Alltel has announced that since the launch and promotion of its My Circle service, it has seen a 285 percent growth in customer communications.

At the DMA 2008 Conference & Exhibition in Las Vegas, Acxiom Corp. released a case study highlighting the role of its customer intelligence services in Alltel Wireless' My Circle direct marketing campaigns. The carrier claims that the market responded enthusiastically, with My Circle's popularity contributing to consistent year-over-year revenue growth.

"Alltel has seen a 285 percent growth in customer communications since we partnered with Acxiom," said Tara Llewellyn, director of direct marketing for Alltel Wireless, Little Rock, AK. "Their services have enabled a dialogue, giving us opportunities to highlight the benefits to customers of products like My Circle.

"We leverage low-cost communications where we can, and we've had lots of success with texting," she said. "SMS is great from a cost perspective and it delivers results."

Other marketing channels that Alltel takes advantage of include email, direct mail and outbound voice.

"This partnership with Acxiom gives us the ability to engage in customer dialogue much more readily and frequently," Ms. Loewellyn said. "Our marketing programs have been very successful, creating at least $30 million in business value by promoting My Circle to existing customers."

As a result of the popularity of My Circle, the direct marketing team at Alltel Wireless quickly realized that to improve the customer experience, it needed to automate a portion of the company's customer lifecycle management, or CLM, communications.

"Our strategy behind automated CLM is to deliver the right messages to the right consumer at the right time in a cost-efficient manner," Ms. Llewellyn. "Our programs begin very early in a customer's life cycle with welcome message a few days after activation and a follow-up message on day 30.

"There are quite a few versions, which encourage customers to activate My Circle numbers online or to access the self-care My Account portal of our Web site, which customers can use to manage their My Circle numbers, products and services," she said. "We want to reminding them of the benefits of My Circle and how to take advantage of them."

The team engaged interactive marketing services provider Acxiom Corporation to improve the precision, relevance and sophistication of its direct communications.

Acxiom worked closely with the Alltel Wireless team to deliver a set of services that anchored the entire campaign process.

Acxiom combined its data products and customer intelligence with Alltel Wireless' customer data and prospect list for targeted segmentation based on actual customer behavior and real household composites.

"They had a lot of this data before, a lot of transaction information in their system, but they couldn't execute mapping analytics on a program like My Circle," said Greg Hogue, vice president/industry executive for Acxion, Little Rock, AR. "We have enabled Alltel to get into the market faster.

"Acxiom's customer intelligence is designed to help marketers acquire and retain more high-value customers, and to cross-sell and up-sell existing customers while strengthening loyalty," he said. "Our marketing solutions provide deep insight into the look of our clients' best customers to discover how they act and where they come from."

A daily customer lifecycle management engine automated customer communications and delivered relevant direct marketing messages at precise times in the customer lifecycle.

Through advanced analytics, Alltel Wireless said that it gained a deeper understanding of its customers and prospects and produced detailed reporting on campaign effectiveness to drive continuous improvement.

"Acxiom provides us with customer data and enriched demographic profiles of customers we're targeting," Ms. Llewellyn said. "Any marketing program has to have a feedback loop to understand what's working and what's not.

"Now this data is centralized and available to Alltel's analytics team, which will help us feed the next evolution of the program and improve the sophistication of our targeting strategies," she said. "We now have a combined household portrait to make sure we're picking the right customers."

Alltel Wireless' direct marketing team now uses Acxiom's services to manage more than 300 direct marketing initiatives yearly, many of which feature automated CLM campaigns using direct mail, email, outbound voice and text messaging.

Using PersonicX, Acxiom's household-level segmentation system, Alltel Wireless can target potential customers based on consumer behavior and demographic variables.

The data also allows Alltel to design communications that speak specifically to certain customer groups.

With cleansed contact information and centralized customer data, Alltel can personalize communications with relevant information such as the customer's first name and account details.

Interactive marketing services provider Acxiom connects clients with their customers through consumer insight.

The company focuses on consumer data and analytics, information technology, data integration and consulting services for marketing across digital, Internet, email, mobile and direct mail channels.

Alltel is has more than 13 million customers, making it the fifth largest carrier in the U.S.

Verizon Wireless has plans to buy Alltel.

"Being able to reach out and respond to consumers at a specific time down to the day has been very important, and bringing together this data lets us do so in an accurate and timely manner," said Lesa Handle, senior vice president of customer strategies for Alltel.

"We are still reviewing our options as far as mobile advertising to find out what is the best for the overall customer experience," she said. "We want to be very sure about the decisions we make so that advertising is not intrusive to customers."