Brooklyn Union Powers Up: Online e-BRCs help energy supplier generate new leads

brooklyn Union has found a major new lead-generation tool – an online business reply card connected to its Web site. Web responses accounted for 10% of all homeowner leads and 5% of all new commercial prospects for the energy supplier last fall.

“It’s one of the best investments we ever made with our advertising dollars,” said Peggy Berretta, director of advertising and promotion for the regulated portion of the company, KeySpan Energy, Brooklyn, NY.

The site (www.buvalue.com), which was developed at a cost of $5,000, is designed to generate leads among home and business owners to convert them from oil to gas heat. But getting top corporate management to buy into the idea was no picnic, said Berretta, speaking at the Direct Marketing to Business Conference last month in Miami.

While Brooklyn Union maintained a corporate site, it was content-heavy and offered no devices for capturing customer data or lead-generation information.

One of the sticking points in getting top company executives to buy into the e-BRC plan, said Berretta, was the theory that many customers were not affluent and most likely not wired to the Web. She initiated research that showed between 15% to 25% of the company’s customers had Internet access at home, 5% to 12% had access at work only, and 10% to 20% had both.

After developing the site last spring, Brooklyn Union promoted the e-BRC with a direct mail effort that targeted 200,000 consumers and 60,000 businesses. The initial spring response pulled in 5% of all homeowner leads and 3% of all commercial prospects.