How Enpal Slashed Its CPL and Made Influencer Marketing Competitive With Paid Ads

About Enpal: Germany's Leading Solar and Heat Pump Provider

Enpal was founded in 2017 and has since become the market leader for solar panels and heat pumps in Germany. With over 120,000 energy systems installed, the Berlin-based greentech company offers homeowners a one-stop solution for the energy transition.

The Challenge: Selling a €20,000–€40,000 Product Through Influencer Marketing

Most influencer marketing playbooks were written with impulse purchases in mind. An energy drink, a protein bar, a piece of clothing. Products where a single swipe-up can drive a conversion.

Enpal is a completely different beast. Solar and heat pump packages run between €20,000 and €40,000. Nobody makes that decision alone, and nobody makes it on a whim. On average, it takes about a month from the first consultation call to a signed contract. So direct conversion was never the goal. The whole point of influencer marketing at Enpal is lead generation: getting potential customers into the sales funnel so the sales team can take it from there.

Florian Folger, Enpal's Head of Influencer Marketing, summed it up well: "The buying process, the decision itself, it just takes a really, really long time. A single piece of content is never going to give you a reliable read on performance."

The Initial Approach: YouTube, and Why It Fell Short

In 2025, Enpal put 83% of its influencer marketing budget into YouTube. The logic made sense: YouTube allows for niche audience targeting, and Florian found himself testing unusual channels like model trains and lawn care, because their audiences skew toward older men who use a lot of electricity and are a natural fit for solar.

The problem? Because Enpal can't just ship the product to a creator, the content ended up being generic by default. Standard 90-second mid-roll integrations that rattled off USPs without any real product experience behind them. The result was high wasted reach, a weak click-through rate, and a CPL that just didn't work for Enpal.

Meanwhile, they were testing Instagram on the side. The numbers were clear: Instagram drove 29% of total leads while accounting for only 17% of spend.

The Strategic Shift: A Tight Creator Circle, Real Customers, Long-Term Partnerships

For 2026, Enpal overhauled its approach entirely. Out with the broad YouTube scale-up, in with a focused group of Instagram creator partners, with one defining requirement: the creators had to be actual Enpal customers.

The path to that starts with a test campaign. Creators are first put through the regular sales process just like any other customer, assigned to an Enpal advisor, walked through the full consultation, and then they decide for themselves whether they want to buy the system. Most do. As Florian put it: "Most creators were already so excited that they just said: yeah, we're buying it."

Creators who hit the CPL benchmarks during the test phase get invited into a year-long partnership.

Twelve months. Layered content. Rather than cramming every USP into a single story, Enpal builds the narrative piece by piece: the installation day, the first kilowatts produced, charging an EV for free, tracking energy independence in the app, busting winter myths about solar performance. Briefs are built to be interactive, with community polls and Q&As that feed directly into the next content piece. Timing is intentional too, with posts spaced two to three weeks apart to keep the audience from tuning out.

And as the partnership matures, creators get more creative freedom. Long-term partners earn more latitude because both sides know what needs to be legally watertight, and because creators know their audience better than anyone.

Creator Discovery With Kolsquare

To find the right partners, Florian relies on Kolsquare, formerly known as Story Clash. Enpal's creator requirements are unusually specific. Homeownership is the biggest filter: there's no point working with a great DIY channel if the person doesn't have a roof to put panels on. That dramatically shrinks the creator pool, which makes the quality of the vetting process even more critical.

Through Kolsquare, Florian analyzes competitor brands in similar price brackets to see which creators are already active in that space. Posting frequency and brand collaboration history are all visible, which speeds up the process of figuring out whether a creator is actually a good fit.

"Kolsquare gives me access to the data I need to make smarter calls on creator selection. I can see who's already active in our space, how often they post, which brands they work with. It takes a lot of the guesswork out of discovery," comments Florian Folger, Head of Influencer Marketing, Enpal

The Results

The strategy shift is delivering measurable impact:

• CPL cut in half compared to 2025
• 30% more leads in Q1 2026 than in all five months of influencer marketing activity in 2025 combined
• Click-through rate more than doubled
• CPM down, conversion rate up 23%
• Influencer marketing now goes head-to-head with paid ads on CPL and outperforms them on close rates further down the funnel

Enpal is currently working with 12 annual creator partners, plus additional creators in test and awareness campaigns, around 19 to 20 creators total in Q1 2026.

The Takeaway for High-Ticket Influencer Marketing

Florian's conclusion: more touchpoints, more trust. Educating people on your USPs just isn't enough on its own. What actually works is real product experience, with creators who have lived the journey from installation day to first sunny afternoon making it visible.

"Only when creators genuinely believe in the product and stand behind it can they actually sell it convincingly."

Enpal has proven that influencer marketing can work for high-ticket, complex products with long decision cycles, as long as the strategy is built around authenticity, long-term partnerships, and data-driven creator selection.

See how Kolsquare helps your team find the right creator partners. Book a demo today.