2016 Silver Best digital destination

Agency CACI

Client EDF Energy

Campaign summary

A much easier way to get paperless statements

Campaign overview

EDF Energy’s opt-in to paperless bills saw an 82% drop-off rate. The main barrier was having to log in to complete the action.

Faced with a corporate objective of ‘drive to self-serve’ and high conversion targets, they required an innovative way to reduce the drop-off and increase conversions.

Strategy

EDF Energy had to make significant improvements to the paper to paperless customer journey. Several barriers were behind the 82% drop-out in conversion.

There was a five-click journey, requiring logging in to ‘My Account’’. This was reduced to two clicks.

The customer experience was simple but the work complex. First EDF Energy emailed customers registered for ‘MyAccount’ receiving paper statements.

Secondly they built a landing page to securely capture the opt-in but hide customer data to avoid asking customers to input any details.

Thirdly they designed a process to extract and pass the customers details from the landing page to the marketing database when customers opted in.

The work created a customer journey that involved minimum effort for the customer with clear outcomes and benefits.

Creativity

The new landing page was built with IBM Silverpop, allowing updated preference data to be pushed through seamlessly to the IBM Silverpop customer database.

The landing page was built as an iframe embedded within the EDF Energy website. The creative featured an animation of EDF Energy’s popular Zingy character that had proved to increase engagement.

EDF Energy selected a unique customer identifier and passed it across from the email to the landing page. It was then prepopulated into the landing page and hidden from the customer. All they had to do was click on ‘Confirm Paperless’.

This updated the customer record on the IBM Silverpop database. Then the updated IBM Silverpop database linked with the EDF Energy marketing database to modify the customer preference. Complex API calls allowed data exports to a file in a secure location. This could be transferred and loaded into the EDF Energy database to propagate customer requests.

Results

The launch was sent to more than 300,000 people and generated a click to conversion rate of 74%, compared to 18% from the previous campaign - an uplift of 311%.

The campaign is still live but overall targets were set at 25% click to conversion and 2.2% overall conversion.

The new journey and destination have been included in EDF Energy’s automated CRM programme, making it easier for new customers (or customers who previously chose to remain on paper communications) to switch at a later date. ROI was £27.30 for every £1 spent.

From a customer perspective, many more now take advantage of the benefits of paperless such as viewing bills online and enjoying less clutter at home.

Team

Ange Morris (Manager of Customer Comms) • Miranda Murphy-Merrydew (Senior Customer Comms Exec) • Brendan McCabe (CRM Manager) • Tim Hall (Senior CRM Data Analyst) • Richard Harrison (Campaign Performance Executive) • Chloe Franklin (Senior CRM Executive) • Ben Morton (Front-end Developer) • Jemma Wurker (Senior Account Manager) • Hannah Mills (Project Manager) • Laura Scamacca (Campaign Executive) • Nick Glover (Campaign Executive) • Richard Greenland (Digital Marketing Consultant) • Steph Jones (Digital Designer) • Samuel Johnson (Digital Designer) • Geoff Constable (Database Developer) • Carlos Borges (Database Developer) • Edgaras Baranauskas (Software Developer) • Matt Slaymaker (Lead Email Developer) • Sandip Sorathia (Solutions Developer)