Aarhus Vand goes one foot deeper

Since 1872, Aarhus Vand has been paving the way to secure the future of healthy living through clean water. With internationally recognised work on the entire water cycle, Aarhus Vand has rethought the way in which the potential of water is realised for the benefit of the climate and and everyone living on the planet.

A large part of the organization’s work is done with the municipality of Aarhus, to adapt Aarhus to a changing climate, including by helping landowners to separate rainwater from grey water on their properties. There was a need to adjust Aarhus Vand’s customer experience, so that landowners would feel well-informed about the complex process involved when drainage lines are being separated, both in the roads and on their properties.

In 2021, Knowit Experience was given the screw driver to Aarhus Vand’s communication flow, which had up until then been based on a combination of traditional snail mail, cold calling, and Outlook e-mails. With the goal of an improved digital customer experience, Aarhus Vand requested optimization of its communication to landowners by not exposing recipients to information that was not relevant for their area. Thus, it became our job to help Aarhus Vand in transforming its one-size-fits-all access to communication, and reduce a lot of the manual work related to sending e-mails and delivering physical mail to the citizens’ mailboxes – and providing maps and other relevant attachments to each person.

The first step towards personalized digital communication was a workshop with Aarhus Vand. Through audits, continuous dialogue, and finetuning, we found a solution that could truly put the recipient at the center and ensure that the right information was provided to the right person at the right time – something that in the digital world is referred to as marketing automation. In our collaboration with Aarhus Vand, we delivered an automation solution that encompassed the entire digital communication platform. It has not only saved time and money for Aarhus Vand, but also given the organization the possibility to tailor its communication to each specific geographic area.

With marketing automation, Aarhus Vand has built and designed a new e-mail flow that provides insight into how much information each customer has received – click by click. By tracking which e-mails a landowner has received, opened, and clicked on links in, Aarhus Vand can get an idea of how far into the process a customer have gotten, and provide personalized services to the customers who need it. The automation flow also ensures that an automatic reminder is sent to anyone who has not opened an e-mail within fourteen days of receipt – to ensure that everyone has read information that is important to them. Thus, citizens get information based on their interactions with earlier e-mails.

As part of the flow, we also delivered a landing page on aarhusvand.dk, which the e-mail recipients are continually invited to visit through e-mails and customer dialogues. In “My Sewer,” house owners can use a search function to find important information in their area, at the time that is relevant for them. The new landing page has not only made things simpler and more convenient for individual citizens – for Aarhus Vand, “My Sewer” and the search function have decreased the need for manual work in preparing communication with customers. Here too, Aarhus Vand can track each customer’s journey based on what the person has read, allowing the organization to be more proactive and respond to customer queries before they arise. This has been highly appreciated by the landowners in Aarhus.

The goal of improving the digital customer experience created a complex task for Aarhus Vand. However, the most important aspect was that landowners would read the e-mails that they were sent. And while not that much water has passed through Aarhus Vand’s new automation pipeline, the results thus far indicate a clear increase in involvement since its implementation. In particular, the average e-mail opening rate of over 80%, with 44.3% on average clicking on one or more link in each e-mail, is a clear indication that landowners find the information in the e-mails relevant.

The e-mail flow has become like a life vest for landowners, protecting them from drowning in irrelevant information. The tailored communication ensures that they are up-to-date regarding what is happening in their area, and thus do not lose track of things during the course of a project. Aarhus Vand’s new marketing automation solution is thus beneficial, not only for the organization and the landowners in the area, but also to help Aarhus deal with climate change in the future – a mission we are happy to have been part of.