer, you will be regularly reminded that great entertainment is only a click away.

How energy utilities can build an effective digital customer relationship

Energy utilities can borrow a page from the streaming service’s engagement playbook. Like Netflix, energy providers are a big part of customers’ daily lives, offering a service that’s increasingly valued in today’s connected world. But unlike Netflix, utilities too often fail to build meaningful digital relationships with their customers, instead relying on transactional outreach like monthly bills, outage alerts and generic program promotions.

The good news is, energy utilities can build strong customer relationships. It just takes a commitment to move beyond these typical one-way tactics to embrace the relevant messaging that customers now expect. Here are three key steps to building and maintaining digital customer relationships:

Effective digital engagement starts on day one

Companies that succeed at customer engagement don’t wait to get started. The last time you signed up for an online subscription or created a new account with an ecommerce company, how much time elapsed before you received the first welcome email? Minutes — or seconds? These messages make a great first impression and immediately start building a strong digital relationship.

Likewise, energy utilities can use welcome series emails to start their relationship with new customers (or restart a relationship with customers moving within a service territory). These welcome messages are an opportunity to introduce your utility, show customers how to make the most of their service, and get them started on paperless billing, outage alerts, eNewsletters and other digital touchpoints. And it works! Customers who receive welcome series open future emails from their utility at 30% higher rates than other customers.

Stay top-of-mind with regular touchpoints

Consistency is important in any relationship. Customers want to know that you’re there to support them on their schedule, not just when you’re trying to sell them something.

A monthly email newsletter is one way to maintain engagement on a regular cadence, delivering interesting content and helpful resources on a schedule that’s distinct from other transactional messages. This consistency pays dividends: Questline Digital performance metrics show that eNewsletter readers are much more likely to open other emails from their utility customers, clicking on program promotions at a 16% higher rate than other customers.

Speak to customer needs with relevant messages

Customers don’t just prefer to receive personalized messages — it’s a basic expectation, thanks to companies like Netflix that have set the standard for digital engagement. To meet these expectations, your utility needs to identify and deliver relevant messages, and avoid wasting customers’ time with communications they aren’t interested in.

Customer interests can be identified in a variety of ways: content consumption on your website or eNewsletters, program participation, marketplace purchases or customer personas built using all of these characteristics and more. With this information, you can deliver relevant content and promotional messages that speak to their interests and address their motivations. In one example from Questline Digital performance metrics, an energy utility that segmented its business newsletter by industry saw content engagement increase by 84% for some segments!

Consistent outreach builds strong relationships

A digital customer relationship is much more than digital marketing or one-way communication. To be effective, your energy utility should use two-way channels to listen to customers and consistently provide relevant, personalized messages that speak to their interests. The result will be stronger relationships and long-lasting satisfaction to rival companies that truly excel at digital engagement.

Learn how Questline Digital’s approach to digital engagement builds long-term customer relationships for energy utilities.

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Marketing vs. Advertising: What is Right for Your Energy Utility?

Many people use the terms “marketing” and “advertising” interchangeably when, in fact, they are quite different. To put it simply, marketing promotes a business and its products or services, while identifying customer needs and how best to meet them. Advertising, however, is the act of calling attention to products or services, specifically through paid methods. You can market without advertising, but your energy utility shouldn’t advertise without marketing.

As digital engagement technology continues to evolve, it’s important for your energy utility to understand these differences in order to know which strategies are best to reach customers and achieve program goals. Read on to learn about the specific differences between marketing and advertising and how to use both to your energy utility’s advantage.

What is marketing?

Marketing is the practice of expanding your business by identifying how to best align a product or service to your customers’ needs. Effective marketing helps you understand how best to reach a target audience while increasing revenue at the same time.

In business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing, a business is reaching customers directly, such as what your energy utility does to reach your residential or business customers. In business-to-business (B2B) marketing, efforts are directed to reach other businesses. Often, a marketing strategy is broken down into four phases called the four Ps:

Product: A company’s offerings (products or services) that meet customer demands.
Price: A pricing strategy could be built around profit margins, perceived value or opportunity costs.
Place: How and where your products are distributed, such as a physical stores or ecommerce websites.
Promotion: This can include advertising, public relations, content marketing and sales efforts.

Types of marketing

Marketing is not one-size-fits-all. There are several types of marketing available, including:

Content Marketing: A strategic approach based on creating and delivering valuable information, such as blog posts or infographics, to educate your target audience about your business.
Inbound Marketing: A focus on attracting customers to your website. Instead of pushing sales messages on customers who may not be interested, inbound marketing offers solutions that customers are looking for — inspiring them to seek out your business. Tactics often include a combination of content marketing, social media marketing and search engine optimization.
Social Media Marketing: The use of social media channels (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) to maintain a conversation with your audience.
Digital Marketing: A “catch-all” for online marketing, leveraging search engines, emails, websites or blogs on both desktop and mobile devices. Digital marketing includes digital advertising as well, such as search engine marketing or paid social promotions.
Traditional Marketing: The opposite of digital marketing, using offline sources, such as print, radio, mail or billboards.
Relationship Marketing: A strategy that relies on both traditional and digital tactics. This strategy focuses on customer retention and satisfaction instead of new sales.
Brand Management: Uses techniques to increase the perceived value of a brand over time. This is achieved through initiatives that manage brand equity, consistent brand messaging and new product pushes that effectively showcases the brand and increases customer loyalty.
Product Development: Filling a gap in the business for a product or service to meet customer needs.

What is advertising?

Advertising is the process of making products or services known to customers, mostly through paid channels. An advertising campaign must be creative, timely and strategic. When executed well, advertising can educate customers, convince them a product or service is superior, improve brand perception, publicize new products, attract new customers and upsell existing customers.

A successful advertising campaign can use a mixture of traditional and digital media to deliver its message and align with the wants or needs of the customer. Advertising is just one component of a marketing strategy; while marketing helps you develop and position products based on customer needs, advertising communicates those products’ existence and influences customers to make a purchase.

Types of advertising

As with marketing, there are numerous types of advertising available. The most successful advertising campaigns uses a mix of these methods:

Digital Advertising: This includes ads paid for on social media, online publications, apps, sponsored content, search engine marketing and programmatic display ads.
Traditional Advertising: This includes advertisements in traditional media, such as newspapers or magazines, billboards or bus stops, direct mail, TV commercials or radio spots.
Retail Advertising: Featured point-of-purchase advertising within stores, such as product placement on displays or carts.
Product Placement: Paid advertisement to have a product emphasized in a TV show or movie.

Marketing or advertising: What should your energy utility focus on?

The short answer to this question is both. You need marketing and advertising efforts aligned to create a well-rounded strategy and connect with your energy utility’s customers. Marketing needs to be the core of what you do — researching customers, understanding their needs, segmenting target audiences to address those needs — but advertising needs to be an aspect of your marketing strategy to fully promote your programs and solutions.

Begin by creating a marketing plan that encompasses your energy utility’s goals. This should be an overarching strategic plan detailing which products, programs or services you want to focus on. In this marketing plan, think about plans for market research, public relations, product development, segmentation, customer support and pricing. Once these items are figured out, add advertising to the mix. While this is often a large part of a budget, it’s necessary to extend your brand’s reach.

Through thoughtful research and implementation, your energy utility’s combined marketing and advertising strategies will help your energy utility achieve its program goals and conversions.

Let Questline Digital’s experts help you craft a marketing and advertising strategy to connect with energy utility customers.

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