Powering Personas to Drive Cost-Effective Conversions & Loyalty The 5 high-value returns of developing small business personas

1. Powering Personas to Drive Cost-Effective Conversions & Loyalty
The 5 high-value returns of developing small business personas
Interpreting the deluge of big data is finally paying big benefits for utilities, especially in the
small to medium business segment. By combining historic energy usage with actual behavioral
data, Lime Energy is putting a face on a traditionally underserved segment. Focusing on people
allows utilities to move beyond the basic benefits of direct install programs and begin to
understand how leveraging program offerings simultaneously improves customers’ lives while
delivering operational efficiency and increased customer satisfaction back to the utility.
The primary goal of developing small business energy personas is to understand how different
types of customers are influenced and approach decisions. From there, personas are utilized to
drive value across the relationship. Within Lime’s direct install model, the following benefits
have been proven out over the course of 15,000 energy efficient installations with small
business customers.
1. Targeted Outreach: Identifying customers that have a high potential for energy savings
based on business industry classification and utility data energy usage modeling
provides an overview of which vertical markets will provide the greatest probability of
participation. In turn, this enables a custom outreach marketing plan for each vertical
based on their unique business needs.
2. Increased Uptake: Research has shown that targeted marketing based on personas
generates three times the response rate of broad based marketing. Therefore, using
predictive analytics to localize both outbound marketing and program teams ensures
that each energy assessment is optimized for closure. This creates a steady state of
progress towards goal attainment within the program.
3. Cost-effective Delivery: Utilizing personas drives down the cost per lead, cost per audit
and output delivery time. Better insight into these customers supports inbound
marketing techniques. Instead of deploying traditional and costly marketing channels,
we focus our energy on helping specific customers find the program – often before they
are even looking to make a decision – and then turning that early awareness into
education, confidence and brand conversions.

2. 4. Customer Satisfaction: With well-developed personas, products and services are
closely aligned to what customers want, allowing the utility to better cater to their
needs. This drives high customer satisfaction, word of mouth and brand loyalty.
5. Long-term Engagement: Persona marketing, based on analysis today, looks to build
relationships with customers by knowing not only what they need now, but what they
will need in three years. By offering products and services that grow and change along
with customers, long-term engagement model with small business customers is created.
As a leading national provider of energy efficiency solutions to utility small business customers,
Lime Energy is actively engaged in nine SBDI programs in six states. Marketing to small
business personas is a prominent feature of our integrated services model that provides a
comprehensive SBDI solution set for utilities. To learn more, visit us at www.lime-energy.com.