Duke Energy
Enterprise communications at scale, across 15+ programs, dozens of jurisdictions, and audiences from households to trade allies.
Vibe Check
One brand had to speak clearly across 15+ enterprise programs, spanning customer marketing, operational communications, energy education, and product messaging for residential customers, small businesses, and trade allies at once. The stakes weren’t abstract: campaigns reached hundreds of thousands of customers per send, across multiple jurisdictions with different regulatory requirements. A technically accurate message that didn’t land with the right audience wasn’t just weak copy. It was a missed compliance window, a confused customer, or a program that underperformed at scale.
The assumption worth questioning going in: that clarity meant simplification, stripping out the technical and regulatory detail to make things “easier.” That assumption turned out to be wrong, and correcting it shaped everything that followed.
The Read
Different audiences needed different entry points into the same underlying information. Residential customers wanted to know what a program meant for their bill and their household. Trade allies and SMB audiences wanted operational specifics: what to do, by when, with what tools. Regulatory and technical detail mattered to all of them, but only as evidence for a decision they were already trying to make, not as the opening argument.
The insight that changed the approach: technical accuracy and customer clarity weren’t in tension. The problem wasn’t too much technical information. It was technical information presented in the wrong order.
Brand Direction
The call: build every message around the customer’s actual question first, then use technical and regulatory information as supporting evidence, never as the opener. This meant adapting message hierarchy and framing by audience, channel, and stage of the customer journey, rather than running one master message through every channel unchanged.
This wasn’t always the path of least resistance internally. On the Residential Outdoor Lighting web experience, a more catalog-first approach was preferred by some stakeholders: send customers straight into product options. The bet was that customers needed enough context to understand the offering and why it mattered before being asked to browse. That meant the case for preserving that orientation layer had to be made and defended, not just executed.
The Build
Messaging frameworks, templates, and reusable content systems were built to keep 15+ programs consistent without becoming formulaic. Without shared infrastructure, message quality would have depended entirely on which writer touched which program that week. Execution spanned email, web, landing pages, direct mail, paid and organic social, video, transactional/service communications, and storm communications.
This required direct coordination with design, legal, compliance, product managers, and business teams on every program: not as a downstream reviewer, but as the person translating requirements from each of those functions into a single coherent customer message. Published examples of the finished work include long-form customer education pieces like “Beyond the Gas Pump” and “Why does your energy use change in summer?”, built to carry technical accuracy without losing the audience.
Field Test
Campaign performance and A/B testing were used on an ongoing basis to refine subject lines, segmentation, and message hierarchy for future sends. This wasn’t a one-time launch, it was a live system that kept adjusting.
Results, at the scale they were reported to me as a contractor on these programs:
472K+
Recipients on the largest single enterprise send, at a 52.74% open rate and 1.64% CTR
71.23%
Open rate on clean-energy/customer education sends to 186K+ customers, 1.91% CTR
23.45%
CTR on targeted SMB webinar communications, meaningfully above the campaign average
3.66%
CTR (up to) across B2B trade-ally campaigns reaching 3,168 trade allies
15+
Enterprise programs supported concurrently across residential and commercial audiences
What This Proves
The ability to hold technical accuracy and audience clarity at the same time, defend a customer-first structure against internal pressure to simplify or lead with product, and coordinate across legal, compliance, design, and business stakeholders without losing the thread of what the customer actually needed to hear. This is judgment under real constraint, at enterprise scale, not just copywriting.
