A Smile for a Dial - Sonic.net Says "Thank You" to Loyal Dial-Up Customers
Background
Sonic.net is a full-service Internet provider, dedicated to delivering fast, reliable and inexpensive connectivity while providing award-winning technical support. Based out of Santa Rosa, Calif, the company was one of the first ISPs to bring DSL access to the Northern California wine country in 1994, and it continues to lead the way in making new Internet access and hosting solutions available to the public.
Situation
In early 2004, Dane Jasper, CEO and president of Sonic.net, decided to invest in a Web accelerator tool to offer faster connections for his dial-up subscribers, a small but important part of Sonic.net's customer base. After researching his options, Jasper chose market leader Propel Accelerator, which immediately speeds up a typical user's Web-browsing experience.
Jasper didn't take the purchase decision lightly. "I know this business inside and out, and I chose Propel for several reasons," he said. "First, their technical platform is superior to anything on the market. They also offered us fixed pricing, which is a much smarter investment for a subscriber-based business like ours. And Propel had a fantastic reputation for excellent client support, which is an absolutely must for any kind of service provider."
Propel Accelerator delivers striking performance improvements to low-speed broadband and dial-up connections. Using a proprietary implementation of wavelet compression technology and other new acceleration techniques, Propel Accelerator consistently delivers better-looking images at equivalent levels of acceleration compared to Propel competitors.
Solution
Jasper however, had something special planned for his customers when deciding on Propel Accelerator, something that was quite different than what other ISPs were doing. He wanted to offer it to his dial-up customers for free.
Jasper explained, "All you hear about these days is the latest this, the greatest that, but not everyone wants or can afford the latest and greatest when it comes to technology, and that includes Internet access," Jasper said. "We have a stable, happy group of dial-up customers, but that doesn't mean that other service providers wouldn't love to have their business. So it's important to us that our dial-up subscribers understand that we appreciate them just as much as we do our other customers."
Once Propel Accelerator was up and running, the challenge for Sonic.net was how to let its dial-up customers know about it. Jasper decided that the best way to inform users about the new offering was to contact each one individually via email. So that's exactly what the company did. In mid-2004, over a 10-day period to allow time to handle the replies to activate the free service, Sonic.net sent out 10,000 individual emails encouraging customers to sign up. It repeated the effort 30 days later and once again when the Macintosh version became available in early 2005.
Results
Without exaggeration, the result of the awareness campaign was increased customer loyalty in an industry where customer churn is very high and extremely expensive. In total more than 30% of Sonic.net's dial-up subscribers chose to activate Propel Accelerator, and many of them expressed their gratitude along with their replies to the offer. "We received a huge number of thank-you responses, and many of them were from customers who declined the service!" Jasper said. "People sincerely appreciated the gesture."
According to David Murray, Propel president and COO, "We are excited by the results Sonic.net has achieved with the rollout of Propel's Web acceleration service to its customers. In today's competitive worldwide market, Propel provides Internet Service Providers with a solution that differentiates them from the competition and reduces customer churn."
Jasper said he's very pleased with his decision to go with Propel. "The product works perfectly, and our customers are happy, so the investment was worth every penny."
