Telefonica O2 UK

The Christmas period is always a busy time for generating new customers but many network operators experience a higher than usual level of churn in January and February.

The objective was to retain new pre-pay subscribers who joined the network in December 2008 through a large Telefónica O2 retail partner.

The focus of the outbound text messaging (SMS) campaign was on subscribers who had not taken a ‘free allowance’, with the justification being that customers who took their allowance were more likely to stay with the network.  In order to test the outbound SMS campaign, a different message was sent to two pools of 10,000 customers each, i.e. an “A / B split” test. The most successful response rate over a 7-day period would determine the message to be used for the remaining pool of 205,000 subscribers.