With millions of Americans struggling to make ends meet due to inflation, AT&T and Verizon used “inflation” as an excuse to raise their rates while still raking in billions in profits. At Mint, we have a history of doing the exact opposite of big wireless, and increasing fees was not something we were going to do. Instead, we deflated the prices of all of our new customer plans to just $15 a month. This not only made it easier for cost-conscious people to switch to Mint Mobile, but it showed that unlike big wireless, “we don’t hate you.”
Our goals were to drive at least a 50% lift in sales for June and July over the previous 60-day run rate, as well as a 50% lift in port-ins from AT&T and Verizon (meaning people leave those carriers for Mint and transfer, or port, their telephone number). Our marketing objective was to lift our Value for the Money score above that of our competitors.
In May 2022, AT&T announced that they were increasing prices for some customers. Shortly after, Verizon announced that they were also raising prices and introduced a new fee called an “Economic Adjustment Charge” of up to $2.20/mo/line in response to “economic conditions”. The challenge for us was to join the conversation but in a way that made sense for the brand, which typically uses humor to speak to consumers. With the seriousness of economic uncertainty, we had to figure out a way to be true to our brand without being insensitive. And to do it quickly while people were upset about their increasing phone bills. We decided the best way to do that would be to develop a promotion where we deflated the prices of our plans. By showing consumers that we have their back in a difficult time, we could earn their trust, which would allow us to be funny without being insulting. Typically when we launch a promotion, we spend months planning and developing it, however if we stuck to that timeline with this promotion, we would miss the opportunity to push off of the big wireless price increases. Therefore, we assembled a cross-functional team to fast track the promo development, while parallel pathing the development of the creative assets. That allowed us to launch our promo and accompanying creative less than three weeks after Verizon introduced their Economic Adjustment Charge.
We produced two spots with our owner Ryan Reynolds, talking about how big wireless raised their prices due to inflation and we deflated ours. Ryan and Mint launched those spots on social media, and we ran them throughout the campaign on digital, paid social and TV. From a PR standpoint, Ryan did a Yahoo Finance interview discussing the campaign and inflation in general. The campaign was also featured in dozens of other online publications including MSN, USA Today, TechRadar, The Drum and Tom’s Guide. We followed those two spots up with another that featured Ryan and the Founder of Arizona Iced Tea, Don Vultaggio, talking about how neither brand has ever raised their prices, and encouraged people to buy the Mint Arizona Starter Pack at Target for $15.99 (in “two separate aisles, you’ll have to do the packaging yourself”).
Our efforts were a success, as we flawlessly launched the promotion and generated awareness with relevant content that translated into a sizable increase in visits to our site. Those efforts led to a 100% lift in sales over the previous 60-day period, doubling our expectations.
Additional successes include:
+53% Increase in overall web traffic vs previous period
+88% Port-ins versus previous 2 months
+46% Customer referrals (via our Refer-a-Friend program) versus previous 3 weeks
+33% Website conversion rate
+76% in daily purchase volume over our non-promotional baseline
+31% in purchase rate over our non-promotional baseline
We also increased our Value for the Money score by 6%, which propelled us above Verizon and AT&T.
