Head of Marketing & PR, Fortumo
Fortumo OÜ 
Let’s imagine you stop on the street to check out a restaurant’s menu hanging on their window. To your surprise you find top five favourite dishes listed, all offered at a significant discount just for today. Don’t lie to yourself: you’d walk in. Restaurants would love to offer each customer exactly what they’re craving for. But while they can only dream of this ability, telcos in fact already have it. Everything comes down to data.
Telcos aiming to convert their prepaid subscriber base to postpaid contracts need to know which segments of the audience are most likely to convert. If the audience for campaigns is too broad, budget goes to waste chasing people who are far from making the switch. So which criteria should the targeting be based on?
Telcos by default have available several metrics that can be used to assess the subscriber’s readiness to convert:
- SIM card age: is the historical data long enough to rely on for a decision?
- Connectivity to the network: is the SIM card constantly online or does the subscriber use multiple cards and switch to competing networks?
- Data usage: how much mobile data does the subscriber use and for what services?
- Recharge frequency and values: does the subscriber top up at a frequency and value that indicates they have disposable income to pay for a postpaid service pack?
- Reload channel: does the subscriber top up offline or online, what is their digital engagement level?
Based on this data, telcos are able to identify subscribers with long-term usage history, loyalty to the network, good payment capability and attitude towards digital channels. This helps segment subscribers on a broad level but does not give much information on which specific marketing offers to create for them.
This is where carrier billing data becomes extremely useful. The more digital merchants using carrier billing, the more information becomes available to telcos about the subscriber’s digital consumption habits. In addition to the previous data points, the following indicators can be used to assess which marketing offer to push to the subscriber:
- Content of digital purchases: Do they spend money on app stores, streaming services or somewhere else? Would they prefer a cashback offer on an app store or free access to a streaming service?
- Spend and frequency of spending: How often do they spend money on digital services and are they frequent consumers? Do they have any recurring payments for services that would indicate loyalty?
In a recent case study on Google Play from Vietnam, we shared data that indicates people using carrier billing are generally willing to spend more on the telco’s own services. This means they’re also more likely to make the switch to postpaid. The additional data points help create even more compelling upselling offers to the subscribers.
