Client industry: Leading Mobile Telecommunications Company

Pain Points

Significantly outspent by competition and facing increasing acquisition costs, the client needed to improve customer retention to improve margins and profitability.

The client asked to better understand the impact of marketing investment and channels on customer retention and churn across the paid, owned and earned mix.

Their key question was: “What is the impact of our channel activations on customer churn, and how do these differ from each other?”

Methods

1. Firstly, we ran an extensive directional correlation analysis to determine which marketing channels and tactics most directly related with the client’s various brand health metrics.

2. We then used this network to construct a statistical model that could calculate:

• How the various marketing investments impacted long-run brand health; and,

• The marginal effects of brand health on churn.

Results

The analyses showed that brand engagement was a strong contributed to customer retention not just acquisition, especially in reducing post-purchase dissonance during the immediate trial period for new devices and plans.

Specifically, we found a strong relationship between their long-held key brand metric (Most Want to Investigate) and a reduction in churn which forecasted the potential for a +5% increase in retention and $48MM in retention value.

As a result of this learning, the company increased its investment in brand communication and new social media and community management capabilities to proactively engage both customer and prospects more effectively across both pre and post purchase cycles.