Corn Belt Power Cooperative, a G&T serving ten distribution cooperatives in northern Iowa, was faced with the challenge of finding new and innovative marketing techniques to increase its electric heating and water heating market shares.
So in 1999, Corn Belt Power and its member systems contracted with Inside Information to build and manage a customer database, in order to segment targeted customers and conduct direct marketing campaigns.
During the past five years, Inside has conducted numerous direct mail, telemarketing and e-mail campaigns for the Corn Belt Power co-ops, targeting customers with gas water heaters to switch to electric.
As a result of those direct marketing campaigns, the Corn Belt Power's co-ops have added 789 new electric water heaters to their system, worth a lifetime value of $1,177,188 in margins!
Corn Belt Power's overall rebates for electric heating/heat pumps and water heating continue to increase as a result of the ongoing database marketing efforts. In 2002, 44% of the total water heater rebates and 59% of the electric heating/heat pump rebates were as a result of targeted marketing.
“Using a customer database to segment our customers for targeted marketing has been an extremely effective marketing technique for our co-ops,” says Jim Sayers, marketing manager at Corn Belt. “We also use database marketing to promote many other products and services to increase lifetime customer value – everything from surge protection and Internet service to long-distance telephone service and electric grills.”
Inside continues to manage the customer databases for the Corn Belt co-ops, coordinating and conducting all surveys and direct marketing campaigns as well. To date, database surveys have been collected from over half of the customers in the Corn Belt system – nearly 17,000 households.
