A Beginners Guide to Remarketing for Utilities

In this post we look at five practical ways that brands in the utility sector can use behavioral marketing to make their online customer journey a warmer one.
Whether it’s gas, electricity or water, utilities are set up to make life easier without disruption. However when it comes to striking the right deal, many potential customers may experience a long and difficult customer journey full of complicated industry jargon. The result can often be website visitors left in the cold and marketers left in the dark wondering why these potential customers didn’t make the switch.
By using behavioral marketing campaigns, you can learn from visitors’ online decisions to create a bespoke customer journey that is as simple as a flick of the switch. So here they are, five steps to a warmer customer journey in the utility industry.

1 Warming up visitors

SaleCycle’s research shows that on average 94% of potential customers abandon without completing a registration while 75.9% abandon after starting the registration process. That’s a lot of potential customers leaving your site. Whether your users are just looking or they want to compare a quote, one thing for sure is that they came to your site for a reason. So keeping your visitors engaged with relevant information is vital to boosting that conversion rate.

Capturing a browser’s email address via category-level or product-targeted on-site messages allows you to be one step ahead of a customer’s journey to the purchase page. Using a category-level and product-targeted on-site message that visitors can interact with allows you to send emails specifically tailored to the product they were interested in when they viewed the OSR message.
Whether it’s single or dual fuel they were looking into, sending a handy email that provides relevant information in accordance to the users’ on-site behaviour is the perfect way to adding a natural flow to the customer journey. Nurturing engaged users with timely and relevant information will go some way to making sure users reach that customer checkout page without getting cold feet.

2 Quote

On completion of a quote application, visitors have two options. Number one is to go ahead and purchase their service, while number two is to wait a little longer and think about it (let’s be honest, they are likely to be comparing quotes on competitor sites). At this moment they are one step away from converting, so the quote completion page certainly shouldn’t be where your hottest prospects’ journey cuts out.
Using an on-site message to give users the option to “lock in” their quote and receive an email or SMS remarketing message with their deal is a great way to encourage completion. To encourage prospects to rush back to their quote, it never hurts to add a little urgency by specifying a deadline for their locked-in quote. Remember it’s important to strike while the iron is HOT!

3 Switch

With a 15% increase in the number of energy accounts being switched in 2015, it’s no secret customers are becoming more comfortable switching energy companies. Knowing the difference between existing and potential customers when they visit your site can help you to create a more bespoke customer journey.
Segmenting on-site messages according to a visitor’s status creates a more relevant and naturally flowing customer journey. Whether they are potential customers looking to switch suppliers, or existing customers coming to the end of their contract, displaying a perfectly timed on-site message might just be the trigger needed to generate a surge of conversions.
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Existing customers’ purchase and utility-use history is the perfect data to use in order to intelligently offer better suited tariffs, insurance and loyalty benefits via behavioral marketing campaigns. So go ahead, offer them the perfect experience with your company. After all, they might not even know you offered services such as boiler care.

4 Post-Purchase

The customer journey should simply not end at the completion page of the checkout. The customer lifecycle goes on beyond this point and a cleverly implemented post-purchase email campaign is a great way to keep it running. The utility industry is full of relevant products to promote to existing customers, ranging from boiler care to energy saving solar panels.
Based on their purchase history, you can let customers know what else is on offer, intelligently cross-selling and up-selling relevant products in a perfectly timed email. Keeping customers engaged and in the loop with personalized recommendations such as smart meters and wireless boiler apps is awesome for improving the overall customer experience.
In an industry where the customer has a growing power, keeping them in the loop is vital to making them feel attached to your brand, ensuring the dreaded switch never enters the customer’s mind.

5 Feedback

It’s always hard to get customer feedback, so you may think it’s even harder to get feedback from non-customers. However, our stats show Abandonment Surveys are the perfect way to find out why visitors really abandoned when they were just a click away from their purchase, and can help to re-engage customers with your brand.

Knowing why your potential customers are going cold can offer you a great insight into the parts of your customer journey that aren’t so hot. From using complicated industry jargon to payment issues, knowing where the problem lies is always better than guessing. Like most content, abandonment surveys are also an awesome way of re-engaging supposedly lost customers with your brand.
Besides, if a non-customer does answer the abandonment survey with ‘not quite ready’, this opens the perfect opportunity to loop them back in with remarketing emails or SMS messages to keep your brand at the front of their mind.
Interested in getting your customer journey switched on?