Sprint said it inked a new deal with Audience Acuity to license the company’s National Consumer Database, Super Identity Graph and Business Database solutions. Sprint said it will integrate Audience Acuity’s services into its marketing efforts.
Specifically, Sprint said the deal will “drive new customer acquisition in targeted geographic areas.”
“Reorienting our data using a customer-centric focus and accurately attributing behavior to carefully executed, multi-channel activities will be crucial to our acquisition strategy,” said Allan Samson, Sprint’s SVP of marketing, in a release. “We selected Audience Acuity because of their experience implementing enterprise-wide solutions.”
Importantly, Audience Acuity’s databases contain information on more than 260 million adults and more than 500 million “digital identities.” Essentially, the company works to track Americans online and offline in order to provide “effective approaches to managing the customer journey” and “omni-channel, microtargeting and engagement, at scale.”
Sprint’s new deal with Audience Acuity comes amid the company’s increasing focus on selling services online. During its recent quarterly conference call, Sprint CEO Michel Combes offered some insights into the carrier’s new digital strategies it’s using to further reduce expenses and boost results.
“We strongly believe in the digital platform to boost sales going forward,” Combes said during the call.
Interestingly, Combes said that Sprint’s weeklong offer of unlimited services for $15 per month was essentially a test of Sprint’s digital-only sales channel. The offer ended after a week’s time in June.
"The goal for us was really to test our digital capabilities,” Combes said. "It was in the market only one week, and it was only to test digital capabilities. So, it was clearly not a material driver of results for the quarter. That was not the intent. That was not the aim."
He added: "The digital channel is a great channel to address price-conscious customers as they want convenience in order to accept our service offerings. … So, this delivered us good insight moving forward for how to leverage this digital channel. That was the aim, and that's what we've done."
Sprint’s shift to digital efforts is the latest sales tactic by the company. Sprint previously worked to score new customers by lowering its prices and also by engaging in more regional strategies and offerings, but the company has said that those strategies haven’t paid off.