2016 Silver Best use of Door Drops

Agency The Specialist Works & The SHARP Agency

Client OVO Energy

Campaign summary

A top-up app for prepaid energy meters

Campaign overview

The plan was to incorporate door drops as part of a multichannel, integrated recruitment campaign to drive incremental PAYG (prepayment) customers - and to build awareness of OVO Energy as a ‘Smart Energy’ supplier.

Strategy

OVO Energy created a top-up app to make life easier. It enabled OVO to take advantage of consumer engagement and increase take-up with a limited budget.

The door drops comms strategy delivered simplified messaging with a friendly tone of voice to an environment where the message could be consumed and action taken.

The campaign needed the locations of households using pre-pay meters with a high annual energy usage in close proximity to PayPoints - and were look-a-likes to OVO’s existing customers. This precision targeting increased the number of consumers most likely to switch to the OVO top-up app.

Door drops were phased to feed off the halo effect of TV and started three weeks into the TV campaign. Door drops explained the product and sparked response. The campaign also drove association of OVO as a ‘Smart Energy’’ supplier who supply a ‘Smart Meter’ that measures energy usage and helps educate consumers on how to save money.

Creativity

The campaign used the Mosaic geodemographic profiling tool to understand OVO customers and the type of property they lived in.

Then OVO targeted look-a-like households and researched the number and location of pre-payment households as well as PayPoints.

Analysis indicated a direct correlation between the locations of prepayment households and where PayPoints were found. One of OVO’s USPs is top-up via their app, so the households had to have smartphones. Using the statement ‘people that have access to a smartphone’ OVO identified the right households, and researched consumer expenditure data to target those spending above the national average.

A base of 4.2 million households were identified as the most responsive postcodes that still maintained a full UK geographical spread. Using the targeting model of four blended data sources, five different creative solutions were distributed - focusing on OVO’s industry-changing proposition.

Results

Door drops started three weeks into the TV campaign, with an instant positive impact on sales, generating a 35% increase in response.

Understanding OVO’s current customer base offered insights into their core TV regions. As a result, 37% of door drop spend was allotted to two main regions, resulting in 41% of sales generated there.

The campaign also cut through in regions with low market share. Meridian and HTV West generated good response. With all creative formats performing well, the six page ‘Switch to Britain’s cheapest prepay energy today’ messaging delivered the best results, with 20% better response rates compared to the lowest performing two-page ‘Switch to Britain’s cheapest prepay energy today’ and 2% better than the nearest format six page ‘Top-up your prepay meter anywhere with OVO’. This was crucial for rolling door drops in the Q1 2016 campaign. Brand tracking showed messaging drove brand awareness and changed a number of brand perceptions for the better.

Team

Verity Brown (Head of Strategic Planning) • Edd Wells (Associate Director- Strategic Planning) • Joe Bull (Head of Marketing Strategy) • Zoe Kho (Senior Acquisition Marketing Manager)