How T-Mobile Uses Adobe Marketing Cloud Audiences to Convert Customers from Competing Carriers

Marketers today are data rich. Data flows from everywhere – from offline and online sources and across solutions – and it’s collected, modified, and expanded continuously. Each solution contains information that could be valuable elsewhere. Connecting that data to create high-impact customer experiences is the goal, and it’s one that T-Mobile has found great success with recently.

Before joining Adobe Marketing Cloud and gaining access to the Audiences core service, T-Mobile’s marketing teams would funnel marketing data from Adobe Target into Adobe Analytics, often uncovering useful insights post-campaign. Carrier data, a vital piece of information in T-Mobile’s personalization efforts, could be surfaced in Adobe Analytics, but couldn’t be quickly integrated into its targeting efforts.

Adobe Marketing Cloud core services turned that process on its head. Using the Audiences core service, T-Mobile can integrate very specific information from Adobe Analytics (in this example, mobile carrier data) into Adobe Target to personalize an individual customer experience more quickly and precisely. With a 34% lift in conversion in the first month alone, the results speak for themselves. Here are the four steps Ryan Pizzuto, T-Mobile’s testing and optimization manager, and his team used to target competitors’ customers and increase conversion:

1. Identify customers of competing wireless carriers using Adobe Analytics.

With Adobe Analytics, marketers and analysts can identify very granular details about a customer’s behavior, preferences, location, device use, and much more. Among these details is very specific information about the device a person is using to access your website, which is of keen interest to T-Mobile’s marketing team. Using Adobe Analytics, T-Mobile can identify users who visit its website from devices powered by competing wireless carriers.

2. Share this segment of people to Adobe Marketing Cloud Audiences.

Once site visitors from competing wireless carriers are identified in Adobe Analytics, this audience is shared to the Adobe Marketing Cloud using just two clicks. Once the audience is shared to the Adobe Marketing Cloud, it appears in the Audiences core service audience library. Here it can be used by T-Mobile’s various marketing teams, including the Adobe Target marketers optimizing the Web experience.

3. Test a new carrier-specific message to this audience using Adobe Target.

By sharing audiences directly via Adobe Marketing Cloud, T-Mobile’s team can test and optimize faster using virtually any data from Adobe Marketing Cloud. In this case, T-Mobile was able to test specific messages to competing vendors’ customers, with offers like “Stop waiting. Switch to T-Mobile today and we’ll pay your early termination fee from AT&T.”

4. Be a personalization rockstar—for your prospective customers and your boss.

T-Mobile’s personalization efforts were extremely fruitful. There was a measurable effect on “cart starts” when messages were personalized by mobile carrier, compared to generic messages. T-Mobile first tested a generic message encouraging customers to switch to T-Mobile; this resulted in a 9% lift in cart starts. When T-Mobile personalized the message based on carrier, there was a 34% lift in cart start rates within the first month.

This is just one example of how Adobe Marketing Cloud core services are improving T-Mobile’s personalization. More are forthcoming, and we are excited about the experiences and results that core services are driving for fast-moving marketers everywhere. You can hear more of T-Mobile’s story from Ryan Pizzuto, who talked about the process at Adobe Summit.