Last week at its Working Group at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the Mobile Money for the Unbanked programme released a new article on marketing mobile money. With nearly 100 mobile money services now deployed, the industry is increasingly focused on the challenge of achieving scale by persuading customers to become regular mobile money users.

“Driving Customer Usage of Mobile Money for the Unbanked” considers the many nuances of marketing mobile money. A key theme of the article is that marketing mobile money is very different from marketing airtime. Indeed, the customer journey for mobile money from unawareness to regular use is long and requires a number of inputs: customers need to not only be informed that the service exists, but also convinced that it could solve a problem in their lives and educated about how it works. We discuss tactics that marketers can employ when customers get stuck along this journey, such as when they have registered but fail to transact, and we have included a diagnostic as a supplement to the article to help operators diagnose and rectify such issues among their potential customer base.

The article includes 27 mini-case studies about effective—and some less effective—mobile money marketing tactics, and we are grateful to the many mobile operators and other mobile money providers who agreed to share their experiences with the broader industry.

Yasmina McCarty, co-author of the article, and I hope you will find the article useful and tell us what you think in the comments section of this post.