Data Boosts Telco Customer Acquisition ROI. Here’s How & Why

For Communication Service Providers (CSPs), including telcos, cable providers, and internet service providers (ISPs), customer acquisition represents arguably the biggest problem. That’s due to:

• Low consumer switching costs
• Undifferentiated offerings
• High competition
• Tech disruptions

Tackling those challenges has made CSPs major spenders on marketing. In fact, four of the highest 10 ad spenders are CSPs, accounting for nearly 44% of ad spend, including Comcast ($6.2 billion ad spend in 2023), AT&T ($3.8 billion), Verizon ($2.9 billion), and Charter Communications ($2.4 billion). By comparison, Procter & Gamble spent $4.8 billion; Ford Motor Co. $2.7 billion, and Alphabet (the parent company of Google) $2.5 billion.¹

Together, these CSPs' spending has one of the lowest spend efficiency among industry verticals, with high customer acquisition cost (CAC) and low customer lifetime value (LTV). The top four CSAs spend twice as much on advertising as a percentage of revenues (4%) compared to the rest of the top 10 (2%). Plus, the spending is disproportionately high on linear TV and direct mail and disproportionately low on digital and direct-to-consumer (DTC).
 
Meanwhile, the broadband landscape is changing. Mobile service providers have entered the fray using 5G-powered Fixed Wireless Access (FWA), and CSPs are primarily relying on broadband for growth while expanding their offerings and entering new markets.

In fact, broadband is growing 14 times faster than cellular: the broadband market in 2022 was $112 billion in size, and growing at 7.2% over the previous 10 years, Meanwhile, cellular’s $322 billion market was effectively saturated, growing at just 0.6% over the prior 5 years.

CSPs need an optimized marketing strategy that alters CAC/LTV calculations to keep pace with an evolving industry and improve marketing ROI. And doing that may be simpler than you think.

The solution: leverage the right data sets for precise insights

Current telecom market share solutions are panel-based, assume fixed connections, and are not representative of the evolved realities of current broadband consumption trends. To truly see what’s happening in the market, CSPs must be able to view and assess communication usage across both cellular and broadband.

Plus, household resolution at scale has long been identified as a hard problem due to difficulty in both identifying households and then keeping track of them amidst societal dynamism.

To accurately understand broadband subscriber trends, CSPs must use data to:

• Know where customers have been: Explore and visualize usage patterns, including carrier transitions, dimensioned by granular geography and time across the entire telecom landscape.
• See where customers are now: Explore and visualize market share and flow share at present across the entire geo-spectrum, including by household, Census block, zip, city, state, nation
• Distinguish between residential and SMB customers: Understand retention and churn propensities of individual subscribers across all carriers, whether residential or SMB.
• Assess the penetration of FWA and how it is changing in specific areas to support operational planning and customer acquisition and retention.

And such specific data sets are available! Take, for instance, Mobilewalla’s Market Flow solution. It’s a granular, population scale measurement tool to understand broadband market and flow share through:

• The industry’s first household dataset at scale, currently resolving 135 million households in the US. That’s more than 90% of the population.
• Business carrier identification across 16 million businesses.
• Cellular connection classifier that distinguishes cellular and wireless broadband device signals (IPs). That signals either “true” cellular or FWA use.
• Mover indicator at both a household and individual level.
• Geographic roll-up from household to zip to census block to city to state to country.
• Lead lists and audience segments that identify the best prospects in key markets.
• Behavioral and demographic data for a deeper understanding of subscribers.

Armed with the right data, CSPs can get the precise insights they need to create marketing segments optimized for highest expected ROI. And that can boost spend efficiency and effectiveness through a granular understanding of what consumers want and need and effectively communicating that to the right customers at the right places and times.

Want to know more? Visit our Market Flow solution webpage, where you can get more details on how Market Flow works, the data it leverages, and how you can benefit. You can even get a free data sample to download and discover data that decodes this evolving market.

Read Next: Leveraging Household Insights to Attract and Retain Subscribers - A Telco Case Study

1. https://austinvisuals.com/top-ad-spenders-in-the-u-s-in-2023/