On 23rd April 2007, Water Group Promotions, in conjunction with Waterwise and Ripple Products, organised a giveaway of 5,000 four-minute shower timers, promoted on GMTV.
In return for their free shower timer we asked claimants to answer two questions:
This enabled us to gather new information about people's showering behaviour. See the results of the survey.
5,000 shower timers were successfully claimed in 9 hours and 15 minutes – the period from when the promotion aired on GMTV, at 7:45am, to when the last one was claimed at 5pm.
The offer was limited to one per household and actually over 6,700 claims were received in that time, including those from people who claimed more than one per household. That’s an average of over 12 orders per minute throughout the day, though at our busiest we were taking more than an order a second.
To make the distribution fair we disallowed claims for more than one per household while accepting claims from people who supplied multiple addresses. One person tried to claim 181 shower timers!
We had 4,093 visitors to the website – many of whom ordered an extra shower timer for a different address. 2,296 of these users agreed that Water Group Promotions could contact them via email and 307 agreed that carefully selected water efficiency companies could contact them via email.
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During December 2006 Three Valleys Water (TVW) conducted a water efficiency mailing trial to determine:
The scale of increase in response rate (from current billing leaflet and water efficiency leaflet water audits) in terms of completed water audit forms
The difference between take up of water efficient goods between metered and non-metered customers
Resulting from offering water efficiency products in return for completing and returning a water audit questionnaire and analysis of the results.
The TVW Water Efficiency Leaflet was modified to include a free water efficiency related gift (tea towel, shower timer or drip gauge) in return for completion and return of the water audit form contained within it.
Four thousand forms were sent out to two thousand randomly selected metered and two thousand randomly selected unmetered customers. Returned forms were directed to a mailing response organisation who entered details of the water audits onto a database and completed wish fulfilment by sending out the giveaway requested.
Results of the trial thus far are as follows.
Three water efficiency products were offered. These were a water efficiency message tea towel, a shower timer and a drip gauge.
The take up of each is indicated in the table below.
A majority of both metered and unmetered customers (65%) expressed a preference for the water efficiency tea towel. The next expressed preference (27%) was for the shower timer.
There is little or no discrimination between whether the customer is metered or not and the choice of gift indicated.
An overall response rate of 11% was achieved (440 responses to 4,000 forms sent out).
Incorporation of an incentive for the supply of information increases the response rates (when compared with the number of water audits returned from the TVW billing or water efficiency leaflets 2006) by a factor of 10 for unmetered customers and by a factor of 34 for metered customers by incorporating an incentive for the supply of information.
Metered customers in TVW area (water scarce, south east of England) are over 3 times more likely to be inclined to take up offers involving the promotion of water efficiency than unmetered customers. This supports water scarcity status applications.
Three Valleys are now looking at the implications of the response rates achieved for a wider roll out of the scheme to benchmark their micro-component use models in the run up to submission of water resources plan and business plans.