Telus’ Brilliant Campaign

My friend who works at Telus at the retail level found out in November they will be releasing the iPhone, which is the first for the phone to be released to a CDMA company. My friend, the paragon of all employees, decided to post the Telus link about the upcoming release on Facebook.

As any curious person…well okay, so I admit, I love their advertisements, especially when they bring out the cute animals, clicked on the link that my friend posted. Once the page loaded I was shocked. When I saw the registration form, my mind boggled and once that cleared, was very impressed. I’ll get to it later on why I am so impressed.

To kick off the interest, you can go to the Telus site and register and they will keep you posted with news on the launch and information about their prices and plans.

What I love about this is that it is probably one of the smartest marketing initiatives on Telus’ part. Why? As part of my program at Seneca College, I had to take a direct marketing course, and my teacher is probably one of the most brilliant marketers of all time. There are so many different forms of marketing and some that are very costly and elaborate, but he taught me to keep it simple. Sometimes the best marketing strategy is something so obvious and simple to execute. As I mentioned before, the best marketing is when you understand your customers or your ideal potential customers, and their behavior. This new marketing initiative from Telus was an unexpected pleasant surprise for me, as they never done this before.

The registration form is collecting information from non-Telus customers and creating their own in-house data base. When a company wants to rent database it cost money…do it yourself, it is essentially free. Database (of segmented groups of people with certain characteristics) is helpful to find prospective customers and better understand their behavior so that one can customize the right marketing mix to cater to that segment. Telus collecting prospective customers’ information through their registration form instead of renting lists is brilliant! On top of that, those who submit a form are already interested so sending information out to them won’t feel like spam and their conversion ratio will probably be high compared to traditional direct marketing campaign (direct mailing program, a 3% response rate is considered successful).

What would be nice to see on these forms would be trying to find out the behavior of those potential customers who would be interested in the iPhone; and things like what is the average price they spend on a monthly cell phone plan, what phone they currently use, their needs and wants with a phone plan, etc. Then their in-house data base would be more comprehensive and then Telus can adjust their iPhone prices and plans to cater to a specific group of target market that would maximize the company’s bottom line.

I know insurance industry uses direct marketing. I have witnessed it myself with a brokerage firm when they rented out a list with specific demographic to launch their new program. They literally sent out thousands of mail-outs to reach the target market, while Telus is luring customers in. If the incentive is sweet enough, I could see insurance companies or brokers and agents adapting what Telus is doing and growing their own in-house data base for future marketing campaigns.