Connecting with customers at the moment of truth | Lumata Insights

Real Time Marketing –Connecting with Customersat the Moment of Truth

R E A L - T I M E M A R K E T I N G

W H I T E P A P E R

© 2014 LUMATA All Rights Reserved

Today, consumers are facing an unprecedented level of 'noise' generated by marketing messages through offline, online and mobile channels. Organisations operating with traditional marketing tools and processes are challenged to 'cut through the noise'. Typical issues include:

1. Marketing messages being drowned out in the clutter of competing offers and messages

2. Customers are moving targets that cannot be captured in long campaign cycles

3. Business analytics fails to keep pace with customer events resulting in lost sales

4. Personalisation across micro-segments and individual customers is resource intensive.

Organisations must fundamentally alter their messaging strategies to stand out from the 'crowd' by employing 'Real-Time' Marketing approaches that deliver timely and relevant messages. This is especially true within the rapidly changing landscape in Telecoms, where Operators need to build lasting relationships 'one customer at a time' to achieve customer retention and ARPU growth objectives.

Telecom Operators, by virtue of their customer relationship on the mobile channel and device, have the unique ability to gauge context (time and location) and infer intent (profile and behaviour). This, in turn, enables them to reach and influence customers at the 'Moment of Truth' – when consumers are most likely to make a purchasing decision. Gone are the times when an Operator could make this happen by just 'segmenting' customers based on their past behaviour using business analytics tools.

Today, you have to delight customers by converting every real-time marketing 'moment' your customers present into a 'lasting impression'. This requires combining what you already know about every customer with what they are doing in real-time to generate the right message at the right moment.

In this white paper, we look at how you can combine behavioural analysis with marketing automation to support your marketing objectives around retention and revenue development.

White Paper | Real Time Marketing – Connecting with customers at the Moment of Truth2 © 2014 LUMATA All Rights Reserved

Lumata recommends implementing real-time marketing automation with the following four steps:-

© 2014 LUMATA All Rights Reserved

Step 1: Understanding Customer Behaviour

The best way to understand customer behaviour is by tracking the entire customer lifecycle journey and studying the key data points.

Once all the information pertaining to the customer is captured in the database, you can then extract the insights residing in the subscriber database to derive marketing 'clusters' based on customer behaviour and needs. This requires capturing all possible data sources right from transactional ‘Call Data Records’ to socio-demographics, device properties, location, network probes and lifecycle events that contribute towards developing a single view of your relationship with each subscriber. The key attributes that define each cluster thus form the 'targeting variables' for marketing campaigns. These are typically a combination of the various attributes that transcend beyond the traditional targeting variables such as age and gender.

For instance, a “Weekend data guzzler” segment of subscribers could be smartphone users with a very high data usage over weekends.

Step 2: Developing Target Customer Journeys

The next step is to develop customer journeys across the customer lifecycle driven by the marketing objectives. This journey is typically composed of various real-time trigger events which provide the best opportunity for a marketing intervention, for example a personalised offer. Triggers could include lifecycle events (e.g. activation, anniversary), behavioural events (e.g. drop in usage, offer acceptance) and location events (e.g. roaming).

For instance, a customer journey for the “Weekend data guzzler” segment might be to nudge them towards higher data usage during the week. Using real-time triggers such as the first data session during the week, you can respond with a limited-time data offer to incentivise the subscriber towards higher data consumption on weekdays. Further, each stage of the journey can be split into several micro-segments. For example, you can adjust the usage thresholds and data bonuses based on the ARPU and the tenure of the customer.

UNDERSTANDING CUSTOMERBEHAVIOR

DEVELOPING TARGET

CUSTOMER JOURNEYS

AUTOMATINGREAL TIME

CAMPAIGNSFOR EACH JOURNEY

REVIEW &OPTIMIZE

White Paper | Real Time Marketing – Connecting with customers at the Moment of Truth3

Step 4: Review Optimize

Step 3: Automating Real- Time Campaigns For Each Journey

Once all the customer journeys are defined, it is essential to configure and automate them so messages can be 'triggered' instantly at the 'moment of truth'. This configuration typically involves several targeting variables, prediction scores, real-time trigger events and personalised actions to define the right trigger moments.

Targeting criteria may need to be changed on a daily basis (in-life), so you do not miss out on customers who qualify after a campaign has started. Examples of 'triggered actions' include notification messages prompting participation in a campaign, a Telco bonus or a partner reward such as a free app or a voucher. Ideally, the campaign management system you employ should automatically optimise message or offer content based on variables like reward costs, availability and previous preferences.

As moments of truth are rare, it is crucial to optimise the message content or customer offer. Research shows that customers typically engage with 'offers' twice before 'switching off' from future solicitations.

The future of a successful marketing programme will be customer and data driven. Examples of this include enrichment of subscriber profiles with prediction scores on churn, usage and revenue. Ideally, prediction models should be self-learning, so changes in a subscriber's behaviour (particularly as the marketing campaigns start having an impact) or any market-wide trends are picked up automatically to refine the prediction scores.

Your customers are 'voting' on each engagement with you and giving valuable feedback (through their actions) on what works and what does not. Even a seemingly successful campaign might sometimes be pure coincidence. It is therefore critical to evaluate the success of each campaign and the entire programme against a control group to isolate the impact of other extraneous factors such as price increase from a competitor, major industry event or new regulation.

Based on these insights, customer journeys need to be updated and refined to evolve the programme towards better performance.

Campaign types across Customer Lifecycle

NEW SUBSCRIBERS ACTIVE SUBSCRIBERS LOYAL SUBSCRIBERS ABOUT TO CHURN

ACQUIRE DEVELOP RETAIN

New subscribersacquisition

Refer a friend/family memeber

VAS free trial

Top-upstimulation

VAS & datastimulation

ARPU boost

Loyaltyprogramme

Coupon & Partneroffers

Up-sell/cross-sellopportunities

Multi-SIMcapture

Inactivityprevention

Winback

MAINTAIN


CASE STUDY

Leveraging behaviour to engage multi-SIM customers

A European operator in a multi-SIM market was managing promotions using scheduled SMS push campaigns contacting all the target customers at the same time. Furthermore, the operator's SIM was considered the backup by its customers. As a result, reach rate of the push campaigns was extremely low. Therefore, the operator was stuck with revenues being eroded by competitive price competition while the campaigns were not being effective in driving ARPU.

Challenges:

By analysing the customer lifecycle and behaviour of multi-SIM consumers, Lumata developed a highly targeted behavioural marketing strategy that pushed a notification to the right customer at the right time.

The campaigns were designed to target customers based on change in their usage compared with their normal usage pattern. A customer who qualified for the campaign was then sent a notification in real-time when they returned to the operator's network. An outgoing call/SMS or a data session indicated when the customer is back on the network after a period of no usage.Customers were offered a bonus for the first recharge of a minimum denomination. The bonus was relative to their value and churn risk. Customers received a double bonus for the next two recharges.

Solution:

The real-time triggered campaigns nudged the customers to growing their usage on the operator and increased spend per user by 34%-72% against the control group depending on the customer segment.

Result:

Contact us

Contact our team of experts at Lumata to find out how we can help you turn your data into revenue.

Call us now on +44 (0)20 7613 8900 or email [email protected].

L U M A T A . C O M

[email protected]

+44 (0)20 7613 8900

57-63 Scrutton Street

London

EC2A 4PF


Lumata is the leading global provider of real-time customer lifecycle management, advertising, and data monetisation software and services. We provide operators, brands and advertisers with the tools and marketing expertise to unlock the value in their data. Lumata’s CLM solutions are powered by the Expression Platform, which globally reaches over 250 million consumers per year. Lumata is backed by Francisco Partners, a leading technology focused private equity firm.