Reducing broker dependency as revenue scaled from £300m to £500m

The situation

OVO was a fast-growing challenger to the Big Six, but relied heavily on price-comparison sites for new customers. Those customers were expensive to acquire and more likely to switch again when the comparison site prompted them at renewal. Direct customers tended to be more valuable over time, so I was hired to build the capability to acquire more of them ourselves.

The challenge was that the obvious route, competing on high-volume paid search terms, was prohibitively expensive against the aggregators. We needed to find higher-value customer segments, reach them through more efficient channels and build a direct relationship before they were ready to switch.

What I did

I built the direct acquisition team and strategy around the economics of the customer rather than simply chasing the cheapest immediate sign-up. We identified the customer segments with the strongest lifetime value, understood what mattered most to each of them, and then built acquisition journeys around those differences.

Paid search was useful further down the long tail, but the big generic energy terms were dominated by price-comparison sites and too expensive to compete on sensibly. So we put more emphasis on display, using relatively novel HTML5 creative at the time to tailor messages to different segments and bring people into a quick-quote journey. Once somebody had a quote, we could use CRM and remarketing to bring them back when they were ready to switch.

In parallel I built a much stronger organic acquisition engine. We created Energy Guides around the questions people were already searching for, giving OVO a way to reach potential customers earlier without paying for every click. I also worked closely with product on conversion-rate optimisation throughout the quote journey and launched a refer-a-friend programme that became another important source of direct acquisition.

As the proposition expanded, we adapted the acquisition model with it. When the business launched pay-as-you-go, we supported it with segment-specific short-form YouTube and social content to bring that audience into the direct funnel.

380,000 to 570,000 customers in fifteen months

The result

Over fifteen months, OVO’s revenue grew from £300m to £500m and the customer base from 380,000 to 570,000. Direct acquisition rose from 16% to 28% of all sign-ups, reducing broker dependency from 72% to 60%. Organic sign-ups grew 200%, paid acquisition cost fell by two thirds and website conversion improved from 1.5% to 2.5%.

The work won a Drum Digital Award and a bronze DMA Award.

What it took

We couldn’t simply outbid the price-comparison sites on the biggest search terms, so the challenge was finding more efficient ways to reach the customers we actually wanted. That meant looking beyond immediate acquisition cost to lifetime value, investing in channels like organic search that took longer to build, and joining paid media, content, CRM, referral and conversion into one acquisition journey.

It was also my first in-house role after Google, so I went from advising businesses on digital channels to owning the budget, team and commercial result myself.