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Unit 5: Closed Loop Marketing

Get your facts straight. Whilst it sounds like stating the obvious, it is something that many Notes
operators can often fail to maximise because they don’t have the right tools at their disposal.
Current and past behaviour patterns are the best predictors of future action; to be able to up-sell
and cross-sell effectively, operators must monitor usage of services or products in real-time to
enable behavioural-based targeting; an approach that, until now, has been hard and costly to
adopt. Yet with the development of tools, like our own Marketing Delivery Platform, which is
able to monitor and harness data on usage and behaviour patterns and execute marketing offers
in real-time, this can be addressed. Tools such as these will enable operators to be better equipped
to launch targeted, personalised and perfectly timed offers delivered through the right channel;
increasing the chances of users purchasing the additional offering.
Many operators may claim to understand the importance of personalisation; however they
often fail to deliver. It is all very well offering deals such as buy-one-get-one-free, 3-for-2, but
does the offer address what the user wants? Operators often send marketing offers to customers
in a non-targeted way that is irrelevant to the user. Users won’t purchase content or subscribe to
a new service if it is not relevant and delivered at the right time. It is ineffective to offer new,
more expensive services to a customer who has, for example, not paid their bill. Equally, it is
pointless to offer content relating to Heavy Metal bands if previous purchases made by the user
have been related to R&B – it will simply not work. What’s more, if users are bombarded with
multiple, irrelevant offers, there’s a possibility it will be seen as spam, not a term you want
associated with your brand. To prevent this, marketers should adopt a personalised, multi-step
online marketing plan rather than generic, multiple, one-trick-pony plan. In this sense, operators
need to follow the example set by online service providers who have maximised the potential
of personalisation with “Amazon-like” recommendations linked to the users’ preferences and
real time behaviour.
This personalised approach has been proven to deliver compelling results, for example, a cable
operator recognised its key competitive advantage was the delivery of video on demand (VoD),
yet subscribers weren’t purchasing this premium content. Through targeted marketing offers to
different consumer categories the operator was able to convert users that had never previously
bought content, 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 per cent over a nine month period. This is the strategy that operators will need to embrace if
they want to out-perform the competition and improve levels of customer retention and
profitability.
Timing is a critical component within the equation. All too often an opportunity can be missed
if an operator does not react in time to retain relationships with users – meaning lost revenue
and the potential of alienating the user by offering a mistargeted, mistimed offer. If a customer
is buying a ringtone, it is best to offer a related cross-sell before the purchase is completed and
not two weeks later as the user is less likely to want to spend extra on additional products or
services. This is an opportunity which operators will miss if they don’t have a full profile of the
customer or have the ability to implement offers in real-time. So often it is only when you
address the customer ‘here and now’ – when their mindset is open to marketing offers and they
are about to purchase, that you will achieve a high success rate and customer satisfaction. The
chances of cross-selling or up-selling will have dramatically dropped if there is a lapse between
time of purchase and offer. Furthermore by offering a deal at the point of purchase it will make
the user feel as though they have a personalised service and, as long as it is something they will
like, and there is a saving, the chances of the user following through with the offer increases. In
this sense, it is essential operators react to the user’s responses in real-time; keeping the
communication with the user open to allow the execution of offers based on requirements. Even
if the customer is not in the process of purchasing a service, this does not mean that they could

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