This Time its Personal

Guy Talmi, Senior Marketing Director of targeted marketing company Pontis, considers ways in which mobile operators can benefit from fine-tuning their marketing processes and adopting a more targeted approach by aggressively marketing highly tailored offerings.

The notoriously competitive and rapidly-evolving market for telecoms services is bringing marketers within this sector new and ever-escalating challenges, but also tremendous opportunities.
Managing a digital product and service portfolio that often spans thousands of items, with the current shift towards delivering converged offerings of broadband, mobile and entertainment services, now means that mobile, cable, VoIP and IPTV operators are facing a very complex environment, while fighting even harder to drive new revenues from existing customers and reach new customers.
In the saturated mobile space, operators struggle with high customer churn and continuous price erosion as new low-rate operators and MVNOs enter the market. Customer acquisition costs are high and retention is a top priority in a market characterised by low levels of product differentiation where customers will simply shop around for the best deal.
Combine this competitive landscape with the added complexity of the products on offer - more products are being introduced to market at an ever-increasing rate through a variety of different channels to users with varying subscription types and devices and the scale of the challenge for marketers within this sector is evident.

One-size-fits-all Marketing
However, the traditional mass-marketing one-size-fits-all approach is no longer sustainable in this environment. Services and bundles of products are offered with limited flexibility in terms of customisation or personalisation and, as such, many of the messages delivered will fail to convert a user to adopt a new service or purchase a new content item.
Mobile advertising, for example, has generated huge hype and is now being touted as a solution for driving revenue from third party advertisers through personalised messages or access to content such as the offer of free downloads. Yet, such techniques represent a missed opportunity and will deliver a lower ROI than is potentially possible if they are poorly targeted, mass communicated, or delivered at the wrong time.
The key challenge for all marketers in this sector if they are to survive and thrive in this environment is to leverage their strengths and to target the right customer at the right time with exactly the right proposition.

The personal approach
In this sense, the industry needs to follow the example set by online service providers who have long maximised the potential of the personal approach, with interactive suggestions linked exactly to the users preferences and real-time behaviour (e.g browsing or purchasing). Amazon-like recommendations based on buying patterns can be used by operators to promote a  cross-sell of related content items, or to use up-sell techniques in order to encourage customers to purchase additional content, such as music bundles, all based on the lifestyle characteristics of a carefully segmented group of customers.
Operators now need to adopt these more sophisticated techniques through the use of marketing delivery platforms to address specific, well-defined customer segments with relevant offers. The arrival of new solutions, specifically designed for marketers within this sector, is now providing the capability for them to do this, by monitoring usage of services or products in real-time to enable behavioural-based targeting. This is approach that, until now, has simply not been possible.
A marketing delivery platform provides telco marketers with an end-to-end design-execute-measure environment to deliver real-time targeted and personalised marketing offers. This ties together marketing design, online sales, dynamic communications and product offer processes, effectively automating the marketing IT. Such systems allow products to be configured dynamically (including special terms) and to be communicated in real time to customers, based on their preferences, history and current usage.
This may seem logical, but in reality, it marks a significant step forward in an industry hampered by silo-based thinking, lack of flexibility across the various operators departments, and a non-systematic, non-automated approach to targeting customers.

Improving ARPU in the real world
This personalised approach to communicating with the customer has been proven to deliver compelling results. Recently, a cable operator recognised that its key competitive advantage was the delivery of video on demand (VoD), yet many subscribers were failing to purchase this premium content. Through targeted promotions to different consumer categories, the operator was able to convert users who had never bought content in the past, and by analysing relationships between content categories, was able to design cross-sell offers that leveraged purchases from one category to promote purchases in another relevant category. This not only drove VOD subscribers to pay for premium movies, but also introduced customers to new categories; increasing overall sales in the promoted categories by 42% over a nine-month period.
Achieving these results means that operators must fine tune their processes and adopt a more targeted approach by aggressively marketing highly-tailored offerings. This is the strategy that operators will need to embrace if they are to out-perform the competition and improve levels of customer retention and profitability.