Powering American businesses

Companies in every industry depend on reliable energy to keep their businesses running, whether they’re powering industrial machinery, medical equipment, or website servers. Every day, nearly three million homes and businesses across the United States turn to NRG Energy for smart, sustainable, and reliable energy services. A fortune 500 company, NRG is a leading customer-focused energy company in the United States, built on the strength of its integrated platform of retail and generation businesses.

NRG’s business customers tend to be large commercial and industrial customers with highly diverse energy needs. These business customers traditionally work closely with B2B sales representatives to construct a custom energy plan that works for their business. While the focus on face-to-face marketing and events helps NRG build close relationships with its customers and nurture leads effectively, the personal sales method makes it more challenging for NRG to grow, as increasing the customer base means also expanding support resources.

To meet this opportunity, NRG is undertaking a digital transformation that would allow it to better leverage its website, email, social media, mobile apps, and other digital marketing channels to support sales activities and minimize the need to hire and train new sales staff. “By using digital marketing channels to maintain relationships, generate leads, and support renewal and cross-selling opportunities, we give sales representatives more time to create customized, exciting energy plans for new customers while also continuing to work closely with our largest existing customers,” says Gin Kinney, Vice President, Strategic Marketing at NRG Energy, Inc.

One major cornerstone of the digital transformation involved revamping the website and using personalized content—featured solutions, case studies, and thought leadership—to connect with potential and existing customers. NRG digital marketers were already using Adobe Creative Cloud apps to produce creative assets used throughout digital marketing, so the company turned to another set of Adobe solutions to form the foundation of its digital marketing transformation: Adobe Experience Cloud.

“Adobe Experience Cloud gives us the solutions that we need to support our sales team by automating digital marketing and building stronger relationships with customers,” says Kinney.

Attracting customers with updated website content

NRG worked closely with its development and creative agency, AKQA, to launch a new website based on Adobe Experience Manager, part of Adobe Marketing Cloud. All content created in Adobe Creative Cloud is uploaded and managed in Adobe Experience Manager Assets. All assets are tagged before publication, which not only makes it easier for NRG to manage assets, but also allows NRG to track performance of each asset and set the stage for robust personalization.

Adobe Experience Manager Sites makes it easy for content authors to quickly create and publish webpages without the need to work through developers. The result is a much faster time to market and a more dynamic website.

“The focus of our website is building relationships with customers and generating leads,” says Steven Lin, Senior Digital Manager at NRG Energy, Inc. “Before, our website was static and flat—not the image that an innovative and leading company wants to portray. With Adobe Experience Manager, our content authors can quickly publish news and thought leadership that’s relevant to companies’ interests or current events. This encourages a much more positive view of NRG and helps push companies toward becoming a customer.”

NRG also uses Adobe Experience Manager for a hybrid content management system (CMS), enabling channel-agnostic content management and delivery. The headless model enables NRG to easily render content across the website, as well as other channels such as email campaigns, social media posts, or mobile apps. This gives marketers the ability to republish and reuse content with even greater flexibility and efficiency.

Increasing lead generation through personalization

Using integrated Adobe Experience Cloud solutions, NRG digital marketers create dozens of personalized experiences that connect with customers and help build strong relationships. Using Adobe Analytics and Adobe Audience Manager in Adobe Analytics Cloud, marketers can analyze the performance of website assets and group website audiences into personas based on their preferences.

Marketers then create, upload, and tag multiple variations of content and experiences designed for each audience into Adobe Experience Manager. Adobe Target, part of Adobe Marketing Cloud, then personalizes website experiences by matching website visitor data with persona data. If Adobe Target identifies a website visitor as coming from a large medical facility, for example, Adobe Target might change the home page to feature a case study about a hospital and highlight a recent blog post about energy security. Geotargeting allows NRG to display or hide regional services to provide more relevant website experiences.

Building cross-channel audiences for consistent marketing

Data from Adobe Analytics is key to understanding customers and creating personas for personalization. Because all website content is tagged, Adobe Analytics can accurately measure engagement and determine what types of behaviors visitors take on the site. Analytics answers questions such as what type of content visitors were viewing, how long they spend reading content, and how they navigated around the website. This helps digital marketers understand what information visitors are looking for and what type of content interests them.

Adobe Audience Manager takes real-time visitor behavior data and combines it with known customer data from sister sites such as Reliant.com, and DoubleClick logs to develop a fuller picture of traits that define different personas. Working with Audience Manager as a data management platform allows NRG to create a single source for audience data and deliver more coordinated digital marketing experiences.

Before Audience Manager, NRG could only personalize website experiences using a tracking code if a customer clicked on an advertisement. With the help of Audience Manager, NRG can go one step further and deliver the same personalized web experience if a customer was exposed to the advertisement but didn’t click on it. Marketers can reinforce the messaging and promote more engagement and leads from customers. With this content personalization, NRG has seen engagement increase by 5x.

Increasing leads through testing and optimization.

Adobe Target doesn’t just allow NRG marketers to personalize web experience. Marketers are also using Target to test and optimize omnichannel experiences. Tests can range from comparing which case studies connect with each persona to optimizing the messaging, color, and placement of a call-to-action button. As a result of this testing, NRG experienced a 3% increase in lead conversions.

Real-time customer behavior data from Adobe Analytics feeds into Adobe Target to continually measure, test performance, and optimize the web experience. “Adobe Target is an invaluable part of delivering the best possible experiences for customers, whether through personalization or optimization,” says Lin. “One of our retail brands, Reliant Energy, saw click through rates double after leveraging Adobe Target.”

Increasing leads tenfold with performance visibility

Before working with Adobe Analytics, marketers didn’t have visibility into how specific ads affect traffic. Now NRG marketers can see beyond the website to gain a much clearer view of how advertising campaigns affect traffic and leads. “We can focus both energy and spend on ads that work, and retool campaigns that don’t,” says Lin. “With updates to our user experience and Adobe Analytics giving us visibility into ad performance, we’ve increased leads per visit tenfold.”

NRG is considering expanding its use of Adobe Experience Cloud, particularly by bringing third-party data into Adobe Audience Manager to expand marketers’ ability to accurately identify and target unknown audiences.

“We had originally expected that personalization would primarily be useful for brand exposure and customer engagement, but we weren’t expecting it to have such an impact on our bottom line,” says Lin. “We’re boosting leads and truly supporting our sales teams. It shows that personalization works.”

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