How Airtel Used Stylized Push Templates to Uplift Their CTR [Customer Spotlight]

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With a satellite network that spans 365,000+ RKMs in 50 countries and five continents, a diverse product portfolio, and strategically located submarine cables, it comes as no surprise that Airtel is the largest provider of mobile telephony and the second-largest provider of fixed telephony in India.

The organization has been pushing the boundaries in digital service delivery with a critical focus on enhanced end-user experience, round-the-clock infrastructure availability, and superior service quality. Their video streaming service, Airtel XStream, also recently achieved a 2 million paid subscriber milestone and is now India’s fastest-growing OTT aggregator!

To top it all off, the communications giant launched India’s first multiplex on the Partynite Metaverse platform just days ago. Airtel XStream Multiplex is an extension of the company’s XStream Premium service and is a 20-screen platform with content libraries from prominent OTT partners, all accessible through the app.

With an abundant portfolio of offerings and hundreds of millions of users that avail Airtel’s services, we wanted to understand how the brand was able to facilitate intelligent customer engagement for these customers using MoEngage’s capabilities, specifically through push notifications.

Key Objectives That Airtel Wished to Achieve Using MoEngage’s Platform

Before we explore the kind of effect Airtel saw by optimizing their current customer engagement strategies using MoEngage’s Insights-led engagement platform, let’s look at the business goals that Airtel wished to achieve using these initiatives:

1. Driving customers to do various kinds of recharges (add-ons and expiry top-ups), be it in the form of internet data pack, calling, DTH, Fiber, etc
2. Cross-selling other Airtel offerings to customers that are active/ have recently done some form of recharge on Airtel Wynk Music, Disney+ Hotstar Mobile, or purchased an Airtel XStream Mobile Pack, among others
3. Upselling Airtel Bank/UPI and Airtel Black services to their active customers by prompting them to take advantage of the following offerings:
   – Send and receive money directly in their bank
   – Send and receive money via Airtel UPI
   – Scan any QR code to pay
   – Pay online for products and services from their favorite shops and apps
4. Disseminating information to their customers about all the exciting Airtel offers and rewards like free trials for Amazon Prime Video (mobile editions) and access to offers on Apollo 24|7 Circle and FASTag

How Airtel Utilized MoEngage’s Push Notification Capabilities to Drive Customer Engagement

While providing relevant and actionable content is essential, maintaining a consistent and interactive connection with your customers through that content is how you guarantee customer satisfaction. In this context, push notifications have become crucial for marketers across industries to engage with customers on their platforms proactively.

But you know what’s better than basic push notifications? Customized, stylized push notifications that are personalized according to your customers! These types of push notifications not only solidify brand voice but are also a great way of making sure you engage with your customers throughout their lifecycle effectively.

Here are some of the ways through which Airtel was able to drive impeccable customer communication through MoEngage’s Push Notification capabilities.

1. Stylized Push Templates: Giving the push notifications a creative edge by using colors and rich text to stand out made all the difference in grabbing the customers’ attention. MoEngage’s Stylized Push Template campaigns delivered 5% better CTR than the basic push campaigns. The brand also saw a 20% uplift in the overall CTR and over 22% uplift in campaigns-based CTR in the first quarter of 2022 alone! One example of this is after a form of recharge was completed on the app, stylized image-only push notifications were sent to educate customers about the extra benefits and to drive the adoption of Airtel XStream.
   Learn how to reach customers and increase retention rates using Push Notifications.
2. Carousel Push Notifications: To enhance the impact of stylized push templates further, Airtel also used MoEngage’s Carousel Notification feature to turn these notifications into rich, interactive experiences using carousels. One example of this feature is a campaign Airtel ran for prepaid customers. This campaign prompted the customers to sign up for Airtel Cloud Storage, recharge to unlock offers, receive 50% off by using Airtel UPI to make a transaction, and access offers post-registration– all using one push notification only.
   
   Another example of a carousel where the brand prompts upsell and cross-sell of other offerings of Airtel, like DTH, FIBER, etc., is:
   With carousel notifications, the brand witnessed an uplift of over 42% in the CTR! The reason for the upsurge is that with carousel notifications, brands are able to add multiple unique CTAs within the same push notification. Therefore, it makes cross-selling and promoting the brand’s partners much more effortless.

A/B Testing to Gauge the Impact of Vernacular-Based Image Push Notifications

To test which types of push notifications perform better for the brand, MoEngage set out to compare the impact of both image and text push notifications. To analyze this, two types of campaigns were executed by Airtel:

1. Airtel Cloud Campaigns: When a customer successfully completes a recharge via the Airtel Thanks App, they get access to 2GB worth of Airtel Cloud storage, which generally goes unused, and one of the reasons for this is the lack of user awareness.
2. Airtel XStream Campaigns: When a customer successfully completes a recharge, the offer of free subscriptions to products like XStream, Sonyliv, etc will automatically be presented in the form of push notifications.

While initially, both of these campaigns were executed via text-only push notifications, the brand moved onto image-only push notifications to see whether they positively impacted the CTR. Using MoEngage’s Locale Split, the brand further personalized the notifications for their customers by splitting the target audience.

This split was based on Circle IDs, which is essentially a grouping of customers based on their preferred languages and using that to modify the language on the image push notifications accordingly.

By adding a layer of personalization over carousel push notifications using stylized push templates with multiple CTAs, it becomes much easier to cross-sell! Airtel saw an overall uplift of around 30-35% in the CTR!

Additionally, Airtel customers could select the number of days for which they want to ‘snooze’ communication from the brand. This allowed the customers not to receive too many push notifications and get overwhelmed.

Since India’s demographic is incredibly wide with a variety of cultures and languages, tapping into the vernacular aspect is exceptionally crucial for brands. Using geolocation and users’ app language settings, Airtel was able to cater to their customers’ preferences in a way that was personal to them.

Using vernacular-based push notifications over the standard English ones, the brand was able to reap an uplift of over 66% in the CTR!

This goes to show that when executed correctly, the benefits of push notifications can be exceptionally rewarding!

Want to know more about how your brand can also craft beautiful, stylized push notifications to drive better engagement rates? Click here and book a demo today!

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