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About Telecom Marketing
Telecom Marketing is the product of The Database Marketing Institute, Ltd (www.dbmarketing.com) which has been providing marketing information over the web since 1994. You can find there more than 140 published articles on direct marketing. The field of Telecom Marketing has become so important that it was decided to start a new website devoted to marketing for telephone companies, wireless companies, Cable TV companies, Satellite TV companies, VoIP companies, IPTV companies, WiFi and WiMAX, plus related enterprises. You are invited to read about telecom marketing here, and to submit articles or communications to Arthur.Hughes@dbmarketing.com..
Featured Book
Custom Churn Reduction and Retention for Telecoms
By Arthur Middleton Hughes
Featured Speech
Targeted Addressable Advertising Using Digital
By Arthur Middleton Hughes
Email Experience Council
Arthur Middleton Hughes is a member of the Email Experience
Council and is one of their speakers. The EEC website is filled with
interesting white papers on email marketing.Featured Article
Phone and Broadband as Commodities
By Arthur Middleton HughesTelecom Marketing Articles
Glossary of Telecom Marketing Terms
Does adding TV improve telco subscriber lifetime value?
By Arthur Middleton Hughes, KnowledgeBase Marketing,It will take telecoms operators a long time to recoup subscriber acquisition costs for TV services; competition for customers will be fierce.
Lifetime value has become one of the most widely used methods of determining the value of telecoms subscribers – and hence of selecting the appropriate marketing strategy to be used to acquire and retain them.To show how it can be used, let's try to answer a simple question: how much will adding TV increase telco subscriber lifetime value? To answer this, let's look at lifetime value (LTV) before and after TV is installed. We can begin with a typical landline subscriber lifetime value table of subscribers who have both a landline and broadband using DSL.
Click here to read the full article (HTML Link).
Minimizing Churn
All industries suffer from voluntary churn — the loss of customers to some other company. But some get hit worse than others.Take the telecommunications business.
Annual churn rates for mobile telecom companies average between 10% and 67%. The rate depends on the firm and whether the subscriber has a postpaid contract or prepays the service. At the low end is Verizon Wireless, with about 10% of its contract customers leaving annually.
Worse, roughly 75% of the 17 million to 20 million subscribers signing up with a new wireless carrier every year are coming from another provider and, hence, are already churners. It costs hundreds of dollars for a company to acquire a new customer. When that person leaves, you lose the future revenue — and the money spent on the acquisition.
But there are many things you can do. And they apply not only to telecom providers but to any high-turnover business.
Click here to read the full article (HTML Link).
Eleven Ways to Reduce Telecom Churn
Telephone companies and cable TV companies (Telecoms) have been offering consumers what they call The Triple Play of phone service, broadband and TV (including movies on demand). The cable companies started it by offering broadband, and later phone service. The Telcos fired back by offering DSL broadband, and most recently by offering a full range of TV and movies. As a result, a small number, and eventually most of the consumers in America will have the option of getting these three services from at least two competing companies.Click here to read the full article (HTML Link).
Download Customer Churn Reduction and Retention Excel Charts
Excel Charts from the book Customer Churn Reduction and Retention for Telecoms by Arthur Middleton HughesGo to form.
Is the Triple Play Working?
Many leaders of phone and cable TV companies have said that the “triple play” is essential to successful customer acquisition and retention today. By the triple play, they mean that the same company offers and sells telephone, Internet broadband, and video-TV to its customers.Click here to read the full article (PDF Format).
Get Analytical About Selling the Triple Play
Cable companies are in the fight of their lives. They have cable running alongside 99% of the TV homes of America, and the Telcos are far behind. But not for long. Telcos are laying fiber and installing VDSL2+ to millions of consumers' homes to bring them high-speed broadband and TV channels.Click here to read the full article (PDF Format).
Phone and Broadband as Commodities
By Arthur Middleton Hughes
Landline phone and broadband services could soon become commodities. The prospect does not spell good news for cable TV and phone companies.
A commodity is defined as a product or resource that is traded primarily on the basis of price, and not on differences in quality or features. When a product or service becomes a commodity, in the long run, the market price of such a commodity will fall to the marginal cost of the lowest cost volume producer.
Broadband as a commodity
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Churn reduction in the telecom industry
By Arthur Middleton Hughes
All industries suffer from voluntary churn -- the loss of customers to some other company. The survival of any business is based on its ability to retain customers. This is particularly true for phone, cable TV, satellite TV and wireless companies. How do you reduce churn? There are many ways: better products, better delivery methods, lower prices, building satisfactory customer relationships, better marketing and, above all, successful customer communications.
Click here to read the full article.
Who Will Own the Pipe?
AT&T and Verizon are losing 3 percent to 5 percent of their landline customers every year.In 2005 Verizon had 50.7 million business and residential phone lines -- plain old telephone service or POTS -- down 5.5 percent from the same time in 2004. Where are these customers going? Some people with cell phones are discontinuing their land line phones. Others are going to telephone service provided by cable companies like Comcast. Still others are shifting to Vonage or Skype. Is this a problem for the phone companies?
The situation is not as bad as you might think.
Click here to read the full article (PDF Format).
A tale of two marketers
By Arthur Middleton HughesVoIP is sweeping the planet. For those who do not know it yet, VoIP stands for Voice over Internet Protocol. It is a method whereby users anywhere in the world can call anyone else over the Internet for almost nothing. Despite its low cost, annual U.S. VoIP revenues exceeded $1 billion in 2005, according to a report from TeleGeography Research. The firm said it expects U.S. VoIP subscribers to jump to 9.6 million by the start of 2007. While this sounds big, US VoIP revenues in 2006 will represent only 7 percent of the combined revenues of traditional local and long distance service providers. Of the total VoIP revenue, more than half of it comes from cable operators.
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The WiMAX Future
People who have been following the telecommunications industry have been seeing it as life or death battle to provide the triple play and other services to American consumers among three titans: phone companies, cable companies and electric utilities. And it is. But meanwhile, there is a development taking place out in left field that may make part of the struggle obsolete in the long run. The development is WiMAX.Click here to read the full article.
Targeted Addressable TV Advertising
Until now, TV ads have been mass marketing – with everyone getting the same ad, and no way of targeting or knowing who is viewing what. This is about to change for consumers who have digital TV from cable TV or phone company TV providers. Here is the way it will work:Regular analog TV involves up to 100 channels sent simultaneously over a coaxial cable to every household at once. The subscribers choose the channel they want to watch by using their remote and their TV. No one knows what any individual subscriber is watching. Nielsen estimates what shows are watched by recording the viewing habits of a small representative sample of households.
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The lifetime value of a Land Line Phone Subscriber
Lifetime value is a key method of determining the value of a telecom subscriber, and of evaluating the strategies used to market to these subscribers.Click here to read the full article (PDF Format).
What is VoIP?
The basic idea in VoIP is to convert an analog voice conversation from a microphone or telephone handset into compressed digital form so that it can be sent over the Internet in packets. VoIP uses an analog telephone adaptor (ATA) -- a device used to connect a standard telephone to a computer or network so that the user can make calls over the Internet. The ATA contains a codec, which stands for coder-decoder. A typical VoIP codec samples an analog voice conversation 8,000 times a second and converts each sample into digital bits. The bits are grouped together into a payload packet that is sent 30 to 50 times per secondClick here to read the full article (PDF Format).
HDTV Bandwith Requirements
How much bandwidth does HDTV require? There is some disagreement about this simple fact. Part of the problem is that the compression standards are being improved, and part is wishful thinking on the part of IPTV promoters.Click here to read the full article (PDF Format).
Case Study: Wireless Churn Reduction
A large wireless company with a major churn problem worked with an outsourced analytics provider to solve their problem. Their success was very impressive. Here is how they went about it. .To begin with, they started out with a serious churn problem: 2.3% per month which meant that they were losing 27.6% of their customers every year. The overall loss was several billions of annual dollars.
Click here to read the full article (PDF Format).
Creative Destruction Hits Telecom
By Lynne Kiesling
AT&T's purchase of Bell South would create a single, more vertically integrated telecommunications provider. The merged firm would be multi-product: wired and wireless telephony, data transmission, business services, and ultimately video delivery. These economies of scale and scope are important for all firms to exploit if they want to survive in the modern telecommunications industry, because the economies of scale and scope provide the opportunity to innovate.AT&T offers a wide range of products and services, and thus competes with cable companies, with satellite companies, with wireless companies, with standalone Internet providers, and with others in various parts of their product and service line.
Click here to read the full article.
Telecom Marketing Issue 01
About Telecom MarketingAmerica is undergoing a vast telecom revolution. Cable TV companies, phone companies and soon electric utilities will be offering virtually identical products: phone service, broadband, and video/TV.
Once in a lifetime opportunity for cable
February 17, 2009 is a very important day for cable TV marketers. That is the day that, by law, all analog TV over the air broadcasting will end. There are about 19 million households who rely on over the air broadcasts for their only access to television. In those households, about 45 million sets will go dark unless the set owners take some action in advance.
How to sell the triple play
Click here to read the full article (PDF Format).
© 2008 The Database Marketing Institute, Ltd.
Arthur Middleton Hughes is Senior Strategist at e-Dialog.com a precision e-mail service provider(ESP). Arthur is the author of Customer Churn Reduction and Retention for Telecoms (RACOM 2008), and Successful E-mail Marketing Strategies: from Hunting to Farming (RACOM 2009) . Arthur can be reached at Arthur.Hughes@dbmarketing.com.
