When residential customers enroll in a demand response program, they make a quiet but meaningful commitment: they agree to reduce energy usage during peak demand events, helping stabilize the grid for their entire community. But enrollment is only half the equation. If participants go dormant, the grid doesn't get the relief it needs, and the collective benefit disappears. Atlantic City Electric had 130,000 enrolled demand response customers who had stopped engaging. They were still signed up, but they weren't participating in events, responding to communications, or taking the actions the program depends on. The result: a grid-management tool operating well below its potential, at exactly the moments when communities need reliability most. Our objective was to design a multi-touch email nurture campaign that would reactivate these dormant participants, not through scare tactics or guilt, but through clear, benefit-forward communication that reminded them why they signed up and how easy it is to participate. We targeted open and click-through rates dramatically above utility email benchmarks, with the bigger goal of converting email engagement into active demand response participation.
The campaign rejected the single-blast approach that dominates utility email. Instead, we built a phased nurture sequence deployed to the full 130,000-person enrolled base, designed to re-engage customers over time rather than overwhelming them with a single reminder they'd ignore. Each email led with the customer benefit, not the program mechanics. Instead of explaining demand response in engineering terms, the copy focused on what participation actually means for the reader: contributing to a more reliable grid for their neighbors, keeping energy costs down for their household, and staying part of a community effort that makes the system work for everyone. Subject lines were crafted for inbox cut-through: direct, action-oriented, and stripped of the corporate formality that tanks utility open rates. Body copy was scannable, with clear calls-to-action and zero jargon. The tone was conversational and respectful, built on the premise that these were already enrolled customers who deserved to be treated as partners, not targets. Cadence was calibrated to maintain presence without creating fatigue. Each touchpoint gave customers a slightly different reason to re-engage, moving from awareness to motivation to action across the sequence. The campaign ran through Eloqua with segmentation logic ensuring the right message reached each customer at the right stage. The strategic bet: that utility email could perform like the best of consumer email if you treated the audience like real people instead of ratepayers.
The campaign delivered a 60% average open rate and a 35% click-through rate across 130,000 recipients. To put those numbers in context: utility industry email benchmarks typically land between 20-25% for open rates and 2-3% for CTR. This campaign tripled the open rate benchmark and outperformed CTR norms by more than 10x. A 60% open rate on a 130,000-person send means roughly 78,000 people opened these emails. A 35% CTR means approximately 45,500 of them clicked through to take action. Those aren't passive readers. Those are dormant program participants who re-engaged with a grid-management tool that strengthens energy reliability for their entire community. The campaign proved that the problem with utility email isn't the channel, it's the approach. When you write like a human, lead with benefits that matter, and respect the audience's time, even a 130,000-person reactivation send can outperform industry benchmarks by an order of magnitude. Every click represents someone who chose to participate in making the grid work better for everyone around them.