O2 recently revealed its personalized marketing service, called ‘More’ has grown rapidly to 2 million customers. Justin Schamotta staff writer for Choose.net, takes a closer look at the growth of the new mobile marketing platform.
As a rule, consumers don’t want to be marketed at. Companies on the other hand, very much want to market at them. So far, O2 Media’s personalised mobile marketing service – O2 More – seems to be navigating the fine line between both camps with considerable dexterity.
O2 More revealed this week that its customer base has gone from 0 to 2 million in little under 16 months.
Meanwhile, O2 Media’s rapacious brand-signing has seen it take more than 1,000 high-street brands under its gilded wing. These include House of Fraser, French Connection, Adidas, Sainsbury’s, Guinness, Honda and Adidas.
For the uninitiated, O2 More is an opt-in service that matches customer-provided preference information with data held by O2 relating to their phone usage and location. Needless to say, such information is akin to gold dust for advertisers.
As Shaun Gregory, Managing Director of O2 Media, has said, “Mobile messaging is the only way that brands can open up a unique one-to-one dialogue with customers and create real engagement.”
Brands aside, customers seem to enjoy the potential for being one of the first in line for various promotions, discounts, limited offers and money-off deals, as well as receiving messages regarding more niche interests.
For example, one campaign targeted customers who had been to Hong Kong in the past six months with the chance to download an app that provided a 720 degree view of Hong Kong. More than 9% of targeted customers downloaded the app, a figure O2 was more than happy to report to its client, the Hong Kong Tourism Board.
Time to be wary
O2 currently has around 22.2 million mobile customers and over 700,000 fixed broadband customers, figures that are increasing all the time.
But while O2’s star is undoubtedly in the ascendant, it may find it hard to shine quite so brightly from the end of March, when it plans to hit broadband customers with lustre-removing price increases.
It says it needs more money to feed into its network, presumably with an eye on snagging yet more customers.
In most cases the rise should be fairly manageable, amounting to little more than an extra £1.68 a year. Customers on older O2 deals however, have reported much higher price rises.
O2 should be wary. The downside of integrating your products as they’ve done so successfully – hooking their mobile phone customers on home broadband with big discounts or hooking them up to other businesses with O2 more – is that bad press can spread.
This is a guest post from Choose. The site covers rights issues, research and debate into home broadband and more broadly home media and mobile markets.
