Telerivet is proud to highlight its partnership with DT One, a global leader in airtime and data rewards, to bring the full suite of mobile incentive solutions to businesses and organizations worldwide.
This collaboration aims to enhance the reach and affordability of airtime and mobile rewards, empowering companies to drive engagement, incentivize performance, and collect valuable insights in key markets, including Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and beyond.
With this partnership, Telerivet and DT One are working together to offer competitive rates on airtime and data bundles. This provides businesses with a cost-effective way to reward employees, retailers, and customers; and enables organizations to collect valuable impact data by incentivizing community survey responses.
By leveraging mobile rewards, organizations can unlock powerful new dimensions of communication and engagement to achieve their goals.
What are mobile rewards and airtime transfers?
Mobile rewards and airtime transfers are ways that companies and non-profit organizations can provide extra value to anyone who owns and uses a mobile phone.
Airtime transfers and mobile rewards are particularly popular with customers on prepaid phone contracts, also known as pay-as-you-go plans. On these types of plans, an airtime transfer means topping up the account credit automatically.
This is comparable to sending that person a set amount of money, except it’s simply a non-cash way to deliver that money.
When you use Telerivet to send airtime credit to a person’s mobile account, that credit can then be used for calls, texts, internet access, and more.
The denominations available for airtime credits depend on the country and mobile network, but typically range from less than $0.10 to more than $10 (USD). The recipient will receive the credit denominated in their local currency.
In addition to sending airtime credits, Telerivet's integration with DT One now also supports sending data, talk-time, and SMS bundles to prepaid mobile phone users on 200+ mobile networks in 90+ countries. Due to discounts offered by the mobile networks, bundles are often more cost-effective than airtime credits when using services included in the bundle.
Using Telerivet's integration with DT One, your organization can send these rewards to your customers, employees, or other people helping the organization on an ad hoc or programmatic basis.
How can I use mobile rewards in my organization?
There are countless ways you can use mobile rewards in your business.
Here are five ways we’ve seen Telerivet customers use airtime transfers and mobile rewards to great effect:
Incentivizing retailers and field teams
In this scenario, you have retailers on the ground trying to sell products and meet sales targets.
As those sales go through and as targets are met, you can provide real-time rewards to those retailers and field workers, offering the incentive as they go.
For example, Telerivet worked with a fast-moving consumer goods company—one that sells high volumes of products at lower prices or margins—that used a combination of mobile rewards and SMS services to increase its retailer database by over 500%. Over a period of two to three years, this approach also helped them increase their market share by 5%.
Improving data collection through surveys and polls
This is a really popular way of leveraging airtime transfers across a range of sectors.
We’ve seen this used extensively by private sector businesses, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and charities.
The mechanism is simple: you want customers, recipients, or stakeholders to complete a survey or poll, and you reward them with airtime for doing so.
This increases your response rates, which in turn improves both your sample size and the speed at which you can complete a research campaign.
Better response rates mean better data, which gives you more opportunities to make that data actionable. And for NGOs, scalable impact data is vital for donors and grantmakers.
Running loyalty campaigns
Businesses can use mobile rewards to reward loyalty, offering existing customers additional “thank you” rewards to create a brilliant customer experience.
This approach strengthens your brand equity and can increase customer retention over the long term.
Supporting NGO and humanitarian efforts
We see many NGOs and charities using airtime transfers and mobile rewards to incentivize participation in programs or as direct support for stakeholders in hard-to-reach regions.
This provides a quantitatively measurable way of distributing rewards and delivering benefits. It also offers a great method for demonstrating value and impact to grant programs and future sponsors.
In addition to sending mobile rewards to beneficiaries, NGOs and humanitarian efforts can also use mobile rewards to incentivize and compensate their field teams. For example, an NGO in West Africa has been using Telerivet to send airtime transfers and data bundles to hundreds of staff members working to increase rates of childhood vaccinations.
Supporting internal operations
Airtime transfers can also be used within a business or organization to easily add credit to the business's own prepaid SIM cards, even when the SIM cards are located remotely.
For example, organizations sending text messages via the Telerivet Gateway Android app can use Telerivet to send airtime credits, SMS bundles, or data bundles to their Android phone.
In addition to sending airtime to mobile phones, airtime can also be transferred to IoT (Internet of Things) SIM cards used for M2M (Machine-to-Machine) communication. For example, a technology company in West Africa has been using Telerivet to send airtime to SIM cards on devices used for remote security monitoring.
Where are mobile rewards most popular?
These types of mobile rewards and airtime transfers are most popular in areas where prepaid phone contracts are most common.
An airtime transfer is far more effective when someone sees their airtime as something they normally need to top up, rather than trying to add airtime to an existing contract allowance that already covers their needs.
As such, these systems tend to perform best in certain geographies.
For example, markets like the United States, Canada, or the UK may see lower effectiveness for these campaigns because those markets are almost entirely postpaid.
However, across large parts of the world, prepaid contracts are highly dominant.
We see this trend across large parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In Asia specifically, the market share of prepaid contracts is above 95% in countries like Bangladesh, Bhutan, Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, Timor-Leste, and many others around the 90% mark.
In these regions, being able to transfer airtime is a significant motivator for almost the entire market.
This means that if you’re a company providing services in cities like Manila, Bangkok, Kathmandu, or a range of other major world cities, it makes complete sense to include airtime transfers, as well as other digital mobile rewards and vouchers, in your arsenal for engaging, incentivizing, motivating, and rewarding your customers and employees.
Some of the fastest-growing economies in the world right now are heavily prepaid.
These markets are increasingly not just digital-first, but mobile-first.
The market opportunity for delivering value via airtime transfers and mobile rewards is not to be missed.
Getting started with airtime and mobile rewards
To see what options for airtime transfers and bundles are available in the country you work in, visit the Airtime Transfer page and select the country and mobile network from the dropdown.
To get started sending airtime and mobile rewards, create a Telerivet account and then follow the steps to enable airtime transfer for your account.
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