Virgin Mobile (now Virgin Media O2): Increased engagement and phone upgrades through rich, interactive RCS messages

Virgin Mobile (now Virgin Media O2) had a reputation as an innovative and vibrant brand that was focused on delivering customers great experiences. Offering exclusive deals on mobile phone upgrades helped ensure their customers would continue to renew their contracts.

Traditionally, Virgin used email and SMS to get the word out about their offers. But emails often went unnoticed and unread, while SMS messages were reliable but limited to text-only, non-branded messages — not ideal for getting customers excited about a slick new phone.

Virgin wanted to start creating more engaging campaigns, while retaining the great reach and reliability that SMS campaigns delivered. They saw a good opportunity for a test case: an upcoming offer on some of the latest Samsung phones.

An engaging campaign was especially important in this instance, as it was due to launch around Valentine’s Day — a time when consumers see an uptick of offers across mobile and email channels.

Enter RCS Business Messaging, powered by Infobip’s conversational experience platform. RCS is the next generation of SMS, offering interactive, video-rich, branded and verified messages that users can trust. Like SMS (but unlike chat apps), RCS messages are delivered to the native messaging inbox on Android devices. Excitingly for brands, Apple announced it too was making RCS available on its devices in September 2024. 

Together, with Virgin Mobile’s marketing team, our Professional Services planned out an RCS campaign that would bring the offer to life. 

Customers who were identified for a handset upgrade were sent rich marketing messages featuring image-rich carousels of the new device. The campaign approach, including which customers should be targeted and their respective journeys, was executed via our customer engagement solution, Moments.

The campaign for the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip3 phone looked like this. It was followed by a second Valentine’s Day campaign to promote the Samsung S22 handset. Alongside videos and graphics showcasing the new handsets, the launches gave customers the option to click through to ‘Shop now’, ‘Visit our website’, or  ‘Call us’ — for a chat with a customer services assistant who would offer further information.

The first campaign resulted in a 92% delivery rate to messaging inboxes and a 57% open rate — way higher than could be hoped for by email. Importantly, messages were far more engaging than even the cleverest SMS could hope to be. The subsequent Valentine’s Day campaign performed even better, achieving a delivery rate of 94% and an open rate of 64%.