Inside Clearwire’s data-driven customer acquisition strategy

All eyes are on Clearwire – both its Clear retail brand and big-name wholesale partners – as the company spends 2010 embarking on the industry’s first large-scale effort to market 4G services to subscribers just beginning to get comfortable with smartphone devices and 3G.

While mobile operators are already among the most sophisticated marketers in telecom, Clearwire is hoping its data-driven marketing approach can set it apart – and help it meet aggressive customer acquisition numbers for a service that's value is still not entirely understood by the industry, let alone its customers.

While Clearwire has aggressively documented its network rollouts – and shared subscriber numbers as part of earnings calls – it hasn’t been as open about its customer acquisition strategies. To learn more about that important side of its launch story, we talked with Melissa Hilton, vice president and general manager of Clearwire’s data business. Hilton, who is responsible for Clearwire’s product marketing, offer development and audience segmentation, among other tasks, shared some insights into the company’s marketing strategy and tactics. At the center of the conversation: How exactly does Clearwire identify its most ideal customers, and how does knowing more about those customers help it go about acquiring them?

While some of the answers are obvious – and just as importantly the company is still in the early days of its customer acquisition efforts – some key lessons have already emerged, Hilton said.

Among the most important takeaways: the value of assembling a single, consolidated view of the customer; the requirement to use that single view across all marketing channels, retail, Web, direct, etc; and, perhaps most importantly the understanding that not every customer is alike – and in particular leveraging that knowledge to market to 4G subscribers based not on service spins and shiny new devices, but on how those customers will fit a new high-speed mobile data service into how they work and live.

“The area where we’re trying to be different is to be more customized about [marketing and customer acquisition]. This isn’t exactly the same business as a Sprint or AT&T or Verizon is in for wireless phones,” Hilton said, noting that traditional mobile phone marketing has traditionally been more of a “one-size-fits-all” effort.

“What we’ve been able to do differently is target [customer] segments and deliver messages appealing to those segments,” she said. “We’ve got to be much more customized as to why [4G service] is important to certain audience segments.”

After many years getting its business off the ground, Clearwire subscriber rolls are at last ramping up. In February, the company said it had acquired 87,000 retail subscribers in the fourth quarter of last year, more than the rest of last year combined. On the wholesale side, it acquired another 46,000 4G subscribers through partners including Sprint, Comcast and Time Warner Cable. Overall, the company ended last year with 688,000 subscribers, up from 475,000 a year ago. Its goal is to reach a little over 2 million 4G subscribers by early next year.

Today, the company offers 4G services to a potential 24 million users in 27 markets – including Chicago, Dallas, Las Vegas, Atlanta, Philadelphia and Seattle – and aims to cover 120 million users in 80 markets by the end of 2010.