Live From Miami: Brooklyn Union E-BRC Brings in Leads

After energy marketer Brooklyn Union launched a Web site dedicated to the online business reply card — an emerging e-marketing tool — responses via the Web accounted for 10% of all homeowner leads and 5% of all commercial prospects last fall.

“It’s one of the best investments we ever made with our advertising dollars,” Peggy Berretta, director of advertising and promotion for the regulated portion of the company KeySpan Energy, Brooklyn, NY, told a crowd at a session yesterday, “Online Lift for Offline Marketing” at the Direct Marketing to Business Conference which ended Friday.

The site, located at http://www.buvalue.com, was developed at a cost of $5,000 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, Berretta said.

She said that while Brooklyn Union maintained a corporate site, it was content-heavy and offered no devices for capturing customer data or lead generation information. While leads were coming in via phone, fax and paper mail, Berretta said, “something’s missing. We need an online response mechanism.”

One of the sticking points of getting top company executives to buy into the e-BRC plan, Berretta said, was the theory that many customers were not affluent and most likely not wired to the Web. She initiated research that showed that 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.

A variety of customer data is now collected online, populating a database that will eventually be segmented, modeled and used for targeted direct marketing promotions, Berretta said. The source of the lead is tracked via a key code typed by the prospect at the end of the site’s URL and appropriate responses can be delivered instantaneously.

Further plans for the site include links to key pages on the corporate site and an automated fulfillment process that delivers requests directly to the fulfillment center and leads directly to the lead management system.

“As more people come online, Web BRC usage will increase at the expense of traditional direct marketing,” Berretta said. “However, phone and mail are still our primary response mediums.”