For many mobile credit providers, the high churn in the prepaid industry is a cause for concern. Luckily, there are ways to combat churn and increase loyalty that don’t require giving it all away for free.
There’s blood in the water
In their 2005 business classic, Blue Ocean Strategy, authors W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne explained the difference between a blue ocean and a red ocean. Whereas a blue ocean is a clear and unexplored space with hardly any players and vast growth opportunities, a red ocean is marred by cut-throat competition.
Using this analogy, the prepaid market is definitely a red ocean. In fact, one of the challenges facing the industry is the high cost of subscriber acquisition (SAC) as a consequence of incredibly high rates of churn. Research by Juvo (2019) shows that in 2018, a whopping 90% of expenditure was spent on replacing lost subscribers. Sadly, this meant that only 10% was invested towards growing net subscriptions.
Effortless mobile top-up
What’s one major thing that customers value more than saving money? Convenience! Whenever a customer runs out of credit, she needs to decide whether or not to remain a prepaid customer and if so, with which provider. Whether it’s more data, or lower prices, prepaid providers are waging war like never before and many users are tempted to choose the flavour of the month. When it comes to prepaid credit providers, prepaid users have a wide range of options to choose from. For many, this is a major bottleneck.
Unsurprisingly, the most dangerous phase in the customer life-cycle is credit top-up. Whenever a customer wades into this red ocean, odds are they might end up gobbled up a competitor. So instead of lowering prices and investing in promotional deals like everybody else, wouldn’t it be smarter to simply improve the top-up process? Improving the top-up process means your customers get to keep their feet dry and stick with the provider they know.
Solutions to churn in the prepaid phone market
What if you could spend your time maintaining and growing a subscriber base rather than simply replacing lost customers? At Mi-Pay, we believe keeping customers on board requires more than promotional activities and special deals. What’s more, we’ve got plenty of proven solutions to help you right the ship.
One way to differentiate your business from the competition and reduce churn is by offering automatic top-up. Automatic top-up works in various ways. It can either be triggered by a recurring date or whenever credit drops below a predetermined threshold. Other solutions include topping up via chatbots within popular apps such as WhatsApp as well as top-up via Paylinks or Amazon Dash Buttons.
Topping up mobile phone credit should be effortless for your customers. Get in touch to find out if our solutions are right for your business.
If you have any question about our reload services please let me know. I’ll be happy to answer!
About the author
Alper Altan – Reload Services
Business Development Manager
I’m Alper Altan, Business Development Manager at Mi-Pay. I make sure that Mi-Pay maximizes profit on existing customers as well as new business.
