1.8M new subscribers to mobile operator’s streaming service

A carefully curated mobile campaign to boost the flat-take up of Vodacom’s music streaming service, MyMuze, among its South African userbase. Apple launched its music service to the South African market in 2015, followed by Spotify in 2018. Vodacom launched MyMuze the following year, in 2019, in order to diversify its revenue streams and make it a more attractive choice of mobile carrier among 18-35-year-olds in the region.

The primary objective was for Vodacom to cross-sell to its 46.1 million prepaid and contract customers and get them to subscribe to the MyMuze service at a low cost-per-acquisition. Long term, Vodacom wanted MyMuze to compete head-to-head with Spotify and Apple Music and become the music streaming service of choice in the region.

In order to crack the youth demographic, the messaging for the campaign had to be pitch-perfect and Vodacom had to act fast. Long plays like SEO or engaging social influencers were simply out of the question, so it was decided that Vodacom would take full of advantage of its “owned” touchpoints such as SMS, USSD and its captive web portal, Connect-U along with web-based advertising. In addition to the offer of the streaming service with one free day to trial the service, the campaign set up two powerful promotions. First, new subscribers would have the chance of winning R30,000 in cash. And secondly, through its music industry connections, they would offer the chance to win a dinner with South African rap superstar, AKA.

The first three months of the campaign delivered a staggering 4x increase in MyMuze’s active user base. Over the course of the 8-month campaign, almost 2 million (1.8M) new subscribers were delivered to the service. The cost-per-acquisition was also minimal, as Vodacom owned the majority of touchpoints leveraged in the campaign.