The energy market is a market for trading energy and delivering energy to end consumers: businesses and households. The energy market is very acquisition driven, with price being the most important differentiator. The strategic question is how to avoid this commodity trap. Investing in a building a strong customer relationship may be a solution. Or helping customers to lower their CO2 footprint and to increase their sustainability. It may contribute to stand out and prevent customers from switching to your competitor.
Energy suppliers try to avoid the commodity trap by focusing on strengthening the relationship with their customers. They want to be helpful and valuable to their customers, putting the relationship between them and the customers first, and focusing on customer satisfaction as one of the most important KPI’s. Marketing Automation can play an important role in this, by combining ambassador scoring with nurturing specific satisfaction groups.
Another strategic option is to reduce costs in the value chain by eliminating the middle man, i.e. the energy consultants. There are many buying groups operating in the energy market, which are supported by an energy consultant. Customers pay a service fee to the energy consultant for guiding this process. By bundling their energy demand they try to seek the best price. However, energy prices are varying so much over time that selecting the right buying moment is much more predominant for getting the best price than the total buying volume. Using marketing automation for creating a one-to-one buying relationship with your customer in selecting the right moment to buy, eliminates the role of the consultant in the value chain.
Sustainable energy is a hot topic in the energy market. energy suppliers offer various services, like installing solar panels, to help their customers to lower their CO-2 footprint. Many customers are interested in sustainability, but only few of them actually consider investing in it. With the use of Marketing Automation, like Marketo Engage, you’ll be able to inform and identify active customers and find out what fits them best, and which customer have a high buying propensity. You will need multiple scoring algorithms like interest scoring to identify the area of interest (e.g. solar panels or energy management) and lead scoring to determine buying propensity.
You’ll need dynamic nurturing programs which deliver the right content at the right moment to engage with leads, in accordance with their particular phase in the buyer journey: awareness, consideration, decision. Any interaction with leads that consume your content will feed the scoring models. A clear lead management process to route leads to the right sales representative will be used to follow up on hot leads effectively. You can also capture information and keep in touch with those who showed interest in your product, but who aren’t ready to buy yet. It is important to create a segmentation between companies who are willing and likely to buy, and those who are less. Otherwise, you will you focus on companies that are not yet ready or relevant for you. However, in the energy market, almost any company is relevant. The market is literally everyone. So, make sure you engage with those potential customers.
Essent, one of the biggest Energy companies in the Netherlands, decided to implement Marketo Engage to automate their marketing initiatives to improve retention and acquisition. Read more about how the implementation of Marketo helped Essent improved their business.
Essent, pressured by energy market forces, for the first time ever in the market, is now serving large B2B customers online. With that, Essent had the need to support the execution of campaigns for acquisition and retention.
Engaging with your customers about sustainable energy also adds to your brand. You can share inspiring stories about your sustainable energy initiatives. And you can leverage customers who decided to lower their CO-2 footprint and use their stories and satisfactions as referral. A way to use Marketing in building a connection with your customer, is by building a consistent image of your company. You can use your marketing efforts to get noticed, and show potential customers that you’re a utility company, convenient and beneficial for everyone. You are dependent on your audience. Showing them that you are helpful, keeping up with current times and thinking on their behalf will lead to positive interactions and word-of-mouth. By offering your customers helpful content and providing a good and timely customer service, your customers will stay with you. Marketing Automation can provide in all of those aspects.
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