The Challenges
In today’s competitive mobile market reducing customer churn and ensuring that customers renew their mobile contracts is considered to be vital to maintaining ACN’s profitability.
Traditionally ACN used Direct Mail to communicate with customers for contract renewals and upgrade offers. The cost of communication was relatively high and the campaign results were difficult to measure and report on accurately.
Cameron Macleod, ACN’s Product Portfolio Manager for Mobile, was sure that ACN could improve response rates to campaigns by using mobile communications to proactively reach out to customers.
ACN wanted to increase its contract renewal rate on mobile services; upsell new upgrade offers to improve ARPU; whilst reducing marketing costs and improving data analytics.
The Solution
ACN chose to work with Engage Hub to integrate rich media mobile messaging into their con- tract renewal campaigns, with the key objectives of improving response rates, driving down retention costs and providing a means of tracking communication success.
A Three Phased Approach to Embedding Mobile Engagement
Phase One: Direct Mail First
The first phase built on ACN’s traditional marketing approach by sending a direct mail first, supplemented by follow-up SMS communications. As a result of tracking the delivery rates of the SMS campaign it was revealed that the average delivery rate for both sends was very high at 86%. ACN also reported that the SMS broadcasts had produced an uplift of 5% over using direct mail alone.
Phase Two: SMS Only
The second phase targeted customers nearing the end of their contract via SMS, notifying them of their upgrade options, but this time taking out the direct mail element. Again, customers had the options to call ACN directly or reply to the SMS broadcast to request an email with the ability to upgrade online. This SMS send resulted in 87% of calls turning into upgrades, the requested email send resulted in 8% of upgrades being made online and 63% of recipients upgrading over the phone.
Phase Three: Split Campaign
Phase three was a split campaign. Group A were sent a direct mail initially and were then sent a follow-up SMS if the direct mail alone had not triggered a response. Group B received the SMS initially and received a follow-up direct mail if the SMS had not provoked a response.
Results showed that the delivery rate for SMS was consistent for each campaign whereas Direct Mail success changed significantly. The results suggested that the SMS send in Group A may have acted as a reminder to the customer that a direct mail had been received and that the customer then revisited it for details on how to renew.
The Result
The results of the campaigns showed that combining mobile messaging with traditional direct mail has significantly increased customer responses, and most importantly, con- tract renewals. What’s more, the Product Portfolio team now have solid data analytics by which they can measure their success.