Developing Your Best Marketing Campaigns

As an energy marketer, you’re always seeking a competitive edge to make your current customers happier, increase their value, and acquire new customers. Here we’re going to take a look at best practices for creating and executing your most successful marketing campaigns. These critical components include:

1. Crafting the Right Message & Incentive
2. Selecting Marketing Channels
3. Knowing your Sales Funnel
4. Tracking Results & Analytics

Crafting the Right Message & Incentive

Marketing is all about delivering the right message to the right person at the right time. If any of these aspects of a campaign are not done well, the campaign results will likely suffer. With regards to crafting an excellent message, consider these pointers:

• Right message at the right time. The most effective messages are transmitted precisely when the recipient has that need. Examples include seasonal messages and contact designed to take advantage of maintenance or other sales cycles.
• Appeal to customer self-interest. Appeal to customer emotions – for example, they’re careful spenders and want to see savings; they don’t like uncertainty and want guarantees and social confirmation; they want trust and dependability, and the possibilities go on.
• Ensure professional design & brand alignment. Your advertisement and brand will be judged by how professional it looks – this “judge a book by its cover” approach is a simple rule of thumb customers use to weed out vendors and make decisions. So, have a graphic designer work with you across your brand needs to put your best foot forward.

Selecting Marketing Channels

With the content, look and feel, and timing of your message decided upon, it’s time to choose which marketing channels to deliver your message to customers or prospects. Commonly used marketing channels include:

• Customer Portal Messages
• E-Docs & statements
• Online ads & landing pages
• Direct mail
• Targeted emails
• Sales phone calls

With regard to customer portal messages and other online methods like email, E-Docs and landing pages, a full suite provider of marketing and customer service tools like the Destwin® Fuel Dealer Solution™ make the creation and management of marketing messages easy and effective. Communicate with your team or marketing partner regarding ways to streamline your marketing campaigns with online tools to maximize results.

Know your Sales Funnel

A great message is the introduction which opens the door to a new customer transaction. But the customer must understand what to do and then take action. Maybe it’s a phone call or a visit to a website; maybe it’s a text message – but nonetheless the customer has to act.

• Easy call to action. The customer should be able to do exactly what you want them to do at the moment they see your message. If the action they need to take is complicated or difficult, few people will respond.
• Convenient online enrollment & ordering. Among the easiest calls to action are to visit a website or landing page, where the customer can easily sign up or purchase what you are selling.
• Customer & leads visibility. At each stage in your sales funnel, there should be data tracking so you may maximize visibility. For example, know your email open and bounce rates, and track which customers respond to your direct mail. Keep customer marketing statistics in your CRM and market to them in the future accordingly.

Track Results & Analytics

An energy marketer’s work is always ongoing, and each campaign only serves to produce more effective future campaigns. To this end, it is essential each marketing campaign has carefully tracked results and measured key performance indicators. Important fundamental strategies include:

• Know your metrics & your goals. When conceptualizing a marketing campaign, establish realistic goals for key metrics like email opens, direct mail response, website customer conversions, and overall ROI. An effective rule of thumb is to define a rate of improvement over the previous marketing campaign.
• Review the results over time. Since marketing is ongoing, no single campaign has as much importance as the overall results of all marketing campaigns over time. This provides a comprehensive view of all work which averages out any peculiarities unique to any campaign.
• Do more of what works, but occasionally try new things. In marketing, it pays to keep things simple, and if something works, keep it up. To innovate, occasionally try new ideas for marketing messages, calls to action, and delivery channels. The next greatest and most effective marketing idea is always just around the corner.

Summary & Next Steps

With the advent of digital technology, all or most of a company’s marketing work can now be streamlined or automated with comprehensive online platforms. This greatly reduces staff burden and produces valuable business intelligence that can be widely shared with your team. Solutions like the Destwin® Fuel Dealer Solution™ bring energy marketers the latest in online marketing tools, including its customer portal, AIM messages, E-Docs, ACE email, and Destwin® Analytics.

About

Destwin Energy Systems LLC is a leading provider of web-based customer service, marketing, and contracting and risk management solutions for energy marketers of all sizes. Learn more about the Destwin® Fuel Dealer Solution ™ or Energy Wholesaler Solution™ at www.destwinenergy.com.