For digital businesses, their web and app platforms are mere extensions of the overall brand persona, product/solution offering, and customer support. This holds true for a lot of traditional industries such as airlines, telcos, and banking.
In this backdrop, telecom app marketers have their jobs cut out. Their objectives in this scenario would be the following:
- To establish a channel of self-service engagement that complements the brand positioning
- To facilitate product discovery and user acquisition
- To drive monetisation efforts through mobile channels
The only way mobile marketers can hope to up their marketing ROI is by getting their carefully acquired users to engage and transact more on their app.
As part of the app user lifecycle for telecom apps, user engagement should remain the north star metric. Engage, engage, and engage with the most personalised, relevant, contextual, and timely multi-channel campaigns to leverage key mobile moments that eventually drive user retention.
Here are 5 messaging campaigns to help telecom apps scale the pinnacle of user engagement, consistently:
1. First-Time Conversion Campaigns
While driving app downloads is critical from a user acquisition perspective, it defeats the purpose if users aren’t increasing adoption, post download.
With the help of a platform like Netcore Smartech, that bridges the gap between actionable user analytics and effective engagement, mobile marketers can now account for every individual user that downloads the app.
Unified customer view allows marketers to create individual personas including details such as full name, geographic location, mobile number, email address, user category etc. In fact, this comprehensive feature allows marketers to create a timeline of every in-app activity that every user undertakes.
Using these insights, specific user segments can be identified. For instance, a user segment that has recently downloaded the app, launched it perhaps once, but hasn’t made an in-app transaction.
Once such relevant segments are identified, marketers need to craft and deliver effective, hyper-personalised push notification and email campaigns with compelling calls to action and attractive incentives. The message copy should not sound too promotional as that just comes across as a hard-sell and might turn off new users right at the onset. The idea is to communicate actual value that the app can deliver.
2. Abandoned Cart Campaigns
Almost 40% of users looking to purchase a prepaid recharge top-up, data extension package, special international roaming deal, etc. abandon or postpone purchase at the very last stage, for a variety of reasons.
One way to recapture lost sales is by reaching out to these users and grabbing their attention within an optimal window of opportunity. Such users make up an immediate segment, ready for targeting.
This segment of users can then be targeted separately with highly focused and personalised push notifications triggered within 30 minutes of an abandoned cart situation, to increase chances of conversion.
Not only does this remind users to relaunch the app and complete the transaction, but, it also establishes a reliable mode of automated engagement in the long-run.
Marketers can add another layer of automation to this by triggering an email with the same message to a sub-segment of users that don’t open this push notification. The idea is to eventually identify what is the most preferred channel for outreach for each user, based on his/her historical response behaviours.
3. Multiple Transaction Campaigns
Sustainable success is built by repeatedly monetising active users through focused multi-channel messaging campaigns.
Mobile marketers need to get users who have transacted at least once to purchase again with timely push notifications and SMS that communicate absolutely meaningful information like bills due, payment confirmation, new data plans, limited-time discounts, convenient payment options, etc.
4. Geolocation-based Campaigns
Another important campaign for telecom apps involve the use of location-specific push notification and SMS campaigns to engage users that travel internationally. For instance, if a user is travelling from New York to Madrid, he can be sent a personalised message welcoming him to Spain the moment he lands. Such messages can be made more valuable to the user by adding a backlink to the relevant app page or mobile site, highlighting the local roaming and data charges for his plan.
5. User Feedback Campaigns
A great way to gain insights on the app and service is by asking users for their feedback. Mobile marketers can run personalised push notification, in-app, or email campaigns for users who have made at least 3 transactions or service requests to request ratings or reviews.
Honest feedback gives businesses valuable insights into what their users think of their brand and network. Not only does this help them understand their relationship with their customers better, suggestions and recommendations can also help them rectify app bugs, improve the entire user interface, and deliver more satisfactory user experiences, leading to higher app adoption and retention.
Better ratings and favourable reviews are also likely to positively influence other network users to download the app off the app stores. More gain for minimal effort with regards to their App Store Optimisation (ASO)!
While driving these campaigns, marketers need to be extremely smart about the user segments that they target. Pushing a new user to rate the app when he/she hasn’t experienced enough value off the app will cause more dissonance than benefit. And, that’s the last thing mobile marketers want or need!
Never Hang Up on your Users!
Marketers need to remember that their telecom app will always be an extension of their parent brand, the network service provider. Neither should be allowed to tarnish the image of the other.
There’s a lot of scope to experiment with campaign messaging, content, and creatives to achieve optimal results.
Marketers should be unafraid of experimenting, based on user behaviour-driven insights, as they strive to deliver differentiated user experiences at scale.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Pradyut V. Hande
Senior Growth Marketer & Product Evangelist at Netcore Solutions
Pradyut V. Hande is a Martech Evangelist, Mobile Growth Expert, Digital Marketing Strategist, and Author having worked in leading startups and MNCs across the SaaS, Consulting, and Banking industries. He currently serves as a Senior Growth Marketer & Product Evangelist at Netcore Solutions, enabling brands deliver data-driven differentiated customer experiences powered by AI.