Case study: Driving customer acquisition through content optimization

How data-informed content design drove a 52% increase in customer acquisition in just 2 weeks.

Overview

Origin Energy is Australia's largest energy provider. As the Senior Content Designer, I led the content for a new customer acquisition campaign offering sign-up credits to attract new customers.

I managed the content experience throughout the on-site sales journey and worked across departments and with our third-party sales partner, CommBank.

Challenge

The energy sector is a complex, highly regulated and competitive environment – a steep learning curve for those new to the company.

Just 3 months into my role at Origin, I needed to work quickly to coordinate departments to get a compliant and compelling campaign live. A lack of documentation meant that I could not lean on past campaigns and that content drafting and review was time-intensive.

In the lead-up to the campaign, the offer construct changed in response to market insights. This delayed the start of the campaign and cut its duration in half. We needed to achieve the same sales target in 3 weeks, instead of the planned 6-week schedule.

One week into the 3-week campaign, data indicated we were trending to miss the sales target. Critically, the customer mix leaned too heavily towards existing customers, diluting the campaign’s ROI.

We had 2 weeks left to meet the sales target.

Approach

My response focused on data-driven optimization and teamwork. I coordinated stakeholders across Product, Sales, Digital, Legal and Compliance, as well as CommBank.

I used web analytics and Hotjar to understand how users interacted with the campaign. Combined with our customer-mix insight, this helped identify the funnel leak: new customer messaging on our campaign page needed to be clearer.

I updated the headings and microcopy to clearly distinguish offers for new and existing customers. To maximize our 2-week window, I expedited the lengthy review process by keeping changes minimal and data-informed, and leveraging the strong relationships I had built.

To avoid reinventing the wheel, I created a guide for third-party campaigns. I documented the content, decisions and process in Confluence. It turned our learnings into pre-approved, reusable content patterns for future campaigns.

Results

  • Increased new customer sign-ups by 52% in the final 2 weeks of the campaign.
  • Reduced existing customer sign-ups from 30% to 12%, improving campaign efficiency and lowering operational costs.
  • Achieved the 6-week sales goal in half the time.
  • Demonstrated the value of content design to achieve measurable business outcomes under tight timelines.

Key learnings

This campaign reinforced that content design is as much about people as it is about words.

While data-driven optimization was critical to our success, the relationships I had built enabled us to iterate quickly. When facing tight deadlines, working closely across teams proved to be the most effective way to navigate challenges and get things done.

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