Pontis – Mobile Targeted Marketing » Contextual Marketing Analyst Reports

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IDC

Pontis’ focus on real-time, personalized marketing campaigns enables it to offer mobile operators and TV service providers new ways of increasing ARPU and subscriber loyalty. With this capability, operators are more likely to succeed in making the necessary transition from the subscriber-acquiring phase to the managing and retention stage. The company’s set of solutions and value-added marketing consulting helps its customers to streamline these solutions efficiently and achieve overall improvement in performance.
Pontis empowers its customers to stimulate voice, SMS, and premium services usage, thus increasing ARPU, overall revenue, and customer loyalty.

Ovum

“Pontis has helped increase response rates, boost ARPU, and improve retention. Pontis addresses customers through a variety of channels including portals, interactive voice response, and call centers. However, in the prepaid market the prime channels to target specific customers are through SMS and MMS. Using these basic channels allows operators to reach all subscribers in its customer base, not just the high value ones.
Pontis tracks realtime usage and behavior, allowing it to keep an updated customer record and profile. This allows operators to identify the best opportunity to present loyalty, marketing, or sales offerings to customers, which otherwise would have been lost if data was examined weeks or months later. It is particularly effective in targeting prepaid customers, where customer information is often scarce.”

Gartner Group

Pontis has been identified as a Sample Vendor during July and August 2010 in 11 Gartner Hype Cycles. Gartner’s Hype Cycles provide a graphic representation of the maturity and adoption of technologies and applications, and how they are potentially relevant to solving real business problems and exploiting new opportunities.

Gartner Group

Gartner has published a case study* in which they document how the use of real-time, contextual information, targeted highly relevant offers to individual customers, have helped a Tier 1 European provider boost their service revenue from prepaid phones, enhance customer loyalty and reduce churn.
The main findings illustrate how the operator has succeeded to follow and better understand the individual needs of their entire customer base and based on this data offered specific targeted prices and products which were highly relevant to individual subscribers. Due to the real-time execution and automatic fulfillment of these offers allowing quick follow-up, and guaranteeing higher response rates, the operator had succeeded to increase overall revenue per subscriber: “offerings that are personalized to the customer segment and presented when the customer is most receptive generate tangible new revenue.”
In this example, the case study highlights how the operator’s “acceptance of promotional offers rose from 2% – 10%.” It further explores how the operator has managed to create an ongoing dialogue with their customers.
Furthermore, the case study recommends that “vendors should target the marketing team, rather than the IT or business intelligence (BI) teams with their products. Highlight that this type of approach allows marketers to radically change the way in which they create and manage promotions”
In addition it is recommended that: “Communications service providers (CSPs) should select a vendor with a proven track record of successful implementations and comprehensive consulting services — they will need to rely on the vendor’s advice to avoid the most common mistakes when creating this new type of campaign”.
Anne Lapkin, Charlotte Patrick, Ned Frey

Gartner Group

Gartner has recognised Pontis as a “Cool Vendor” in their 2010 report, highlighting that, “…context will be a technology that redefines customer experiences and relationships, and, as these Cool Vendors demonstrate, it can deliver value in 2010.”The report is based on evaluation of vendors that are innovative, impactful and intriguing. The Marketing Delivery Platform™ allows mobile, TV and fixed line operators to target customers with contextual marketing offers.
Real-time contextual marketing and selling, based on a customer’s lifecycle and real-time events, enables operators to push price and product offers at the right time, increasing the response rate by as much as 10%. In today’s fierce competitive markets where power is shifting to the customer, Pontis’ solution helps operators to develop personal relationships with their customers. Furthermore, the Pontis’ solution allows operators to run hundreds of highly targeted promotional offers simultaneously on a monthly basis, which can be implemented within days, rather than weeks.Nick Jones, Monica Basso, Anne Lapkin, Charlotte Patrick, Carol Rozwell, Robin Simpson

Gartner Group

“By 2013, half of all CSP marketing offers will be based on some type of context-aware data”.Information about user context is of interest to companies wanting to interact with their customers. These companies include CSPs themselves and other parties that could use some of the contextual knowledge that CSPs have at their disposal.Unlike some of the other uses for contextual information, activities in the area of marketing offers do not require the consumer to be prepared to pay. Those companies already trying activities in this area seem enthusiastic, and we expect this to be one of the more popular areas of context-aware services with CSPs. The Pontis system has been implemented by 20 wireless and TV operators.A Tier 1 European mobile operator, which uses the system to reduce the churn and increase the ARPU in its prepaid customer base, reports an average takeup rate of 10% for offers made and a more than 7% increase in ARPU across its prepaid base, resulting in a sales increase of millions of Euros per month as compared with a control group”. Annette Zimmerman Sr Research Analyst Gartner Group

Yankee Group

“The issue of better managing customer marketing and retention is getting through to the operators after many years of focusing almost solely on land-grab tactics for acquisition. The ability to tailor promotions and retention to customers requirements and usage is immensely valuable, as is the capacity to do so across multiple platforms. As we move to a multi-platform world operators will be able to demonstrate additional value through these cross-promotion activities. This allows them to offer increasingly valuable and tangible loyalty schemes above and beyond the traditional devices and bundled minutes/SMS”. Matt Hatton Program Manager – Wireless Research EMEA Yankee Group

Current Analysis

“Pontis has a strong proposition for service providers undergoing the DNA change from a single-discipline service provider to a provider of multi-services, and particularly providers engaged in service convergence. Cross-service incentives and targeted promotion creation are likely to become the real arts of mobile marketing tomorrow. Amid the current multi-service confusion, it’s good to see a vendor step forward with a solution which will genuinely improve, as well as simplify, the customer targeting process”. Emma Mohr-McClune Principal Analyst, Wireless Services Europe Current Analysis

Quocirca

“Marketing is just like any business process, it has to be planned, executed, controlled and the results tested against the plan. Like any other process, the more this can be automated, the more efficiently it can be undertaken, and this is particularly important in the fast changing world of telecommunications. Here new services are being created, trialled, turned into commercial successes or scrapped due to apparent failure at a rapid rate Closing the marketing loop to capitalise on success and steer away from failure is becoming ever more important. Operators and service providers have strong experience at running networks and bringing in new subscribers, but little at managing the customer marketing lifecycle. They then lose out by not being able to offer the right products and services to maximise ARPU, and finally as the customer churns to another supplier. Products that fully support the operator through the marketing process, providing efficiency and timeliness to marketing programs, and offering guidance to best practice fill that gap, and give operators the tools they need to nurture and grow revenues as they then can properly manage their existing customer relationships”. Rob Bamforth Principal Analyst, Service Provision and Mobility Quocirca Ltd