Marketing for energy retailers
Everything you spend is judged against a customer who can leave in ten minutes and a price the regulator publishes for them.
Where the money moves.
Your marketing year has a fixed shape. The default market offer lands in May and applies from 1 July, the Victorian default offer runs the same rhythm, and every bill carries a better offer message pointing the customer straight at a comparison site. Switching intent spikes on a date the regulator sets, then again when the winter bill arrives. Planning around that beats reacting to it. Acquisition creative, retention save offers, the pages answering price change questions and the contact centre script all need to be finished before the determination is public, not after.
Not every connection is the same asset. A customer bought through an aggregator arrives with a switching habit and tends to leave the same way, so the acquisition cost is only defensible if the tenure holds. A customer who arrives direct, having read a page that answered what actually happens to their solar feed in, behaves differently. We report by channel against tenure and margin rather than connection volume, because a cost per acquisition that ignores how long people stay flatters whichever channel churns fastest.
Compliance shapes the creative, and it can work in your favour. Claims sit under the retail rules and Australian Consumer Law, discounts reference the published price, and the regulator reads the same ads your customers do. Vague offers fail review and fail customers. Specific ones survive both. We build approval into production, with legal inside the workflow and a substantiation record behind every claim, so a campaign ships on the date it was planned rather than sitting in a queue while the switching window closes.
Churn is where the money is, and churn is mostly a communication failure. The bill that arrives higher than expected with no warning. The solar customer who was never told what changed. The question that becomes an ombudsman complaint because nobody answered it. Lifecycle email, proactive messaging ahead of a price change and content that explains billing in plain English hold more margin than another week of paid acquisition. Reporting is written against retained customers and gross margin, not connections.
What we run.
The July reset
The acquisition and retention campaign built backwards from the determination date. Offer messaging, landing pages, comparison listings, email to the base and contact centre material all finished before the price is public and live the moment it is.
Channel economics by tenure
Every acquisition channel measured on what the customer is still worth six and twelve months in. Aggregator, paid search, social and direct compared on retained margin, with budget moved to what holds rather than to what fills fastest.
Search and answer engines for price questions
Customers ask what the default offer means, whether solar exports are still worth it, what an EV plan changes. Answer those properly and you meet intent at the moment of switching, in search and in the chatbots now summarising energy advice.
Lifecycle email through billing events
Welcome, first bill, seasonal spike, price change, plan anniversary. Each triggered from your billing data, written plainly, and designed to prevent the call rather than to sell something in the middle of a bill shock.
Brand that survives review
Positioning and creative built with legal in the room and substantiation recorded per claim. Distinct enough to be remembered, specific enough to be defended, and reusable across the base rather than rebuilt every campaign.
Questions we get asked.
Yes, on different terms. Competing head on for generic comparison queries is expensive and rarely holds. Bidding on questions about the default offer, solar exports, bill increases, moving house and specific plan mechanics brings a customer who has read something of yours before they switch, and that is the customer worth measuring on tenure.
By making the specific fact the headline instead of a claim that needs propping up. If the offer is a set percentage against the reference price for a defined period, say exactly that. Substantiation lives on the landing page, disclosure sits where the rules require it, and the ad reads like a sentence rather than a footnote.
The listing is fed by your plan data, so the work is upstream: plan structure, naming, and how the offer reads to somebody comparing on price alone. Around it, we make sure a customer who leaves the comparison site to check who you are finds enough to finish the switch.
Completely. SME and commercial buying runs through brokers, tender processes and contract renewal dates rather than a switching site, and the content that wins it deals with load, tariff structure and the risk of a renewal falling over. Separate programme, separate reporting, same in-house team.
Also in energy and utilities
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9 services under one team, run against the numbers your business already reports on.
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