At first glance, building a word-of-mouth marketing campaign around a low-cost-to-free phone service would seem about as complex as organizing a one-car parade. After all, anyone who tries the service and likes the savings is going to reach for a phone and tell their non-user friends about you. Aren’t they?
Well, yes, says Frederik Hermann, director of global marketing for low-cost voice calling service JaJah. But relying on those volunteer customer evangelists isn’t necessarily going to get the most influential people up and calling. And it won’t identify specific user segments that might be especially ripe for more intensive marketing.
In a nutshell, JaJah gives callers an easy way to make IP voice calls without downloading software to their computers (a big hurdle for the less technically gifted) or donning a nifty headset (a deal-breaker for those users who aren’t Time-Life operators). Users simply go to the JaJah Web page, open a free account and pre-pay for some calls. To use the service, they type in their regular phone number and that of the person they want to call and hit “submit.” After a short wait, their listed phone number rings and they hear a recorded message saying their call will be connected.
JaJah can do this because it holds agreements with some 130 phone companies around the globe and maintains equipment in their switching centers that puts calls up onto the Internet and pulls them down at the other end. So a call from Albania to Australia is a cheap local call at both ends and travels over the free Internet in the middle. JaJah registrants can talk to non-users for much less than standard phone fees — as little as 2 cents a minute; and they can talk to other registered users for free.
It’s in the company’s interest to grow its member rolls as large as possible. Last March, the privately held company said it had amassed 2 million users in its first year of operation, and that 800,000 of those came on board during the first three months of 2007. “It’s a viral numbers game,” JaJah CEO Trevor Healy told Reuters at the time. “The more registered users, the more calls get made and the more new users become aware.”
To turn up the heat under that viral momentum, JaJah turned to viral marketing consultancy PopularMedia. After some study, Popular identified a few customer segments with more than average potential — most notably, the Indian subcontinent and the large Indian population living abroad. From early July through Indian Independence Day (Aug. 15), JaJah offered calls between India and the U.S., Canada and the U.K for about 7 cents a minute.
“We have a very international user base, but India is a huge emerging market,” Hermann says. And an underserved one for its size. “We specifically wanted to create awareness in a market where we were still kind of new, and we targeted India as a country where we needed to gain more users and more brand awareness.”
PopularMedia designed a special Web page for Indian customers, www.JajahIndia.com, and an e-mail promotion aimed at current Indian registrants. The page and e-mail offered registered users 30 free calling minutes if they persuaded five friends to join with them, and free calling among those countries until next year for the registrant who signed up the largest number of friends.
The results were impressive. Thirty-three percent of participants signed up for JaJah’s service during the campaign. The average participant invited 9.6 friends to join JaJah, sending out nearly 250,000 invitations to 100 countries during the six weeks of the promotion. Fifty percent of those invited actually converted to registered users.
PopularMedia CEO Jim Calhoun says one trick was keeping the mechanics of inviting friends to join as simple as the JaJah user interface. Users were able to access their Web-based e-mail address books directly from the JaJahIndia.com site to make invitations easier. They were also given a personalized invitation link to post on their blogs or in their e-mail signatures, and got credit for newcomers signing up through those links.
Hooking into participants’ address books was not only a convenience for them, of course, it also meant that e-mail invitations to their friends went out via their personal e-mail addresses. Such peer-to-peer recommendations are more likely to be opened, Calhoun says, and the offers are more credible because they come with the implicit endorsement of a trusted friend.
Finally, the campaign also made sure to give participants an easy Web-based scorecard for keeping track of which friends had accepted their invitations and which of those went on to join JaJah, bringing them closer to their free 30 minutes.
Overall, Hermann says, JaJah’s viral marketing campaign produced an almost 70% increase in generated leads during its six-week run, and resulted in almost 90% more conversions than the provider’s baseline marketing efforts.
“We essentially doubled our registrations among the target population with this campaign,” Hermann says. And JaJah’s now looking for other target segments to help get its message out virally.
For more articles on interactive marketing, go to www.promomagazine.com/interactivemarketing
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