Installing charging stations at your hotel, retail store, or residence is both essential and a significant investment that requires a clear return on investment. To make this worthwhile, you need a high frequency of use — from regular users and guests. But how can you ensure high usage and effectively encourage visitors to charge their EVs at your location?

One effective way is to offer €5, $5, or £5 gift vouchers to encourage EV driver guests to charge, shop, stay, or sleep at your location. This is now possible with the Saascharge Web QR Contactless Method, which was developed in 2021 and has since been upgraded to include a voucher feature. It has proven effective in guest parking scenarios.

“The key to making your network busy is to engage with consumers—that’s what gift vouchers can achieve.”

How does it work?

The voucher solution is based on the Web QR access method and the Pre-Pay portfolio allowing you to set the desired value of your vouchers. The process is simple:

• Create Gift Vouchers like €5, £10, or $20.
• Generate digital or printable voucher lists.
• Distribute vouchers to hotels, residences, or companies.
• Engage with EV drivers to enhance loyalty and increase usage.

The EV driver simply scans a QR code. They are directed to a webpage where they can enter the voucher code. Next, they add a payment method, such as a credit card, Google Pay, or Apple Pay.

Costs and Benefits of Offering EV Charging Vouchers

An EV charging voucher represents a monetary value that can be factored into your charging prices. Typically, the voucher value accounts for 20% of an average charging transaction (e.g., a $5 voucher for a $25 transaction). While this might reduce your charging profit, the overall business benefits are substantial:

• Attract new customers: Draw EV drivers to your location and encourage them to shop, dine, or stay while their car charges. Charging can take hours, providing ample opportunity for them to engage with your business.
• Increase usage: Incentives encourage EV drivers to choose their location over others or charge at home.
• Enhance service offerings: EV charging is becoming a must-have amenity for hotels, shopping malls, and businesses, improving the overall customer experience.
• Boost customer loyalty: Offering vouchers shows appreciation for your customers, encouraging them to return.

Will Vouchers Discourage EV Drivers From Registering to Your Network?

Not at all. Gift vouchers can be offered to both guests and regular customers using, for example, a Smartphone app. Rather than discouraging registration, vouchers act as an incentive for EV drivers to join your network. Registered users shall benefit from better pricing and additional rewards, further encouraging loyalty.

What’s Next? Gift Vouchers as a Growth Enabler

Ultimately, the goal is to maximize usage of your charging stations. Gift vouchers help drive more transactions, in addition to regular EV driver activity (subscribers) and users coming via eRoaming agreements or payment terminals.

In summary, engaging with consumers through gift vouchers is a proven way to keep your charging network busy and profitable. Start today!

Public charging networks are growing all over the world but are they competitive? Of course, all marketing managers will surely promote the performance of charging station with great power output, coverage with number of charging points, great services with smartphone applications and 24/7 hotline. Despite all these parameters, Pricing is often underestimated as if EV drivers should be thankful to have access to public charging stations. This is often the case when new markets are opening but will quickly change when competition arise. Thankfully, this is already happening in multiple eMobility markets. The upcoming interconnection of charging station networks thanks to eRoaming solutions do offer access to thousands of public charging points all over Europe. When you get access to almost the same product, pricing become highly strategical! So, what should be the right price?

Let’s first try to understand the elements to determine a charging price:

1. Costs: Energy, service and infrastructure
2. Offer and Demand: Driver readiness to pay for charging
3. Strategy: Competition, tactics and goals

What are the cost of public charging?

The cost of public charging is depending of all elements needed for a driver to stop and charge a car. In a gasoline station we would calculate the brute price of oil, refinery costs and finally different taxes and a margin to cover all running costs (location, salaries, infrastructure and payment system…).

In the electricity world, we don’t have to refine the product, we just have to deliver it with the right power and that depends of the infrastructure and the way we can access it. The biggest difference with gazonline is that public EV charging networks are organised around a “Service provider” structure which makes them closer to Mobile operators than a gaz station model.

Here is a representation of the structure and all elements that you have to take into account to run a public charging network:

Next to these, you have to take into account all commercialisation costs to acquire and manage drivers and owners of charging stations and of course the electricity costs.

Offer and demand: Driver readiness to pay?

Despite a growing eMobility service provider competition with a variety of prices, the biggest benchmark remains the retail price of electricity. Basically, what drivers are paying at home to charge a car. This is rather unusual in comparison to the gasoline world and makes Drivers less dependent to public charging network. At least for a radius of 150 to 500 km where customer have to charge a car and may more interested about the location, ease of use (access, payment) and charging time (power output) rather than the price. It means that they are quality oriented but not ready to pay fantasy prices and would compare eMobility provider offers.

Strategy: How do you want to charge your customers?

The concept and way of billing is strategical. The objective is to gain, retain and finance Charging station investors. We can already see 2 major pricing concepts and various pricing types.

Pricing concepts:

1. Per station-based pricing

The benefit of this model is that owners of charging stations can define price schemes according to their needs. For example, a low pricing policy, to attract customers for other services (e.g. restaurant, coffee clients…) or a progressive pricing per minute to encourage drivers to free up charging stations for the next driver. The weakness is that it does generate a multitude of prices which can only be checked over a smart phone application. We can compare this pricing concept with the gas station model where prices can be openly set. There are however 3 massive differences:

• 1^st Gas station prices are clearly indicated on the facilities. You do not have to open a smartphone application to check prices
• 2^nd Way of billing per litre or gallon is always the same. There is no multiplicity of type of pricing such as minimum amount, setup or per minute billing.
• 3^rd price disparity is very low. eMobility drivers have to count with charging prices with differences of almost single to double in a radius of a few miles.

2. Network pricing

Country with Zones:

In summary, the difference of both prices is about the logic of pricing calculation from the Driver or from the Charging Station. I tend to prefer the pricing approach from the Driver which is the customer of these networks. 

Billing plan types:

Billing plan types are about the way drivers can be billed for charging transactions. There are a lot of possibilities depending on system capabilities, regulation and goals.

All these prices have a reason to exist. However, the best way could be a mix of all these pricing types. For examples, this charging plan that I have seen recently in the US:
– Setup to give access to the charger
– Per kW until the car is charged
– Per minute for all remaining time after completion of the charging process