Challenge:

Union Gas has a strong focus on energy conservation and offers numerous energy efficiency programs to its customers including the Commercial Savings by Design program. The Commercial Savings by Design program offers participants such as builders and developers an Integrated Design Process (IDP) Workshop that allows leading green building experts to share innovative ways to achieve greater sustainability. The program allows participants to integrate energy conservation into their new construction or major renovation building designs and achieve energy models 15% above the current building code. In 2017, this was a new program for Union Gas and presented a unique challenge in having to reach decision makers in a specific industry within a defined geographic region. This initiative presents a difficult marketing scenario, and one that many B2B firms can relate to.

Solution:

Working with their agency, Sandbox advertising, Union Gas developed a tailored marketing campaign to reach decision makers in specific roles, industries and locations in Ontario. The campaign featured key messages that promoted sustainable building design to industry experts. In order to ensure their message got to the right person, Union Gas and Sandbox turned to Sponsored InMail. Having seen higher open rates and click-through rates with this product in the past, the marketing team viewed InMail as an excellent tool to ensure the content would be seen by pertinent recipients, and would help drive behavioral change.

Results:

At a time when it’s getting tougher for marketers to ensure their content gets seen, Sponsored InMail proved a reliable, cost effective avenue for Union Gas. According to Andrew Simbol, the Commercial Savings by Design campaign achieved an open rate nearly 2X above benchmark via InMail, and was well above 50% from the targeted audience. “Not only are we generating awareness about the Savings by Design program with these personalized messages,” he explains, “but we’re actually seeing interest from Union Gas customers who clicked the link to visit the program’s website to learn more.” Through this campaign, Union Gas saw immediate results as the number of visits to the program’s page increased and customers reached out to find out more about making their new construction more energy-efficient.

Over the course of the process, Sandbox continually refined its targeting by measuring which job titles were engaging most, and then reallocating budget and tweaking creative to reach them further. “We’ve been very impressed with the success rate that we’ve had with LinkedIn, and the ROI that we’ve gotten on it is something we continue to recommend to our client,” says Margaux Carter, Senior Account Executive for Sandbox.

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About Union Gas

Union Gas is a Canadian natural gas storage, transmission and distribution company with a strong focus on conservation and efficiency.