Earth Day fell on April 22nd this year, and many people took perhaps a moment to reflect upon the promise and progress we continue to make against climate change. At Uplight, Earth Day is also a chance for us to make April one of the biggest impact months of the year as we sell and enroll three months of energy-saving devices in a single month.
These enrollments reflect the growing emphasis of demand-side solutions for the energy industry as a whole as extreme weather events become more frequent and severe. Utilities are increasingly turning to strategies such as Demand Response (DR) events and Virtual Power Plants to help manage this volatility. According to Guidehouse, distributed energy resource (DER) management spending is forecasted to grow by 4x by 2030, from $1.7 to 7 billion dollars.
Energy marketplaces are the center of our Earth Day campaigns. As the market leader, Uplight has designed a seamless customer experience that drives results–helping utilities improve grid resiliency, reduce energy costs, and accelerate decarbonization. Our winning formula of well-designed customer experiences, bundled demand response program enrollment, energy product offerings, and marketing expertise maximizes conversions and participation. And, we’re continuing to add new products and types of demand response programs to increase value.
Uplight’s demand response pre-enrollment bundles smart thermostats, EV chargers, or other appliance sales with DR program enrollment on our marketplaces. A direct benefit of the emphasis our programs place on a more seamless, customer-centric experience is a 19% increase in enrollments through a connected Uplight marketplace and DR program versus a customer “handoff” to a third party. This also reduces acquisition costs, which can range from $10-150 per customer.
For Uplight clients, Earth Month has become an “anchor” holiday, similar to Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales. Our demand response pre-enrollments for April exceeded the number of demand response pre-enrollments acquired in all of Q1 2023. And, Uplight DR enrollments from July-December 2022 increased by 150% compared to the prior year–equivalent to adding 50MW flexible load or removing a 50MW peaker plant from the grid every 3.8 months.
We’ll continue to recruit customers throughout May to prepare for our biggest demand response event season in Uplight history. With more devices under control, Uplight has the opportunity to shift record amounts of load this summer.
Prioritizing the customer experience through product design, customer care, and expert marketing services contributes to our success. Uplight’s average Net Promoter Score across all Marketplaces is 71, which is 20 points higher than Amazon’s. We also offer top-notch customer care for Marketplace and Demand Response Programs––maintaining a CSAT score of 70. Experienced Uplight call center agents actively recruit customers into our OE programs and dissuade customers from opting out.
Uplight is the only energy marketplace provider to offer extensive marketing services that drive significantly more traffic and conversions than competitors. Our comprehensive marketing services leverage several channels – such as email, paid search, social, programmatic display, audio and video ads, postcards, and more – to increase offer awareness and meet customers where they are. And we leverage best practice ecommerce tactics such as abandoned cart emails and retargeting to boost conversion rates.
Marketplaces are a key lever in enabling utilities to meet their energy savings, decarbonization, and load flexibility goals. Uplight’s deep understanding of energy customers and laser focus on the customer experience coupled with our investment and continued innovation helps make Earth Day every day for utilities and their customers.
