Sell where your customers already are
What WhatsApp, Shopee and a million small shops taught me.
At Indosat I was responsible for about $119 million a month in revenue. A lot of that came from being in more places, not from one big campaign.
Our own channels were the IM3 app, SMS and the *123# menu. But most people didn't spend their day in our app. They were in their bank app, on Shopee, on WhatsApp, or at the small shop near their house.
So we went to them. I brought IM3 Hot Promo, our personal offers, into 12 partner apps, including Shopee, Tokopedia, Blibli, Livin' by Mandiri, myBCA, BRImo and Mitra Bukalapak. Shopee alone reached about $125,000 a day, and more than $250,000 on paydays.
WhatsApp was similar. It was built for customer service, like checking your balance. But that's exactly when people think about buying more data. We made it a sales channel for the first time. It reached about $9,000 a day, and about half of the people who bought there came back the next month.
It wasn't easy. Every partner had its own API, so I spent a lot of time in Postman figuring out whether a problem was on our side or theirs. Every new channel also needed consent rules and frequency caps. But being where customers already are made a big difference.