Let me make this concrete for
you with three examples that we did in sales partnerships with TerraPass.
The first was with Ford Motor Company.
The insight we had was that when somebody is buying a car, they're already thinking
about options and additional accessories that they might buy to go with the car.
What if, at the point of purchase,
we could offer a TerraPass to go alongside a new vehicle?
And the benefit proposition would be that TerraPass
mitigates the environmental impact of owning that vehicle.
Now, we thought, maybe this would be particularly attractive to those who were
buying cars that have relatively poor fuel economy, or
maybe it would be appropriate for those who were hesitant to even own a car.
But if they could get a TerraPass with that car,
it would mitigate an objection to owning the car.
And we therefore thought that might be quite attractive to either car dealers or
the automobile manufacturers.
In fact, we were able to establish a partnership with Ford Motor Company
called Green Miles.
And the program behind, the idea behind that program
was that someone buying a Ford automobile could buy a TerraPass, and
TerraPass would mitigate the environmental impact of driving that car.
And as part of that exchange, TerraPass would share some of the revenue
from the TerraPass purchase with Ford, and Ford would provide the email address and
customer information of their customer, and TerraPass could then have
access to that customer for the lifetime of the relationship with the customer.
So that was one example of a partnership.
A second example was a deal that we did with Expedia.
Expedia is a travel retailer.
It sells airline tickets, hotel rooms, that sort of thing.
The idea behind the Expedia deal was that during the checkout sequence,
after someone had purchased an airline ticket,
they would be offered the possibility of purchasing a TerraPass
certificate that would mitigate the environmental impact of that flight.
So you would be buying enough environmental remediation to cover
the fossil fuel use of that flight, and that would be done during the check out
sequence on Expedia in the same place where Expedia offers you things like
airport packing or rental cars or theater tickets during the check-out sequence.
That partnership turned out to be fantastically successful for TerraPass.
I believe TerraPass acquired close to a million customers as a result of that
Expedia deal, and something like 2% of those who checked out
on Expedia after buying an airline ticket opted in to buy the TerraPass add-on.
So we acquired those customers as a result of that transaction.