Key Highlights
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Increased awareness and participation in TXU’s Energy Aid bill-pay assistance program.
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Created collateral and key messages to promote program.
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Leveraged bill insert to make Energy Aid top of mind and easy to support.
Services
Collateral, Copywriting, Energy Marketing
Challenge
Many TXU Energy customers were not aware of the largest bill-pay assistance program of any electric utility in the nation. Although the company has a Texas-sized program with dollars that are set aside to help customers who fall on hard times, they needed to ensure that the program remained large enough to meet the needs of a growing customer population. That’s where Marketwave delivered a smart strategy plus a compelling message to help get the word out.
Solution
We learned from customer feedback that the key to increasing financial participation in the TXU Energy Aid program was to make it easy to give. The message of “with just 1 minute and $1” you can make an impact on helping someone else make ends meet. By boiling it down to a simple check mark on a bill insert form returned with your monthly payment, customers could pay into this fund and know it would be there for them if they ever needed it. And, besides the “make it simple” strategy, we also made sure to put the program collateral in the hands of local social services agencies that might be the first to connect with customers who needed bill-pay assistance so the Energy Aid program would be serving those most in need.
Results
In the first year these new messages and collateral were in place, the TXU Energy Aid program saw the following lift:
- 26% increase in new contributions to the bill-pay fund
- 100% participation from nonprofits sharing program information with their clients