According to research carried out by Juniper (Making Digital Content Pay) revenues generated from digital content will increase from under $140 Billion worldwide in 2015 to $180 Billion in 2017. Operators are looking to get a cut of this revenue and are looking to focus on their customers’ digital spend, and not just their communications spend. Many are teaming up with content providers to offer free initial content subscriptions or free data to encourage customers to buy digital content from them – usually as part of a bundle. It’s all well and good having these great offers but how do operators engage with their customers in this digital age in order to get the customer interested in the content and to buy it from the operator?

For operators direct marketing to their customers is one of their most successful channels. Typically this is done by call, SMS, email and even by post which is quite expensive. There are a number of challenges faced with carrying out direct marketing. One of the biggest challenges is that you need to have permission to contact your customer for marketing purposes. This sometimes could mean up to half of your customer base being uncontactable. Then you can have low engagement rates because customers are getting marketed too by other companies like utilities and insurance companies for example.

So what do you to stand out from this noise and drive engagement with the customer? One great tool is app notification messaging and especially real-time.

What is an app notification? An app notification is a message that appears directly on your smart phone from an app. You will see this from a lot of news related apps will send you a notification to your phone if you have it downloaded of a signification news event. This can be pushed directly to your phone or when you log into the push a targeted message can appear for each individual customer.

What’s the difference between an app notification and an SMS? Firstly there is a separate marketing permission required for SMS. Secondly an app notification can include an image or a trailer that will grab your customer’s attention. Once you open the notification it directs customers straight to where they can either purchase or view what you are informing them about. However the key factor in this working is that it’s real-time and relevant for the end customer. Imagine you are a heavy Spotify user and this eats into all your monthly allowance of data. Then your operator sends you a notification offering free rated Spotify for an extra €5 a month, you would jump at this.

So what about real-time marketing through an app notification? Is this possible? The ground work needs to be done well in advance of execution. Using your analytics team, you identify all your metrics for each customer. Gaps and opportunities should be clearly identified as to how you can either grow revenue or reduce churn. Once customers hit a trigger that you pre-set, then they can immediately be notified of an offer by app notification. This allows you to upsell or cross sell content and offers to your customers. If you see that a customer is a user of Spotify but towards the end of the month you can see that they pull back on their usage. You can push offers through give them free rated or extra data as a reward for their loyalty. Customers get very frustrated having to pull back on using your favourite content because of fear of data overage charges.

Operators need to be one step ahead of the curve and think outside the box in order to capitalise on the potential revenue.  When it’s done right and timely, customers do tend to engage with the operator.

To learn more download Openet’s White Paper: Smarter Customer Engagement – From Reactive to Proactive – Taking Control of the Customer Experience