Client & Context
Easy Energies, an ambitious player in the B2C energy sector, was facing a challenge familiar to many companies: an overreliance on lead-reselling platforms.
To ensure healthy, sustainable growth, the client wanted to bring its acquisition strategy in-house. The goal? To become 100% self-sufficient in feeding its sales pipeline by generating its own exclusive leads.
The Challenge
The challenge entrusted to Donutz was to generate a sufficient volume of leads to continuously supply the sales teams, while respecting a predefined target Cost Per Lead (CPL), an essential threshold for guaranteeing the profitability of the entire model. The difficulty, however, went beyond a simple question of volume or cost, because we also had to maintain a high level of qualification, so that every contact passed on to the sales team represented a real opportunity rather than just another number in a database.
Our Strategy
True to our conviction that a high-performing campaign is built on data, we chose to begin with a multichannel testing phase designed to quickly put our hypotheses to the test. Very soon, the early results confronted us with the reality of a saturated market: a CPL above target and a level of qualification still too low.
At Donutz, we refuse to stubbornly pursue a strategy that costs our clients too much, and it was precisely this clear-sightedness that guided our pivot: rather than clinging to an approach that wasn’t delivering, we took end-to-end control of the conversion funnel and focused our efforts where the data pointed to the greatest potential. Above all, where many would have simply waited for performance to improve on its own, we tested, measured, and iterated continuously until we found the right formula.
The Actions
To bring this pivot to life and reverse the trend in less than three months, we deployed our full technological and creative arsenal, driven by particularly hands-on account management.
A custom-built CRM that feeds the algorithms:
We developed a proprietary CRM for Easy Energies that doesn’t just process leads: it sends real-time quality signals back to the advertising platforms. The algorithms no longer optimize for a simple volume of form submissions, but for the real commercial value of each contact. This enrichment with first-party data is one of our true differentiators — it’s what moves both the CPL and the qualification.
Strong account management:
This is arguably where an agency’s real added value comes into play. The project didn’t start as planned, and rather than enduring it, we steered it. Funnel overhaul, creative iterations, fine-grained audience segmentation, successive tests: every hypothesis was measured, every learning fed back in, until we converged on the combination that brought the client closer to its goals. Many would have settled for the initial strategy and waited for things to improve; we experimented until we found the right recipe.
The details of the method, the tools, the funnel mechanics, the creative angles, are part of our know-how; that’s our little secret garden 😉
Results
Powered by this agile approach and the continuous optimization of the conversion funnel, the strategy quickly produced tangible results — in less than three months. Cost control did not come at the expense of quality, since the direct funnel and the custom-built CRM made it possible to maintain an excellent commercial conversion rate. Easy Energies is now free from lead-reselling platforms and controls both the flow and the quality of its contacts. With this regained autonomy and a now-stabilized model, the client is stepping up a gear, as we are currently rolling out and testing acquisition campaigns across the other verticals of its business.
