Volume vs personalisation: what works?
Service providers are talking up careful targeting and personalisation while brands are still preoccupied by scale and reach. Should there be a difference between targeting and personalisation of operators’ services – voice, data and content – from third party promotions? BKI Media doesn’t think so, despite the apparent chasm between the two opposing views.
| Leave a Comment September 8th, 2008
Building A Synchronized Set of Prepaid Offers
This is the third and final post in a series of three where we revealed how we went about impacting prepaid behavior in our work with one of the largest prepaid operators in the world.
The following are the main behavior indicators we take into account when building a synchronized set of offers to different segments. To see how we impacted each please see the before and after graphs in How Do We Impact Prepaid Behavior?
> The time period that goes by between top ups – the shorter the period is means the subscriber is more active.
> The time that goes by from reaching a zero balance until the next top up is even more important, because each day that goes by without talking, means the subscriber could be churning. This resonating silence is referred to as a ‘dormant subscriber’.
> The third factor is the date of the last call, or days from the last call. This is extremely important because since there is no contract, there is no proactive activity involved in case the subscriber wants to churn like calling the operator to terminate service. That is the main reason why so many prepaid subscribers become dormant, and why this phenomenon is often referred to as ‘passive churn’.
| Leave a Comment August 11th, 2008
How Do We Impact Prepaid Behavior?
In our first post on impacting prepaid behavior we demonstrated how we increased usage within a “mid–ARPU” prepaid segment, using a multi-stage marketing program. What is the strategic impact we achieved? First let us take a look at the before and after status of each phenomenon and then we will explain how we did it.
As we can see in the below graph showing last call date distribution (Phenomenon 1) a subscriber that didn’t talk for 30 days is considered dormant. As a result of our targeted marketing program we managed to reduce the time frame from the last call made (a shift from the right to the left on the graph), where subscribers actually remained active over time. This is based on a three month period that began in January 2008, and three months later we checked how many were still active. So for example, subscribers from day 30 to day 60 in the graph made their last call in March, and subscribers from 61 to 90 made their last call in February. What we managed to do is bring about a shift where more subscribers remained active over time or to put it another way – kept talking!
| Leave a Comment August 3rd, 2008
Impacting Prepaid Behavior To Increase Revenues
The big race to retain customers and maintain their level of usage has proven to be extremely challenging in the prepaid sector. Generic characteristics of this service, lack of users’ data and minimal differentiation bring marketing challenges to new heights.
This post is about the best way to overcome these obstacles and go about impacting subscriber behavior in one of the most lucrative revenue sectors for mobile operators - the prepaid sector that is comprised of over 1 bln subscribers worldwide. The following insight is based on our activity with one of the largest prepaid operators in the world.
Our first challenge with this operator was to increase usage within a “mid–ARPU” prepaid segment. Experience has taught us that the best way to impact behavior in this segment is to integrate real time and immediate response tactics into all marketing activities. Here is a real life sample of how we went about increasing top up recharges and voice usage for subscribers with an average top up amount of lower than €10.
| 4 Comments July 7th, 2008
The Power Of Personalized Multi Step Marketing
The traditional mass-marketing “one-size-fits-all” approach is no longer sustainable in today’s competitive environment. Services and bundles of products being offered leave a lot to be desired when it comes to customization and personalization. This lack of flexibility is the main reason why many of the messages and promotions delivered fail to convert a user to adopt a new service or purchase a new content item.
The key challenge for all marketers in this sector, if they are to thrive in this environment, is to employ a multi-step approach that maximizes relevance for each customer through the dynamic adaptation of personalized marketing offers.
| Leave a Comment June 23rd, 2008
Mobile Marketing: Tremendous Potential For Growth
The Washington Post has featured a report, Mobile Marketing Crowd Says Improvements Must Be Made For Growth To Happen showing how much the industry wants to embrace mobile marketing:
A survey conducted at the Mobile Marketing Association’s Mobile Marketing Forum this week in New York quizzed advertising agencies, content providers, aggregators, carriers and others about the space to understand from an insider’s view of what is going on in the industry.
Here are results that are relevant for wireless operators:
– 31 percent of wireless operators reported that they are looking for more information from the mobile ecosystem on the strategies used for executing mobile marketing campaigns.
– 23 percent of wireless operators said they felt that content customization and personalization are the key to increasing mobile marketing.
| Leave a Comment April 16th, 2008
All Communication to Mobile Users Should Be Personalized
According to the Washington Post’s Advertising Still Annoying, Text The Best Format, “most types of mobile advertising are still annoying to a sufficient amount of people to engender caution”, which is based on the latest report by Forrester. In a similar survey commissioned by Pontis, “70% of mobile phone users consider the marketing offers they receive to be irrelevant and 64% confess to being annoyed by them”.
Of course this mass infiltration of the mobile user’s private space is intrusive and unwelcome, mostly because the systems in place today are not sophisticated enough to be able to create a truly personalized approach based on multiple user and usage criteria.
| Leave a Comment March 16th, 2008
Gaming is new ball game for operators
Gaming can be a hugely powerful marketing tool for mobile service providers, but so far it has been used with mixed success. BKI Media believes there is a lot of confused thinking on the subject and here looks at who got it right, who got it wrong and lessons learned.
T-Mobile has been a pioneer of in-game mobile advertising since 2005 and is creative in using gaming as a way of publicising its own new tariffs and promotions.
The first example was during the run-up to and aftermath of the soccer World Cup in 2006. T-Mobile launched The Beautiful Game (a reference to football legend Pelé’s autobiography). T-Mobile’s game showed fans undressing and streaking across the football pitch – another 1970’s craze. The simplicity of the game was remarkable, the in-house advertising creative was original and it attracted a lot of interest in the media. Yet during the world’s biggest football event in the host nation, the uptake and use of the game remained low.
| Leave a Comment January 9th, 2008
The Impact of Real Time Promotions in Digital Service Offerings
Notice how everything today is happening at an accelerated pace? That’s how your customers want to get what they need from you – ASAP. That means tighter delivery cycles and the ability to provide a multitude of different deliverables through numerous channels. Which in plain English means being able to deliver digital service offerings in real time. So the real question is, are your systems up to the task? Read on to find out.
Digital content and data services are the expected business growth drivers of Telecom operators. But this type of content is very different from the traditional communication services. These products are much more diversified, highly related to customers’ lifestyle, can have multiple cross-media relationships (e.g. song, ring-tone, real-tone, performer picture, latest gossip, latest video clip, other songs from the same album, link to concerts schedule, etc.), have a relatively easily identified target audience, and most have a relatively short lifetime (e.g. related to a specific event, hit parade, location, etc.).
| Leave a Comment December 11th, 2007
Long Tail, Short Head: unprecedented cross-selling
Everyone talks about The Long Tail, but what is it, where did it come from and how does it apply to digital marketing? The phrase was coined by Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired in an article published in that magazine in October 2004. It made a huge impression immediately and Mr Anderson subsequently expanded his theory into a book, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More.
The theory refutes the long-held wisdom of the 80/20 rule whose premise is that 80% of sales would be made on the 20% of the inventory. The arrival of the Internet as a mass medium has proven this wrong. Amazon says 50% of its total sales come from a wide range of items that only sell once a month, while eBay’s staggering success came from auctioning obscure items.
| Leave a Comment December 3rd, 2007
The Secret To Selecting Products For Promotions
There are so many considerations to take into account when selecting products for promotions. If you leave out external factors such as special events, business goals, wallet share or customer propensity to buy, selecting the right product may be driven by many product related considerations. What we want to share with you in this post are the more important aspects that need to be taken into consideration when planning promotions, and then we will provide an actual method for pulling this off. Here’s what you need to think about before you get started:
Revenue / revenue share / margin – the associated product sales revenue that is kept by the service provider. A private case of revenue share is when the product is fully owned by the service provider and all promotion ideas are subjected solely to its consideration.
Margin or profitability – the amount of revenue that is left after the direct operational expenses related to the product.
| Leave a Comment
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