8 Proven Marketing Tactics to Fill Community Solar Projects

In a maturing community solar market, the ability to reliably acquire and retain subscribers has become a defining driver of project success. For community solar developers, filling projects on time is no longer a downstream marketing function—it directly impacts project financing, interconnection timelines, and portfolio performance.

This playbook outlines eight proven tactics PowerMarket uses to consistently fill community solar projects on schedule and at predictable cost. The focus is not on channels in isolation, but on building an integrated enrollment system that aligns targeting, acquisition channels, incentives, and metrics under real-world constraints such as geography, eligibility, and finite enrollment windows.

The result is reduced execution risk, improved enrollment velocity, and greater confidence moving projects from construction to full subscription.

1. Choose the Right Channels
Community solar customer acquisition differs fundamentally from traditional consumer marketing. Projects are geographically constrained, eligibility varies by project, and enrollment windows are often finite. As a result, broad, generalized ad buys are inefficient and risky.

The most effective channels allow you to:

• Acquire customers at a predictable cost
• Adjust spend quickly as projects fill
• Scale across a portfolio

Rather than maximizing ad reach, the goal is predictable control over enrollment velocity and cost at the project level. Below is how we evaluate the primary acquisition channels.

Agents
Pros: Pay-for-performance pricing, speed, scalability
Cons: Compliance and reputational risks, difficulty targeting specific customer profiles such as LMI communities, scheduling, higher churn risk, minimal supply of agents
Cost: $$-$$$

Municipal & Community Partnerships
Pros: High trust, strong credibility, effective for local engagement
Cons: Long lead times, reliance on local buy‑in, limited LMI precision
Cost: $

Influencers
Pros: Can build trust within niche communities
Cons: Inconsistent performance, variable pricing, limited geotargeting
Cost: $$

Direct Mail
Pros: High geographic precision, strong responses from certain demographics, higher perceived trust than digital
Cons: Printing and postage costs, slower feedback loops, large upfront investment per send
Cost: $$–$$$

Digital Advertising
Pros: Fast to launch, scalable, measurable, rapid iteration
Cons: Wasted spend with broad targeting, setup and maintenance complexity, measurement complexity, minimum budgets depending on partner
Cost: $-$$$

There’s no such thing as the “best” channel. Rather, it’s about finding the right mix based on geography, project size, eligibility rules, budget, timeline, and internal capabilities, such as the knowledge, relationships, and tools any company has at their disposal.

A big part of this decision is having a strong understanding of your audience and what channels can reach them.

2. Target the Best Candidates for the Program
“Spray and pray” doesn’t work in community solar or in most industries with high product complexity, various eligibility requirements, and “low” market penetration.

Effective targeting requires clarity on both where and who you target, including:

• Underserved geographies with limited competition
• Regions with supportive clean energy policy
• Populations aligned with historical subscriber performance

Signals such as age, income, language preference, and housing type materially affect outcomes. At scale, this is where predictive modeling becomes essential, a key tactic we use at PowerMarket. By scoring households across hundreds or thousands of attributes, outreach can be prioritized toward those most likely to enroll, which reduces wasted spend and improves acquisition forecasts. I’ve written about our predictive modeling approach in more detail here, where we’ve seen top-scoring prospects up to 5x more likely to convert. Data-driven acquisition strategies have helped us reduce complexity and allocate spend with greater precision.

Once you determine the channel and audience, it’s critical to communicate with them in a way that resonates.

3. Enable Multiple Communication Channels
Inbox fatigue is real. Many prospective subscribers—especially LMI households—prefer faster, simpler communication, in part because they often already navigate complex paperwork across other assistance programs. We see consistently higher engagement when programs support:

• Email for education, documentation, and confirmations
• Texts for urgency (missing documents, promotions, deadlines)
• Phone outreach for complex questions

The goal is optionality. Meet customers on their preferred channels and measure both cost and return at each touchpoint. Each channel should be evaluated on:

• Cost to initiate contact
• TConversion impact
• Downstream revenue contribution

This enables a clear view of incremental value at scale.

4. Track Metrics to Optimize the Enrollment Engine
Metrics shouldn’t be about vanity or check-the-box reporting—they should exist to expose friction, cost, and inefficiency within the enrollment flow itself.

We rely on operational KPIs to identify where prospects drop off, how much effort conversion requires, and where improvements will have the greatest impact. These metrics inform real-time decisions around UI/UX, staffing, and outreach.

We closely track:

• Step-level completion rates: How many customers move from website visit to application start to application completion. We break this down further by individual application steps. This allows us to pinpoint exactly where chokepoints exist, such as due to confusing language, documentation requirements, or form design.
• Contacts per conversion: Number of outreach attempts required to convert. For example, conversion rates typically decline sharply after two calls, making further investment not worthwhile.
• Time to enroll: Duration from first interaction to completed subscription. Longer timelines often signal avoidable complexity.

These metrics directly inform website copy, design, staffing, outreach, and channel prioritization. In short, they help us make the enrollment process faster, simpler, and more cost-effective.

Once the enrollment engine is running efficiently, the next question becomes how to evaluate performance and allocate acquisition spend across projects and advertising channels.

5. Choose the Right Metrics for the Right Decisions
While operational metrics help optimize day-to-day execution, others serve different purposes and exist to diagnose performance after the fact. It’s important to have a clear view on the type of data you’re using and the purpose it serves.

That’s why we organize metrics along two dimensions:

1. By data type: leading vs. lagging indicators
2. By purpose: what decision the metric is meant to inform

Leading indicators are forward-looking and predictive. Lagging indicators are retrospective, which help evaluate past performance and outcomes.

Cost per click (CPC), for example, is often misused. If a channel delivers a $1 CPC and converts 1 in 500 visitors, customer acquisition cost (CAC) is $500—making CPC a lagging diagnostic for that campaign. Once that relationship is understood, CPC becomes a leading indicator. A $2 CPC immediately implies conversion rates must double to maintain CAC. This is important because, with the right audience targeting or acquisition partner, that increase in upfront cost can be rational and even desirable. If successful, you now have a CPC benchmark based on that specific channel to guide future decisions. This helps us decide whether a channel works and if it’s worth scaling.

When allocating spend, we prioritize different metrics based on our goals:

• Start-to-complete enrollment rate: Often reflects the operational burden placed on internal sales and support teams.
• Customer acquisition cost (CAC): Allows us to compare channels not just on cost, but on speed, scalability, and reliability.
• Churn rate: Helps us understand whether certain rate classes or acquisition sources require higher levels of ongoing replacement and reacquisition.

Notably, we rarely discuss customer lifetime value (CLV). While important in theory, CLV doesn’t translate cleanly from traditional, product-oriented ecommerce models. It aggregates too many variables—client, state, project structure, and regulatory context—making it difficult to generate accurate, actionable benchmarks. It often introduces false precision rather than better decisions.

6. Offer Enrollment Incentives, Especially for LMI Segments
LMI participation is expanding, and incentives play an outsized role in driving urgency and trust. LMI households are more likely to live paycheck to paycheck, and flexible, unrestricted incentives let participants spend money without the stigma sometimes associated with restricted benefit programs. This makes them especially valuable for covering essentials or unexpected expenses.

Research consistently shows that incentives:

• Increase conversion rates
• Shorten enrollment cycles
• Help projects meet deadlines

The structure of these benefits matter. Incentives must be clear, immediate, and simple to redeem. Complexity erodes trust.

On our platform, once eligibility is met, customers receive a redemption link and can choose how to receive their incentive: physical or digital debit card, ACH, PayPal, Venmo, or a gift card of their choice. Incentive data is stored in the customer profile and email history for transparency.

Since 2023, we’ve distributed over $200,000 annually in customer rewards on top of the monthly utility bill savings. Read more about the benefits of the platform we use, called Tremendous, and how it accomplishes our goals here.

7. Use Referral Programs Strategically
Referral programs work, but timing is everything.

Subscribers are most likely to refer others after experiencing real savings, making referrals best suited for:

• Churn replacement
• Filling any incomplete projects post‑interconnection

On one project, 135 subscribers enrolled through referrals—none before the project went live. Proof drives advocacy. Reviews further reinforce this fact.

8. Prioritize Reviews and Social Proof
Word of mouth consistently outperforms advertising. Reviews act as a force multiplier across every acquisition channel.

We focus on a small number of platforms, especially Google, where consumer trust is highest. Strong reviews reduce perceived risk, shorten sales cycles, and improve close rates because prospects build trust more quickly in your brand.

This impact should be measured. One way to do that is by adding reviews to your conversion pages and A/B testing traffic, which should almost always produce a conversion lift. When prospective subscribers see themselves reflected in the goals and concerns of current subscribers, hesitation drops and confidence increases.

Final Thoughts
For developers, the takeaway is straightforward: filling projects consistently requires the same rigor as developing them. Enrollment success is not a marketing afterthought. It’s an execution discipline.

Effective community solar customer acquisition is about building a system. Channels, targeting, incentives, and metrics must be intentionally designed to work together under real-world constraints.

That’s the role PowerMarket plays for our partners. We operate enrollment with the same ownership mindset developers bring to siting, permitting, and construction. The result is simple and measurable: projects move from construction to full subscription on schedule, with predictability and confidence.