Why Telecom Brands Are Taking a New Approach to Personalized Marketing
For years, marketers have leaned on various forms of personalization to engage with customers. In this article, SheerID, CEO, Jake Weatherly, discusses a novel form of personalized marketing that telecom providers like Comcast and T-Mobile are using to build relationships with members of consumer tribes such as the military, students, and teachers.
Personalized marketing holds so much promise. Yet as we currently know it, it’s failing to deliver.
Marketers are struggling to overcome hurdles around data quality, getting a single view of the customer and growing privacy concerns. And consumers are fed up with the status quo. They click endless privacy compliance checkboxes, only to engage with brands that still track their every move.
And to what end? The payoff is another unsolicited email in their inbox begging for their attention.
In the telecom industry, it’s especially difficult for brands to differentiate their commoditized services. Consumers have plenty of options and churn is a constant threat. To get customers’ attention, some brands try to run more campaigns across more channels, but more of the same promotions isn’t the answer.
Personalization Must Create a High-Quality Connection
To improve personalized marketing efforts, brands need to focus on the quality, not quantity, of their campaigns. This requires:
Specificity—offers that focus on high-value for a specific audience.
Meaning—offers that create a connection with consumers beyond the sterile transactions associated with typical market segmentation.
Reciprocity—offers that establish a clear value exchange between the brand and consumer.
Telecom giants like Comcast and T-Mobile are moving in this direction. They’re using a new form of personalization, called “identity marketing,” to acquire and retain subscribers.
Telecom Connects With Consumer Tribes
Identity marketing is a way for brands to create personalized offers for consumer tribes like students, teachers, and members of the military, based on the tribe’s deep-seated attributes and values.
Gen Z, for example, is a sweet spot for everything Comcast has to offer. The majority of these younger consumers watch television through streaming services on the Internet. To reach this audience, “Comcast offers an exclusive student discount in numerous markets across the country.”
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T-Mobile took a similar approach by creating a personalized offer for the military. The T-Mobile ONE Military program includes a 50% discount on family lines for all military and veterans.
In both cases, the brands are pursuing a personalization strategy that emphasizes a higher-quality relationship with consumers. It’s a new way to engage:
- The brand invites members of the consumer tribe to take part in the unique offer.
- The consumer “raises their hand” and opts in to the offer by providing relevant information to qualify.
- The brand uses a digital verification process to confirm the consumer’s eligibility to redeem the offer.
- Because the offer makes consumers feel recognized and respected, they are motivated to participate.
5 Reasons to Market to Consumer Tribes
Brands that personalize their marketing to consumer tribes are seeing results on the order of 3x increased conversions and return on ad spend as high as 25:1. Here are five reasons why this approach is working.
#1 You break through the noise by connecting with how someone identifies
Traditional approaches to personalization are sterile. When you target consumers based on demographics or recent shopping behavior, it’s a weak signal of intent. Consumers are getting bombarded with “special” offers and they’re tuning out.
When you market to consumers based on their sense of belonging to a tribe—part of their identity—you change the dynamic. Moreover, because they declare their eligibility for the offer, they provide a strong signal of intent. You communicate “I recognize who you are and I want to reward that.” That’s when consumers start to pay attention.
According to a Kelton Global survey, nearly 95% of consumers who are given a personalized offer based on their identity would redeem it.
#2 You demonstrates shared values
A recent survey conducted by SheerID and The Military Times found that 8 out of 10 members of the military say being a part of the military is more important to their identity than their religion or where they’re from.
Along with family, it’s the most important aspect of their identity.
T-Mobile’s personalized offer acknowledges this sense of identity and demonstrates shared values with the consumer tribe. The brand is able to continue their long-standing commitment to honor and reward the military while also creating an emotional connection with consumers.
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#3 You initiate a relationship built on trust
In the past, Comcast tried to target students with a direct mail campaign to everyone who lived near a campus in a city like Boston. But it was expensive and imprecise, and didn’t capture intent.
When they honed their personalization strategy and added digital verification to market to the student tribe, it took only one week for Comcast to see an enormous spike in traffic to their site and a significant lift in conversions.
That’s because the students were able to engage on their own terms.
Identity marketing allows the consumer to opt in to the relationship with the brand, providing minimal personal data to confirm eligibility. For consumers increasingly interested in protecting their data, this privacy-friendly approach kicks off a relationship built on mutual terms, reciprocity, and trust.
#4 You encourage word-of-mouth sharing
Compared to buyer segments united by a common purchase or behavior, such as visiting a website, consumer tribes have strong networks. And that drives word of mouth.
In a recent survey of 500 members of the military, 76% say they learn about discounts from word of mouth, and 83% of students would share a gated offer with friends and family.
Because verification protects the integrity of the offer, members of a tribe trust that the offer is just for them. This makes it more valuable, and more worthy of sharing.
Verification also gives the brand confidence in the discount. With their previous direct mail campaign, Comcast would lose money if non-students redeemed the offer. But now that only eligible consumers can redeem the student offer, Comcast has the confidence to aggressively market the discount and continue to expand. They recently added free access to Amazon Music and HBO to their student offer.
#5 You have the opportunity to go all-in with a consumer tribe
Once you initiate a relationship with members of a consumer tribe, you can extend your program beyond a single, online offer and engender long-term loyalty among subscribers.
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Comcast hired a team of student ambassadors and scheduled numerous campus events at colleges across the country.
T-Mobile also went beyond a discount with an extensive, multi-faceted program that reflects their commitment to the military. The brand:
Pledged to recruit and hire 10,000 veterans and military spouses.
Proved funding for the non-profit FourBlock to expand its successful Career Readiness Program and launch it online so all military and veterans can enroll from anywhere for free.
Invested more than half a billion dollars to expand LTE coverage and capacity and lay the foundation for 5G in communities around U.S. military bases.
The strategy has paid off, and the company attributed meaningful growth to the fact that they started offering segment-specific offers like the one to the military.
Rethinking personalization
As consumer demands shift and endless offers flood the marketplace, brands need to rethink their personalization strategies to get noticed. And as Comcast and T-Mobile have shown, improved customer acquisition and retention depends on higher-quality relationships with consumer tribes.
