Tracfone, now owned by Verizon, is the leading pre-paid and value mobile provider in the U.S, boasting 25 million subscribers through a network of over 90,000 retail locations worldwide. The portfolio of Verizon prepaid brands includes 9 well-known companies, including Straight Talk, Total Wireless, NET10, and SafeLink among others. Since 2009, I’ve helped grow and develop 6 additional consumer brands and helped established the corporation as a clear leader in the value mobile segment, even before being purchased by Verizon.
CHANNELS USED: Email Marketing, Direct Mail, SMS, 611 Messaging, Web Banners, Push Notifications, In-App Messages, Social and Independently Hosted Landing Pages
“I wanted to take a moment to thank you for what you do in and day out for the company but especially for Straight Talk. During the month of May, Straight Talk has reached the lowest Churn in its brand history with a result of *.**%. This was achievable only by working together as a unified team with a common goal of teamwork and success. Genuinely appreciated!” - George Aguilar. Straight Talk
Ongoing Initiatives
Lifecycle Planning and Redesign
With most big organizations, client touch-points are created and updated over long periods of time, and as the need arises. I see this especially being true with plan improvements, updated legal requirements, and new products, creating great inconsistencies within the brand. Working on most of them personally as time passed by, I put great effort into looking at the big picture and unify all the communications that the end client gets on a regular basis.
My team redid all the lifecycle communications for SIMPLE Mobile, SafeLink, and Straight Talk, ensuring a unified tone/look and cohesive evolution between the communications.
Strategic Partnerships make Tracfone Unique
Tracfone made a business decision to start promoting external products to its clients to be more than a wireless company. This brought many challenges, including the unfamiliarity of the new products to their clients and lack of trust in the new offerings. We didn’t want to be seen as spammers or get higher unsubscribes from our base, so we needed a new client-facing strategy on why this was happening.
My role was to make the connection that demonstrates how these strategic partners were purposely created as a human-centric effort to help our customers and the communities we serve. We did this by creating a social statement and a promise to care about the betterment of our community through education, health and financial empowerment, and to only offer products that we deemed as good and that would genuinely help our community.
Strategizing Rewards Program
We created a strategy from the belief that most consumers don’t like or trust loyalty programs because they are complicated and points are hard to understand. Our goal was to keep the point system simple and only utilize it for brand products like free months of service. But the main goal of our loyalty program was to reward our customers just for being loyal, by giving them free prizes from their favorite brands like pizza discounts, free ice cream, and weekly Samsung giveaways.
Results showed us that the rewards program was so successful in reducing churn that it became the number one sign of a healthy customer and the one item to promote during the welcome lifecycle.
Migration Efforts
Most of my biggest efforts with this client have been migrating customers from one network to the next and even from one brand to another one. Together, we’ve gone through several technology-caused migrations (2G, 3G, VoLTE), brand migrations (Telcel to SIMPLE Mobile), and even economic caused migration where the customer was more profitable under a different tower. We were successful in migrating millions of customers each time, through strategic planning, an appropriate channel mix, interesting incentives, and escalated urgency.
Some numbers from our last VoLTE migration Unique Opens (top) and Unique Clicks (bottom):
INDUSTRY STRT TALK SAFELINK
20.92% 55.34% 45.33%
2.27% 36.83% 32.96%