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Energy Efficiency Gains Momentum By: Joel S. Gilbert , P.E., CEO
Even though energy efficiency has had over three decades of emphasis since the energy embargoes of 70s, there is a new spirit of sincere interest emerging. A much wider range of customers now seems more concerned and interested in learning what they can do to really help. Maybe it is the maturing of the population, a consensus that we all live in a fragile environment, or the fear that we are truly at a tipping point, but something has actually changed. Energy efficiency has gained the customer’s ear. They seem more interested in doing their part, especially if it makes good economic sense. We are also learning how to market energy efficiency for what it does rather than what it is. We are now seeing compact fluorescent lamps, bundled into packages, labeled with how much money they save instead of how much energy they save. Customers are interested in what it will do for them and today’s compact fluorescent lamps reflect that realization. The next time you pick one up, notice they are now emphasizing how This awareness is occurring at the same time that the electric industry has worked down capacity reserves and is preparing for the building of new plants. Gaining permission to build base loaded coal and/or nuclear power plants will take a lot more than capital. It will take community acceptance … and that will come after customers, regulators and politicians believe the power company has exhausted the cost effective alternatives: most notably energy efficiency. But, this will not be the same old program-driven period of the past. Today’s utility executives are enthusiastically leading the way and applying a more business scrutiny to efficiency efforts. They want predictable and verifyable results at the lowest possible price of acquisition. This will be far more than token investments without proof of results. The goals for some of the programs already announced are so ambitious that they represent very meaningful business opportunities for someone. It would not be all that surprising to see some utilities returning to the energy services companies of the 1980s. What will this mean for the online energy evaluation applications APOGEE provides today (e.g., the HomeEnergySuite™ and the CommercialEnergySuite™)? Several things.
From our industry vantage-point, energy efficiency is going to command a higher level of attention in the years ahead. Online applications have their place in meeting this demand. Summarized here are just a few of the criteria leading-edge online applications must deliver. We are constantly building our applications to meet these higher standards. Please take time to attend our online webinars to see how much they have evolved and to give input to their continued development. These customer forums are serving as excellent and cost effective means of getting your input to what your company needs our applications to deliver. Plus, they are a convenient way for us to share the evolution and new product enhancements that are coming down the line to support your energy efficiency agendas. |
News You Can Use
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Engage Customers with Interactivity and Impact By: Susan Gilbert, President
Did you ever use a touch-screen monitor to place an order or get information? Remember how satisfying it was to simply touch the screen to see your answer magically appear? That “engagement factor” is elusive on the web where you can’t provide a touch-screen experience for your customers, yet you want to catch your visitors’ attention, engage them in a dialogue, and ultimately let them perform transactions that increase their satisfaction and reduce your customer service costs. Engagement power is something we’ve spent a decade decoding as we’ve built thousands of web applications that live on hundreds of websites. We’ve watched the Internet become integral to our lives. Through greater adoption, people’s expectations have risen while their poor-performance tolerance has plummeted. We’ve found that today to captivate, involve, and educate visitors on your website, you must offer attractively packaged concepts that are easy to understand and allow customers to personalize the material precisely to their situation. Then, if you can simulate the feeling of touch-screen interactivity, you’ve got them hooked. Here are some of the techniques we’ve found that work.
Use a Currency Customers Value. Many of our utility clients want to help their customers understand the enormous impact of changing out an incandescent lamp for a compact fluorescent one. To some, cost savings and quick payback are motivating as reasons for the replacement. With the buzz about global warming and green house gasses, some people are becoming moved by the carbon impacts as well. So use these attention grabbers to captivate interest. Take a look at this CFL comparison calculator. It would be hard to miss the carbon reduction produced by the choice. As people become more educated about carbon footprint and relative emission values, this number will begin to really mean something to those concerned about the planet. Click here to view the CFL Calculator.
Allow Personalization — Not Generic National Standards. As shown with this intuitive CFL-comparison-calculator, users slide buttons to personalize it to their own situations, then can instantly see the results in easy-to-absorb stacked bars. Provide Real-time Responsiveness. Here’s another example where slider bars give visitors the feeling of touch-screen performance. This seemingly simple calculator does sophisticated engineering analysis behind its attractive exterior. As the blue buttons are moved, the chart dynamically rebuilds itself, displaying heating and cooling cost estimates to match the settings. And in the Annual Savings table above the bar chart, users can see the savings for making an upgrade to their HVAC systems, and the value of going to higher and higher efficiencies. Click here to experience the HVAC calculator. Make it amusing. Making a calculator look like what it’s computing is a fun way of capturing attention and communicating the subject without words. In this TV energy cost estimator, users can get a feel for how much operating their many TVs costs. Particularly interesting are the dollars associated with the Plasma and DLP sets (Figure 1). And seeing how much these different sets costs in energy dollars, even when they are turned off is interesting (Figure 2.). Click here to access the TV Calculator.
Make it intriguingly attractive. In this colorful, three-dimensional cut-away of a home, people can pop into rooms by simply clicking on them. Interested in home offices? Click there. Pools? Try the backyard. Kitchen, laundry, living room, HVAC closet? You pick it, click, and you are there. Click here to explore our InteractiveEnergyHome™
Hot Topic Made Personal. Finally, with gasoline prices hitting record levels this year, people are particularly sensitive to energy prices. (Isn’t it interesting that when gasoline prices jump, concern over the utility bills jump as well even if rates have not changed?) Since it’s a hot topic, let people see for themselves how much they are paying in a year for gasoline to power their cars. Once the dollar amounts are computed for their situation, not some generic national average, people walk away from this experience with a renewed appreciation for what they pay to heat, cool, light and enjoy their homes year ‘round. Click here, let your mouse hover over the garage, then click for the gasoline calculator. So, what’s the key to engaging customers with your website applications? Make them eye-catchingly attractive, be sure they relate to something people want to know, allow users to personalize them to their situation, and keep them as interactive as possible. With that done, you can sit back, watch your analytics or web-logs to see who comes, learn from what they try, and keep evolving your applications to interest and educate your customers. |
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By: Karen D. Morris, Marketing Manager
From a global perspective, most view the Internet as a rapidly evolving multicultural environment, a massive network, or neurosphere. Communication on a global scale is only a mouse click away. Remember when there were only 3 major television networks? Today there are hundreds of stations from which to choose. TiVo, DVD’s, VOD (video on demand) and Slingbox has made television a less effective marketing venue. Email, IM and the Blog has surpassed snail mail and the telephone as a preferred method of communication. RSS feeds, satellite radio, the iPod and online publications are quickly displacing traditional radio and hard copy publications as sources of information and entertainment.
How can today’s marketer effectively function in the consumer driven “neurosphere”? Target Your Audience – Permission marketing is a must. Consumers want to choose what messages they receive and how they receive them. Offer the opportunity to subscribe to specific topics of interest aligned with your products and services. Then carefully segment your database, follow Trust & Integrity – Never before has the marketplace been more transparent; gaining the trust of the consumer is paramount. Having the opportunity to address individual concerns and engage in an open dialogue with consumers is proving to out weigh the risks of skirting the issues or appearing unapproachable. The Internet is making this easily attainable on a grand scale. Online information and applications that allow customers to get the answers they need from a trusted resource works toward gaining valuable trust. Individuality & Branding – The Internet has empowered consumers with the ability to express individuality. Amazingly, the social networking site myspace.com sees 2 million new unique profiles each week, spinning off into a wide range of interest groups and creating an aerial view of today's 14 - 30 year olds. It is predicted that this platform will soon move outside the realm of youth and into the mainstream – businesspace.com? Personifying your brand, aligning your internal values and actions with your external message and appealing to consumers’ passions and emotional responses will empower the marketer. The key to adapting to an ever changing market is flexibility. Benchmark, measure and acknowledge what is working and what is not. If you write an annual, quarterly or five-year marketing strategy, be prepared to change directions regularly. At the end of the day, the highest ethics and best quality products and services will continue to win out. Remember word of mouth is golden, now more than ever, as our world grows smaller with each mouse click. |
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Web Analytics: What you need to know By: Jon Scott, Account Representative
Web analytics is the measurement of the behavior of visitors to your website or web-hosted content and applications. Web Analytics can be used to extract everything from the number of people coming to your website, what they are utilizing, to where they are located and what operating system they are using. Because there is so much information available in web statistics reports, it is important to sort out what’s genuinely useful in your pursuit of tracking visitor behavior. What you need to focus on…
Visits The best gauge of activity on your website or web-hosted content/applications is visits. Visits measure the total number of times people actually looked at and interacted with your website or web hosted content/applications over a designated time period. “Oh… so a ‘visit’ is like a ‘hit?’” No! Strike the word “hit” from your web-lexicon. Somewhere along the way, “visits” became interchangeable with “hits” when in reality, the two are very different. Here’s why. Let’s say we go to a website having 15 separate pictures on the homepage. That one visit to the homepage just generated 15+ hits. It’s a great gauge to use if you’re trying to inflate your numbers, but for honest tracking of activity, use “visits.”
Entry / Exit Pages Now that we know how many people are visiting our website, content, or applications, it is now important to see both where they enter and where they choose to leave. The ability to see where visitors enter will give you great insight into what people see when they first come to your website. While a vast majority of your visitors will view your homepage as their “entry page,” there will still be people that enter through other paths. Search Engines, other sites that link to you, and bookmarked pages are all alternative entry points that bypass the homepage. By identifying where visitors enter, we are able to better understand what they are hoping to accomplish there.
Knowing where visitors choose to leave your website can be helpful too. First, it allows you to identify pages within your website that may hold little interest for your typical visitor. Second, it can expose usability issues on pages that require your visitor to take certain actions. For example: If your electronic forms are cumbersome, the visitor will become frustrated and in some cases leave the site completely. Last, viewing the most popular exit pages can help you identify pages with links to other sites that may be unintentionally driving engaged visitors away from your website.
Downloads Now that we know how many people are coming to our website and we have a good idea of where they enter and where they exit, we now want to focus on what they are downloading. Many companies offer a variety of downloads on their websites or web-hosted content/applications. By measuring downloads, we are able to gauge visitor’s interest-level in the specific items we have posted. We are also able to judge if the bandwidth we provide is enough to handle the download traffic. Tracking what people are downloading and how often can also help in identifying potential download issues. Perhaps a single download file is too large or a link has broken. It’s better to identify this ourselves before a visitor is inconvenienced.
While there are numerous statistics available in your Web Analytics arsenal, don’t let the volume of information overwhelm or confuse you. Visits, Entry/Exit pages and Downloads should be at the forefront in measuring your website activity. We recommend you track these numbers on a monthly basis. By watching them, you can learn what drives visits and gain valuable insights to what visitors are doing on your website.
The 10 Worst Web Pages Featured on Web Pages That Suck in 2006
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through by providing quality information to a highly targeted audience. This will lend credibility to your efforts and lower the cost of generating qualified results. 
