Current eMessage > Creative Solutions > June 2017

Creative Solutions

School’s out! Time to get ready for back to school

By Ryan Thompson, Creative Services Manager

For telecom companies, it’s time for some back-to-school prep work. Most schools have only been out a week or two, and the first bell of the 2017-2018 school year isn’t even a distant concern yet for the kids playing in your town’s pool, but now is the best time to put together a plan to capitalize on students’ need for the internet.

While there are many approaches you can take when it comes to selling more internet as part of a back to school campaign, we’ll look at three options.

Promote Lifeline
Now that Lifeline support is available for internet service, there are likely households in your community with school-aged children who would truly benefit from this program. Nationally, as of 2015, 17 percent of households with school-aged children do not have access to internet at home. Not having internet access at home puts these students at a real educational disadvantage as so much of today’s learning occurs online. Helping students without internet access is a great reason to promote this program. Reaching out via social media is an ideal approach for this demographic as the Lifeline information can easily be shared in this format. Direct mail is also an option, and don’t forget to post information about discounted internet on your website in an easy to find location.

Give customers an academic boost
Back to school season is a great time to offer customers a temporary bandwidth boost to allow them to test drive a higher speed of internet on the new school year’s first batch of homework. Typically the speed boost lasts a month and then customers have an option to keep the higher speed or drop down to their previous tier. Customers who aren’t on your faster internet packages are easy to reach through selective bill inserts and on-bill ads.

A little shopping money
Back to school time is expensive for many families, but offering a gift card or other tangible item to new customers, or current customers who upgrade their services, can really help your numbers. Agreements can be structured so customers must keep your service long enough to recoup the cost of the gift card. For a customer on the fence regarding signing up for internet service, receiving a gift card to help with back-to-school shopping can be a real tipping point. Social media, direct mail, and a good spot on your website are all helpful to promote this type of offer.

For assistance in implementing any of these ideas, please contact MACC’s Creative Services Team. Your MACC Customer Master Software Support Team can also help with running reports to identify potential customers, setting up selective on-bill ads to reach specific segments of your customer base and helping you configure a variety of tools to track your results.