The Utility Warehouse Internet Marketing machine appears to be a broken record that’s been stuck in the same groove for some time now.
As you may or may not know this Blog is a bit of a hobby of mine that I spend the odd five or ten Min’s a week Blogging about Utility Prices in the UK and the companies supplying them.
I got interested in the Utility Warehouse Problems when someone tried very hard get me to switch to the Utility Warehouse from my current supplier and then proceeded to persuade me into becoming a distributor (affiliate) for them as well if I decided to join.
After checking for myself it became obvious that because I had oil central heating and I didn’t want telephone / broadband it would be much cheaper to stay with my current supplier.
I was tempted to join even though it would cost me more because the idea of being a distributor and making money selling the services and receiving a small residual income from my clients appealed to me. Cutting a long story short after much research I decided my time would be better spent invested in other projects I had on the go because I didn’t believe the UW had as much potential.
Anyway back to the point.
I keep a close eye on what the Utility Warehouse distributors are doing because I’m interested in all aspects of Internet Marketing and was intrigued with how the distributors were marketing the UW on-line.
My impression is they’re not doing it very well.
Don’t get me wrong the top players in this market are very Internet savvy and have been in the game for a long time they are innovative and very creative and I’m sure do really well getting referrals from the many assets they have on-line. This post is about the others.
The methods they’re using are mostly identical and are:
- Create Twitter account and spam it with their UW links
- Register a domain (Website) and 301 redirect it to a UW landing page (not how I’d do it)
- Forum spam / Troll (sign up to a forum and post on how great the UW is)
- Article marketing – Create a bunch of articles and submit them to low authority Article Directories
- Create some Web 2.0 properties and bookmark all of the above
- Create the same poor quality videos and post them to Youtube
- Etc….
Nothing wrong with above except for the forum spam which is annoying but guess what? If everyone is doing the same thing (and not very well in a lot of cases) can you guess the outcome? Yup the big boys get bigger and the small guys get eaten alive (never get anywhere).
It’s probably that they haven’t had the right training but anyway if that’s all they’re going to do it’s highly unlikely these small players will get anywhere fast if at all.
As Jim Rohn would say “If you do what you’ve always done you’ll get what you always got”
You may be thinking well you’re not doing much better who are you to tell us we’re doing it badly and you’d be right – for now 
As I’ve said this is a hobby site for me and I don’t spend a lot of time on it because I’m busy.
Bottom line: Am I saying you can’t make money with the Utility Warehouse as a distributor? No I’m not. I’m sure there is still scope for savvy distributors to make money but they’re going to have to be a little more innovative in their Internet marketing strategy if they want to make it big.
Article Updates
26/03/2011
I’m curious if people think that Tweeting and direct messaging people with messages like these is a good idea?
“If you like great customer service and savings every month, you’ll love the Utility Warehouse”
“If the award-winning customer service doesn’t convince you, the savings will. The Utility Warehouse”
“Utility Warehouse Discount Club members save daily. Do you want to join?”
I suppose if you’re the only one doing it on Twitter it might not be to bad but you’re not!. It would appear that every Utility Warehouse distributor is doing it over and over and over again.
Why?
I doubt its very effective and it’s very anoying to see the same Tweets day after day after day
{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
Hello Carol
I am really pleased you have written this, since it is a hobby horse of mine too.
IMHO if you keep on doing what you have been doing, you will ultimately fail, and it is fair to say, marketing is about finding the right mix.
So some online, some off line, but a great focus on referrals, since those who are with Utility Warehouse as Partners (our new name for distributors), will succeed by building a ready stream of referrals because we are in the Referral Marketing Business.
Over 90% of my new customers come though this route.
Keep up the good blog
Laurence
Hi, I’m a new ‘partner’ in the business but have very little knowledge about online marketing or even ‘referral marketing,’ could you please tell me as much as possible or even direct me so I can continue researching and eventually do this properly.
I would much appreciate.
K.
Hi Carol,
I agreed with what you had written and would love to know how you might approach the challenge. Please email if you have time.
Thanks
David
Good idea a few years ago, maybe. But times have moved on. examples below . .
Unit rates – Gas / Electricity. Yes, maybe slightly cheaper but many utility providers offers DD and DF discount (npower, example, combined discounts = £103.50 per year) – does the yearly difference in unit rates (inclusive of fresh-hold allowance and standing charge – in the case of UU) equate to £103.50. Probably not.
Broadband. Comes down in price by the month. O2, for example, offering its own mobile customers BB for £10. Some telco companies will do BB, LR (line rental) and CPS (calls) for as little as £14 per month.
Discount card – you have to pay for the privalge – minimum of £18 per year, in order to get discounts of 5% ? So, if your combined utility bill for the year was £1000 then 5% discount = £50. But, take away the £18 which was charged for the privaledge then the true discount would be £32. Still far less than the £103.50 offered by Npower , or for that matter £88 offered by British Gas.
Telephone. Again, a market which changes by the month, however the devil is always in the detail with call charges, 0845, 0844, 0870 etc. Evening and weekend calls, UK Wide, is generally free with line rental now with most providers, and again as above some providers also include BB.
I could go on, my point is that we live in an ever changing world, but judging by all the smoke and mirrors generated by UU, I tend to think they are still living 3 years behind.
As a distributor, it may work but that would have to be equalled out against already having a full time job and some good factoring on how many sign-ups it would take to even break-even from the £100 or £200 (?) training fee initially involved.
Good points DJ seems like the bottom line is to keep checking what you’re paying compared with the other suppliers and switch as frequently as required. I also agreee that suppliers don’t make it easy to compare like with like and it’s therefore difficult unless you have a degree in maths to calculate any savings.
DJ, Dj, Dj………………………………
Learn about what they offer before you preach. The 5% cashback card is applied to everything they spend in partner stores such as M&S, Argos, Comet, etc etc etc!! You get cash back on everything after the first 20 pounds which covers the monthly admin cost.
Second, how can people move about the market place when THEY ARE LOCKED UP in contracts! UW never put you in one so you are free to move whenever you like, HOWEVER, 96% of thier customer dont!!
Thats great because I am about to be one of the 4%…
Great customer service… ha ha
Apparently they are always right and I am wrong… bless them!
Strangely enough charges seem to appear from every angle, and agreed prices have a habit of rising… but of course it is ‘all in the small print’… apparently!
Oh, for some reason they are not able to use a phone once you join them…
I agree with you that the vast majority of UW distributors do not have any expertise in internet marketing. Out of interest, how would you do it?
Good question Chris and the answer although simple would take a while to explain. I may start a series of posts on the topic if enough people are interested even though that’s not the topic of this Blog.
I was thinking of becoming a distributor, but after reading some of these eye opening comments………
Dave…If you sign up 10 customers a week, you’ll be adding £200 of residual income to your business each month. After doing this for a year, assuming you’ve averaged ten customers a week, you will have residual income in the region of £2,400 (based on %5 of an average £1oo pm bill per customer).
Now that’s without the commission on sign up, if you take that into account you’ll have earned over £10,000 in sign up commission! How awesome does that sound?
Now stop, step back, and think….YES, it is possible, but do you honestly think you can sign up 520 NEW customers in this day and age, im mean how hard is it to compare prices? People simply want to save money and unfortunate UW will not, but you will get all the bills in one!
You will have to put some serious leg work in to hit these numbers, you are looking at selling to thousands of people to even get close to converting to 520 customers.
However, you may get lucky
Also, when I say THOUSANDS of people, i don’t mean create a web site and sit back and hope for millions of unique hits a day! How will people find your site when there are soooooo many sites the same?
Do you know anything about SEO, AdWords ect?
NOT EASY to get a highly ranked page and even you manage to design the slickest site known to man you then you have to convert the hits to sales!
The thousands I mentioned was in regards to Door to door, cold calling, leaflets, telemarketing, attend networking groups!
You will need to devise a marketing strategy, which will cost a lot of money if done correctly.
How many people do you have on your facebook account? lets say 520, do you think any of them would change from their current suppliers to pay potentially more money simply because you recommend them?
It would be hard even if UW were guaranteed to save them money!
Good luck