This metering engagement campaign was a ton of fun because revenue-grade meters are a challenging subject. Email recipients may be interested in them for financial or billing reasons, or they may want these meters to see underlying power quality or power factor issues. They may have other concerns as well, because these devices support a wide range of applications.
The request was for a single engagement campaign that somehow met the needs of every possible audience. It has been pretty successful, too. In the first six months, it had over 100,000 subscriptions and 30% click through rates on all emails.
How do we design an engagement campaign for varied audiences? In this case, we designed several, but we wrap them underneath the umbrella of a common starting point. From there, several branches occur, each taking advantage of some common emails and landing pages to tell a different narrative but lead to a similar conclusion.
Choose Your Own Adventure
The starting point of this engagement campaign is a white paper about high-accuracy meters and a sign-up form. At this point, folks have said they’re interested in a metering engagement campaign in some other form, but we still need more information.
So, the email leads to a landing page with the white paper (appropriately framed as a metering resource, not a power quality resource) and a dropdown menu to indicate interest area.
The interest area is the key to this engagement campaign. There are effectively five buckets and an unsubscribe option. In the end, the paths are pretty similar between the five subscription options, but we wanted to leave the door open to modifying, say, the power quality sequence or the energy management sequence as new assets became available.
Narrative Arc 1: Building Common Ground
All audiences receive a video about an industrial application for high quality meters. This helps build or show common ground by laying out some key terms for the rest of the campaign: reliability, power quality, dependability. These are benefits customers need, so the opening of the narrative has to show the solution can deliver them.
But, not all customers are initially interested in what you get with high-accuracy meters. (For reference, the thing bolted onto the side of my house is very low accuracy, just good enough to determine how much power I’m using each month.) Recipients get a podcast episode that explains all of the benefits that are available once users start getting into finer granularity metering.
Narrative Arc 2: Some Branching
At this point, the buckets come back into play. Some groups will receive content that others don’t (the finance-oriented customers don’t care much about power quality issues, and vice versa). Other times, different audiences might be sent the same technical paper, webinar, or other piece of content, but they will need different emails or landing pages to frame that material appropriately. (Sort of like arranging a movie night and telling your spouse that you picked a love story, telling your kids you picked a cartoon adventure, and surprising everyone by putting Ferngully into the DVD player.)
Branch: Large solar panel installations
Recipients are offered a technical paper describing a current implementation of a system built from meters (but consisting of a few more technologies) that helps a university campus and a medium-sized city both save money on energy costs and promotes better grid stability. Big wins for everyone! However…
…Not every recipient is interested in this subject in the same way. Different emails go out for folks interested in financial points or in energy system management (like balancing rooftop solar production with power bought from a utility). This email goes out to folks interested in power quality issues with that design or folks trying to integrate solar panels and other challenging sources into a power system.
Branch: Customers worried about power quality
Because some content shared through this campaign can be pretty specialized, some branches are offered to only one group. In this case, a webinar about a power quality monitoring tool was sent out, with explicit language connecting the meters to the monitoring software.
Branch: Solar and other intermittent source customers
Wind and solar generation installations are popping up everywhere, but there are some logistical challenges in selling power from them—utilities require a consistent power output, and going under (or over!) that agreed-upon output can decrease revenue. So, this email and…
…this landing page frame a technical paper as an answer to that problem using high-accuracy meters. There are many different control systems available for these installations, so these messages needed to convey the value of reliably generating (and getting paid for) as much power as possible.
Narrative Arc 3: Take Action
At this point, the branches start to come back together. The closing emails go in and out of buckets, and the campaign emails have since been updated to reflect new solutions and options.
It has been a few weeks (or more) since the podcast email at the beginning, so the wrap-up brings every thread back together by reminding recipients of some common language—the “eyes and ears of the power system.” It’s a webinar that shows a direct application of these tools, which segues into…
…two case studies showing the benefits of that application. The challenge here is still talking to everyone: with so many competing interests, how do we show that this solution has benefits everyone cares about?
The email and landing page both refer to multiple case studies. In this case, there is a large industrial application (power quality and energy management focus) and a small utility application (mostly finance-focused). Recipients can read both, but they are given appropriate direction to pick the one that matters.
The final stop is a webinar that explains how to use a common analytics tool with data created by these meters. It’s a simple walkthrough, but it provides a significant benefit to anyone already familiar with Power BI (a reasonable expectation of these audiences).
In the end, you might notice there is no explicit call to action. There is no instruction to buy a thing, call a person, sign up for more, or anything else.
The reason for this is that those CTAs have been scattered throughout the process. Each of the webinars and web resources provide opportunities to connect with a human to ask for more information. These emails and landing pages don’t bludgeon the audience with those requests because this is a large investment. We understand that the person going through this engagement campaign probably doesn’t have 100% decision-making power, so our goal is to provide them with the data they need to make a case for this kind of investment.
