November 27th, 2007

Digital Services Best Practice: Happy Hour Promotion Case Study

By Dr. Shuki Idan

A long-distance provider decided to make his Philippines customers really happy right in time for New Year’s. He went to all the trouble of setting up a Happy Hour special rate during January so that more of his customers would be inclined to call home on this special occasion and speak longer. Those of you that have experienced launching such special plans would understand the trouble involved and the return needed to justify such an effort. It requires major changes in billing and handling complex issues such as calculating customers’ calls that span between the Happy Hour rate and regular hours. But apart from all that, the plan backfired in a big way because his customer base calls a total of 150 destinations and there were other segments that wanted preferential treatment as well for their holidays.

| Leave a Comment

November 18th, 2007

Digital Services Best Practice: Happy Hour Promotions

By Dr. Shuki Idan

Expanding users’ tastes and influencing consumption habits are one of the challenges of digital marketers. Happy Hour promotions are one of the more interesting marketing practices that can help digital marketers achieve their goals. We think we have it down to a science at this point and today we’re going to share some of that insight with you.

Happy Hour Promotions can influence users to try services they have never used before by giving a discount during certain time periods. Another motivation can be in changing the customer’s behavior patterns, ideally moving them from high consumption periods to off-peak hours. For example, by offering happy hour calling rates in off-peak hours, a long distance carrier can expect users to use this opportunity. But the carrier should make sure not to substantially cannibalize full rate hour margins.

| Leave a Comment

November 11th, 2007

The Right Way To Deploy BOGO in Digital Marketing

By Dr. Shuki Idan

As tempting as it might be to use Buy One Get One (BOGO) offers to influence user spending, you want to be careful to keep just the right balance at all times.

Having reviewed some of the key differences between using the BOGO paradigm in the brick-and-mortar world and in the online marketing world, some of our best practice recommendations for the proper use of BOGO with digital products are:

Always provide full price and value information of the “benefit”, to allow consumers to assess what they are getting. The regular price of the product should be retained wherever possible as its mere presence will reduce the likelihood of drawing a price related inference (that can be unfavorable) from the value of the deal. Include the “value” of the benefit, if it is a reasonable value, for while consumers may not accept the full claim, they will use this value to anchor on and assess the value.

| Leave a Comment

November 4th, 2007

Marketing digital services within the ‘Buy One Get One’ paradigm

By Dr. Shuki Idan

The Buy/Get or BOGO (Buy One Get One) offering is a common retail promotion practice. The BOGO model encourages the customer to buy one or a few items and get special terms on other items, e.g. discounted or free other items, loyalty points, eligibility for preferential terms in other promotions, etc. This model is also applied in digital marketing scenarios such as: download a song and get a ringtone for free, buy this Madonna song and get another song for half price, or sign up for VOD service and get 100 minutes of international calls for free. In this post we will be looking at the use of the Buy/Get model in the marketing of content and digital services.