Virgin Mobile (now Virgin Media O2): Increased engagement and customer lifetime value with a conversational marketing campaign on RCS

Virgin Mobile (now Virgin Media O2) is a customer-centric telco offering a wide range of connectivity services to help enhance their customer’s experiences.

To provide a good customer experience, it was important for Virgin Mobile to give their customers exclusive offers on upgrades at the right time, in the most engaging manner. Thereby, successfully increasing their customer lifetime value.

To do this they needed to execute a campaign to inform their existing customer base who could get a handset upgrade, about the latest offer on Samsung phones. Traditionally, the operator used Email and SMS, but they were looking for a richer, more engaging campaign that would initiate conversations and successfully upsell to their existing customers.

They needed a channel that had the reliability of SMS but the impact and interactivity of a chat app to capture their customers’ attention and encourage conversions. This was especially important as the activity launched around Valentine’s Day, a time when consumers are typically flooded with offers across mobile and email channels.

Enter RCS Business Messaging powered by Infobip’s conversational experience platform. Together, with Virgin Mobile’s marketing team, Infobip’s Professional Services brought the offer to life in a conversational manner over RCS.

Customers who were identified for a handset upgrade were sent rich marketing messages over RCS with images of the new device.  The approach for the campaign, which customers we’d target, and their journey was done via our customer engagement solution Moments.

RCS signifies the next generation of SMS, offering rich media, branded, and verified messages within the native messaging inbox on Android devices (RCS will also be available on iOS devices later in 2024). RCS, powered by Infobip, enabled Virgin Media to deliver a special-pre-order offer for the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip3 phone 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’ or ‘visit our website’, diverting them to the Virgin Media website, or to ‘call us’, where they could contact the operator for further information.

The campaign was commercially tied into extending their existing customers lifetime value with richer message content. Thereby driving better upgrade rates.

The first campaign resulted in a 92% delivery rate and a 57% ‘seen’ rate. The subsequent Valentine’s Day campaign performed even better, achieving a delivery rate of 94% and a ‘seen’ rate of 64%.