The broadband business is cutthroat.
Whether it’s new regulations, increasing competition or a renewed focus on security, marketing broadband as an Internet Service Provider (ISP) requires creative and effective strategies.
As a direct mail automation tool, we work closely with ISPs. We’ve discovered that many internet businesses now use direct mail as a marketing strategy.
In this article, we’ll explore the seven most effective strategies, with a focus on the role of direct mail. We’ll also show how your business can adopt them to garner more leads and grow revenue.
What We’ll Cover:
Background: What is Broadband Marketing?
Broadband marketing involves using different strategies, like direct mail, email, or social media marketing, to spread awareness about your broadband packages and convert your target audience into customers.
ISPs face a unique marketing challenge. Most ISPs provide internet services with fast speeds and unlimited downloads. So, broadband marketers face difficulty differentiating their packages and services.
Laser-focused marketing strategies help focus on refining your marketing campaigns. It can help you reach the right audience with the right message at the right time.
Why is Focusing on Broadband Marketing Important?
Broadband marketing provides the following benefits to internet service providers:
- Reach a wider audience: If your target audience doesn’t know about your brand, you won’t be able to make conversions. Broadband marketing helps you reach many people and capture a larger market share.
- Creates a differentiating factor: Most ISPs offer the same packages. How you market them and position your services could be a differentiating factor.
- Reach rural customers: You can reach rural customers who may not yet have broadband and get various incentives from the government or similar entities.
- Improve customer satisfaction and loyalty: ISPs can use marketing to communicate with customers about upgrades, promotions, and customer support, creating better customer experiences.
5 Common Challenges in Broadband Marketing
While broadband marketing has a lot of benefits and can shoot up your revenue, there are certain challenges you need to be aware of. Here are five such challenges and how you can prepare for them.
#1 Price Wars
A price war occurs when rival companies lower the prices of their products or services to undercut one another and capture a more significant market share.
Price wars are common in competitive markets like the internet industry, where the price is a focal point. Profit margins can easily be eroded by manipulating prices, which can push competitors out.
One way to avoid becoming a target of price wars is to create a loyal customer base. You can build loyalty by creating better customer support experiences, engaging them on different platforms and providing value to them through helpful content.
Here are some other strategies you can use:
#2 Customer Retention
Differentiating your services can be tough when most providers offer similar broadband packages. The result? Customer churn. A high customer churn rate means you’ll have trouble maintaining steady growth and revenue.
That’s why you need to find ways to retain your customers. Some of the best methods are to;
- Engage with your customers often
- Create a culture of personalization at each stage
- Ask for their feedback regularly
- Offer discounts and irresistible deals
One tactic ISPs use is to promote their annual plans and make them more appealing than monthly packages to lock customers for a more extended period.
#3 Limited Geographic Reach
Not all ISPs have a large resource base at their disposal. It can mean geographic reach becomes a significant challenge, as expanding infrastructure to reach new areas can be costly.
As a solution to this, many ISPs first try to focus on a few target areas instead of setting a base in wider locations. It allows them to capture prominent locations first, and then, as resources grow, they expand into different areas.
#4 Contentious Customer Support
How many of us write something online when we have a good customer experience with a brand? Not many of us. But most of us would write negative reviews or tell our close ones about it if we had a bad experience.
Poor customer service experiences can lead to negative reviews and customer churn. Broadband companies must provide timely support and resolve customer issues to mitigate this.
If you don’t want to invest in an extensive customer support team, create detailed FAQs and guides to help customers solve problems themselves.
#5 Technological Advancements
As technology evolves, customers expect faster speeds and more advanced features. Keeping up with these advancements and offering them to customers can be expensive and challenging. Many customers might even flock to bigger competitors with larger resources to provide this new technology.
It’s best to partner with brands or offer competitive packages to your existing customers to provide advanced technology. If you don’t have it, provide a timeline of how you will adopt advanced technology down the line.
7 Effective Broadband Marketing Strategies
Some broadband marketing strategies will give you the required visibility; some may focus on lead conversion. Getting the right balance is important.
Here are seven strategies you can start experimenting with.
#1 Direct Mail Marketing
Many businesses have included direct marketing to complement their digital marketing activities and gain a competitive edge. It gets the highest ROI of 112% across all mediums and can be an important marketing strategy.
With direct mail automation tools like Postalytics, you can create, edit, send, and track campaigns without visiting post offices or doing manual work. It makes managing direct mail campaigns as easy as managing email campaigns.
You can also:
- Personalize campaigns at scale using the variable logic and data features
- Target precise audiences with integrations to your CRM tools
- Create triggered drip campaigns
- Embed pURLs and QR codes to bring recipients online
- Measure campaign effectiveness
#2 Referral Program
Many ISPs create referral programs to encourage existing happy customers to bring more business. This way, customers get incentivized, and you reach more potential customers without spending much money.
You can give discounts, free upgrades, or limited-time access to premium features as incentives.
Here’s an example from Easy Internet Now.
To create a referral program, you can look at your competitor’s referral program, set goals, find what incentives your customers would prefer, discover how to promote your program and use referral program software like Referral Rock or Referral Factory.
#3 Email Campaigns
Successful email marketing campaigns can help you create awareness, engage your target audience, nurture leads, and convert them.
You can create various campaigns like welcome emails, newsletters, promotions, new service additions, retargeting, milestones, upselling, anniversaries, surveys, etc.
Here are some email marketing tips you can follow:
- Segment your email lists and personalize each email you send
- Nail your subject lines, and A/B test them to select the perfect one
- Always include a Call To Action (CTA) and limit it to one or two
- Make the design appealing and optimize emails for mobile
- Automate your campaigns
- Use direct mail-email workflows to complement email with other marketing campaigns
- Follow email or spam regulations
#4 Freemium Strategy
Freemium (free + premium) pricing is a strategy where a business offers a version of their product or services for free and charges a premium fee for any add-ons or upgrades.
This model works well for internet businesses as customer acquisition costs run low and lifetime value is generally high. Here are all the different benefits you get by adopting freemium.
While adopting this pricing model, ensure you’re not giving away too much for free – if you do, your customers will never opt for upgrades or add-ons!
#5 Discount Strategy
Over 85% of consumers are influenced to purchase a product if a coupon code is offered. It reinforces the simple notion that we all love getting good deals. By adopting a discount strategy for your internet business, you can nudge those price-sensitive customers who will subscribe to your broadband if you put a good offer on the table.
The various types of discounts you can offer are;
- Seasonal discounts
- Bulk discounts (annual plan discounts)
- Bundled discounts
- Prepayment discounts
Ensure you’re promoting these discounts to the right set of people to gain conversions.
Here are some other best practices while adopting this strategy.
#6 Upselling Services
Upselling is a marketing strategy that aims to sell a more expensive, premium version of a product or service than a customer already uses.
For example, if they use a 10 Mbps plan with 100 GB of monthly data, you can upsell them to a more premium broadband plan. Many ISP packages upsell with increased data allowances, faster speeds, or additional services like home security or streaming bundles.
Upselling can lead to increased revenue per customer while better aligning their broadband service with evolving needs. To get the most out of this strategy, you must identify customer needs and preferences and demonstrate how the upsell option provides more value.
#7 Social Media Marketing
With more users arriving on social media, it’s the place to be for any business. Social media allows ISP marketers to connect with a diverse and extensive group of people, including their local reach and target audience.
You can talk about the benefits of high-speed internet, various plans, and how to make the most of broadband connection through informative posts, infographics, and videos.
You can share images and videos of customer testimonials and visually appealing content that captures the audience’s attention.
Check out how Verizon uses social media to win over sports fans.
Create Your Broadband Marketing Campaign Today!
Getting your broadband marketing strategy right will transform your business. While you may start with all or some of these strategies, ensure you’re not missing out on the most important one – direct mail marketing.
Direct mail will help you cut through the digital noise and reach your audience in a tangible way that’s proven to drive a higher ROI.
If you’re unsure how to get started with it, head over to our blog to get all the insights on direct marketing. You can register for free on Postalytics to learn as you go.