Defining a well thought-out, highly relevant and targeted mobile campaign can produce benefits that far outweigh any other medium, as a recent SMS campaign to promote a mobile banking app proved.
Last November, Scottish bank NatWest partnered with operator O2 to produce an SMS campaign to promote its new mobile banking iPhone app. With the help of O2 media, the operator’s sales division, a highly targeted SMS campaign was devised to send a text message to opted-in subscribers with iPhones who also had a NatWest bank account. The data used was carefully anonymized by using sort-code information matched with O2’s opted-in iPhone users to give a highly targeted campaign, while maintaining strict user-privacy.
In the end, a 20% response rate was realized, with over 100,000 downloads of its app recorded following the campaign. Without question, both the iPhone app and the SMS campaign to promote it were highly successful for NatWest. Sarah Bundock, media relations manager for NatWest, added that the app, developed by Monetise, had been receiving up to 3,000 requests an hour, with different demographics making use of it at different times of the day.
This particular campaign followed July’s launch of O2 Money, a partnership between the operator and NatWest which offers subscribers access to a pre-paid Visa card. Beyond the success of this campaign and the recent partnerships between NatWest and O2, I think the real take-away from this case study is that operators have the power to make mobile campaigns highly successful, if they would just do so. Carriers possess the targeting and relevancy capabilities to turn a mundane campaign into a mega-successful one, but simply choose not too in most cases.
Without data from O2 media in terms of iPhone-users and anonymized sort-code information, NatWest wouldn’t have been able to produce the results they did. Carriers around the world need to take note and learn from O2’s example.