Be Power Group SpA is a Digital Green Utility (DGU). Their business model aims to integrate energy trading as a Balancing Responsible Party (BRP) and construct a fully-owned nationwide public network of EV charging stations to sell energy to electric vehicles and balance supply and demand on the grid real-time, at scale. Be Charge is a Be Power brand that offers EV charging stations and a mobile app to operate them.
They offer their services in Italy, where the penetration of electric mobility solutions is quickly growing on the market – it constituted 3% of the Italian automotive market in 2020, having more than doubled from 2019 to 2020.
Key challenges
- Low market penetration (they are relatively new in the business).
- Competitors with the same business model.
- Promotion technology integration within the app.
Be Charge strives to position itself as the first or second EV charging provider on the Italian market. This market is still relatively small but is quickly growing, and establishing Be Charge as one of the most recognized providers will be very profitable in the future. To expand their market share and speed up the acquisition, they have decided to start running sales promotions.
Be Charge aims to target two customer groups with promotions. One is B2C, customers using their mobile app, where they wanted to run the following types of promotions:
- Acquisition campaigns, encouraging app downloads, mostly discounts on the recharges.
- Referral program focused on increasing the market penetration.
- A loyalty program that will help them with customer retention.
- Offering “prepaid” products, for example, a prepaid package including a fixed amount of kWh as recharge.
The second audience is B2B partners, for which Be Charge wanted to offer gift vouchers or dedicated discounts on services. They did not have an infrastructure in place that would allow them to run such promotions.
Therefore, they were looking for a flexible solution that would allow them to launch B2C and B2B promotions, including in-cart promotions, discount vouchers, and gift cards. They needed the system to be easy to use and possible to integrate with their mobile app quickly.
Solution
So far, Be Charge has launched acquisition-focused discount campaigns either using discount coupons or in-cart promotions. These campaigns offer discounts on the recharging sessions. An example of a Voucherify-powered campaign is offering the first recharge free for the new users.
Another example is an extensive campaign they run with their partner, Eni SpA, where they have offered a 50% discount for the recharging session on specific charging stations designated by the partner with a limit of once per customer. Be Charge uses geolocation-based (or EVC - based) segmentation in Voucherify to target their promotions at the right segments.
The distribution channels they are using for Voucherify-generated campaigns include email and in-app messages. They are planning to implement promotions in the push notifications as well. There are other promotions Be Charge is planning to launch with Voucherify in the future, such as pre-paid packages for the recharging service or referral and loyalty programs.
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