Winning over cable TV customers is no simple feat. Competition is fierce, and leading telecom service providers offer bundled services that balance savings with premium services that consumers want.

Cable provider Comcast recently attempted to leverage its high definition (HD) television service, a technology becoming popular with consumers, with a triple play bundle promotion. Comcast is marketing a HD Triple Play bundle across media channels. The bundle includes free HD service as an incentive to also subscribe to digital voice and high speed internet.

But this made me wonder: is Comcast actually bringing in more people than its competitors and benchmarks to look at bundles online?

Let’s start with the advertising. The online banner ad (shown below) has a clear call to action with the “Learn More Now” button.

In contrast, the direct mail piece (shown below) lacks any next step for customers. I’m consistently surprised that Comcast’s direct mail pieces don’t always have a reference to Comcast.com, and I almost fell out of my chair when I saw this insert. This piece doesn’t highlight Comcast.com or a telesales phone number for customers to call. What is a customer to do?

To explore what people are actually doing online when it comes to cable bundles, I leveraged Compete’s Online Channel Effectiveness intelligence.

First, I looked at what percentage of online visitors do top telecom and cable providers attract to the pages that promote its products, shown in the chart below.

This chart highlights how Comcast (in red) only led AT&T in the proportion of visitors who viewed pages promoting its products. AT&T’s percentage is lower because the provider integrates its wireless cell phones on the same site. Traffic to these wireless pages is not included in this view, which drives the wireline percentage down. Verizon’s percentage is based on all wireline traffic to Verizon.com and excludes traffic to Verizonwireless.com. But what percentage of those wireline product visitors also viewed the bundle pages on the telecom and cable provider sites?

We’ve already seen that Comcast has been promoting its HD Triple Play online and offline. Even though Comcast is behind competitors and benchmarks in getting visitors to look at the product pages, surely this advertising and the free HD offer are helping the provider perform better in bundle interest, right? Wrong. As shown in the chart below, Comcast trails all of the telecom and cable providers in getting the people who make it to the product pages to visit the bundle pages.

It’s no surprise that Comcast’s overall product and bundle interest penetrations are low when marketing tactics like direct mail do little to promote Comcast.com. Comcast should highlight Comcast.com more in its marketing in order to help drive product interest among both prospects and existing customers. Comcast’s HD Triple Play bundle may be an attractive offer, but it doesn’t appear to pose a threat online relative to the percentages of visitors viewing product and bundle pages its top competitors’ sites.

Comcast is now leveraging another emerging technology by giving away a FREE Dell netbook when consumers purchase a triple play bundle. Hopefully, Comcast will improve its tactics in promoting Comcast.com to help drive online interest, which will become even more important when Comcast starts bundling Wi-Max for an even more online savvy segment.

Last week Verizon Wireless’s COO confirmed that the carrier would be begin selling the Palm Pre smartphone in ‘early 2010′. It’s no surprise that the Pre will wind up at both CDMA-based carriers eventually.  However, it is surprising how soon the device will be available from another carrier after its initial exclusive launch at Sprint in June 2009.The stakes could be high for Verizon Wireless here. Sure, they are the largest wireless carrier in the US, and the Palm Pre will be a great addition. But their last flagship device, the Blackberry Storm, fell short of its astronomical expectations, frustrating many who saw the Storm as a bona fide rival of the iPhone. If a Verizon Wireless Pre launch falls flat in the absence of another “blockbuster” device, the chances of attracting that ever-elusive iPhone killer could be slipping away.I got out my crystal ball (i.e. Compete’s online behavioral panel) to better understand who is shopping for the Palm Pre today, and what that could mean for the move to Verizon Wireless.

Carrier Customers’ Interest in the Palm Pre

Share of interest by carrier for online carrier customers that viewed the Palm Pre, June 2009.

Naturally Sprint customers are more active in researching the Palm Pre - they have immediate access to it and have received the bulk of targeted advertising for it. Still, few VZW customers looked at the device on Sprint’s website - no more or less than AT&T customers or T-Mobile customers. Is this an early sign that the Palm Pre won’t be as successful at VZW as Sprint? Or could it mean that these customers are so satisfied with VZW that they would never even think of switching carriers?

Incentives are a big factor in answering those questions (subsidies, rebates, offers, etc.) and since we don’t have any information about Verizon Wireless’s incentive plan we can’t really answer them. But there is a specific group of people that help us dig a bit deeper. They are who we call ‘pre-churners’. A pre-churner is someone who is a current customer of one carrier, but is actively shopping on other carrier websites. It is a measure of how many customers are thinking about jumping ship, making them an important group to monitor and measure on a regular basis. If a large proportion of Verizon Wireless’s pre-churners are shopping the Palm Pre, bringing the device on board may help retain those customers. If not, Verizon Wireless may want to look at which other devices do attract their pre-churners.

Verizon Wireless Pre-Churners’ Interest in the Palm Pre and iPhone 3G S

Percentage of VZW’s pre-churners that viewed each device online at the associated carrier during June 2009.

The 1.7% of VZW pre-churners interested in the Palm Pre is actually about 50% less than that of Sprint or T-Mobile pre-churners, suggesting that bringing the Palm Pre to VZW won’t actually help the carrier retain some of its riskiest customers. On the other hand, VZW’s 14.8% pre-churner interest in the iPhone 3G S is over 40% higher than that of pre-churners from Sprint or T-Mobile. Since online wireless shopping is largely concentrated at carrier websites (and traffic to iPhone-specific pages on Apple.com dwarfs traffic to Palm’s website anyways), I think it’s safe to say that AT&T’s exclusive deal on the iPhone still appears to be a major pain in Verizon Wireless’ side.

Will the Palm Pre be the golden ticket Verizon Wireless is looking for? It’s a solid device that should benefit from Verizon Wireless’s large customer base and keep them squarely in the press. Yet, you have to think that Verizon execs can’t sleep easy at night knowing their riskiest customers are actively shopping a competitor despite their best efforts to bring new, innovative handsets to the carrier.  Will the Palm Pre be a success for Verizon Wireless in acquiring and retaining customers? I guess we’ll find out in 2010.

I must admit, I am quite taken with the Palm Pre. The hype, predictably, has been enormous. And the handset itself is very well put together. Online reviews rave about it. After playing with my friend’s new Pre, I have to agree with them: it is one cool handset.

But before the Pre could bask in the media spotlight for long, Apple whooshed in two days later to announce its newest iPhone, the 3G S, and that the 3G would sell for as little as $99.

So how has this move affected overall interest in the Pre?

This chart shows the percentage of people viewing the Palm Pre who also looked at the Apple iPhone 3G S online in the same week. Interest in the Pre is defined here as anyone who looked at a Pre-related webpage hosted by Palm or Sprint (or both). Similarly, interest in the iPhone 3G S includes anyone who viewed iPhone 3G S-related web pages at Apple or AT&T (or both). Before the announcement of the iPhone 3G S, interest traffic for the iPhone represents the iPhone 3G.

Here we see that:

• Before the iPhone 3G S was officially announced on June 6th, only about 2.5% of people who looked at the Palm Pre online also viewed the iPhone 3G
• However, once the iPhone 3G S announcement was made, traffic to the iPhone 3G S by Palm Pre shoppers jumped 104%, signaling that the Pre definitely had to share the limelight with the new iPhone 3G S
• By the time the iPhone 3G S was available, just a week after it was announced, consideration of the device by Palm Pre shoppers dropped by about 25%

While the decrease in cross shopping seems to suggest that the iPhone 3G S will not continue to distract Pre shoppers, handset interest data shines a different light on the situation. Interest in the Pre predictably shot up during the week of its launch and the week after as marketing efforts and press coverage reached a fever pitch. However in the second week after launch, Pre interest dropped sharply to levels it had prior to launch, as shown in the chart below.

This suggests that the Pre may indeed have lost its thunder online, though it is unclear at this point if interest has transferred to the iPhone 3G S or simply faded away. Certainly, consideration of both models decreased after the initial excitement of the Palm Pre’s launch and the iPhone 3G S announcement passed, which could indicate that distinct fan bases have emerged for each phone.

Still, much remains to be seen over the next few weeks, as each phone works to establish and sustain its fan base. There are also more opportunities to drive online interest in the Palm Pre to counter the iPhone. Selling the device online is one possibility. Encouraging development of more applications to rival the iTunes App Store by releasing the software development kit more broadly (which Palm says they will do “by the end of this summer”) could also entice consumers.

Challenging the iPhone’s dominance is no small task, but we’ll be watching over the next few months to see if the Palm Pre is the device that will rise to the occasion.

Over the next two years, I could save $721 in cell phone bills if I switched to a 1000 anytime minute individual T-Mobile plan plus 300 text messages and unlimited web.

That’s according to BillShrink.com, a site that tells you which wireless carrier could save you money when you enter information about your cell phone usage, what you are paying, and where you use the phone. The site offers a similar service for saving money on credit card bills, as well as helping users find the cheapest gas. To give you a better sense of what the BillShrink.com results look like, I’ve included a screenshot of my top result.

BillShrink.com has recently been given a lot of publicity due to its relationship with the wireless carrier T-Mobile, as T-Mobile consistently - though not always- comes up as the best value for a wireless shopper. Billshrink.com is prominently featured in T-Mobile’s new online and TV ad campaign (alongside Catherine Zeta-Jones) that encourages anyone and everyone to use Billshrink.com to see which service and plan will save them the most money while providing them with ample coverage.

So how has this relationship affected T-Mobile and BillShrink.com? Is it a mutually beneficial relationship, or is one side reaping more benefits? We can start by looking at traffic to BillShrink.com over the past year.

• From this chart we can see that T-Mobile appears to have had a large impact on traffic to BillShrink.com. Though T-Mobile started including links on its site for BillShrink.com in March, it’s clear the largest impact occurred when it began its broader campaign in May.
• In addition to an increase in traffic, we can further tell this relationship with T-Mobile has impacted Billshrink.com as 43% of visitors to Billshrink.com used the Wireless Plan area of the site in May, compared to only 22% using the wireless area in March.

Looking at data on Compete.com, we found that the T-Mobile campaign seems to be giving Billshrink.com a significant boost: the carrier accounted for 12.8% of all referrals to BillShrink.com, and was the destination site for 7.4% of all visitors to BillShrink.com.

All this data certainly tells me that the T-Mobile relationship has benefited BillShrink.com. T-Mobile, however, is the one that went out on a limb by telling consumers to check this site and see which carrier will save them the most money. So has this campaign benefited T-Mobile too? To get a sense of the impact, we looked at how many T-Mobile shoppers are also visiting BIllShrink.com.

This chart is looking at the volume of T-Mobile.com visitors also visiting BillShrink.com, represented by the blue bars and mapped to the right axis. The diamonds represent the % of overall T-Mobile.com traffic that also used BillShrink.com in the given month, and is mapped to the right axis. So what does this chart show us?

• Since the relationship began, there has been an increase in T-Mobile.com visitors also using BillShrink.com, shown by the blue bars. Unfortunately for T-Mobile, even with a 211% M-O-M increase in the volume of visitors visiting both sites in May, this still represents less than 2% of overall traffic, shown by the diamonds.
• Breaking this down a little further, we found that 49% of the T-Mobile.com visitors also using BillShrink.com in May were T-Mobile Customers, which is likely not the target group T-Mobile is hoping will use BillShrink.com.

To further investigate the impact on T-Mobile, I also took a look at how many of the T-Mobile.com visitors also using BillShrink.com went on to purchase within the same month (either a phone and plan or an upgrade) on T-Mobile.com. The results were negligible, indicating sending T-Mobile shoppers to BillShrink.com has not yet had an impact on shoppers purchasing on T-Mobile.com.

So it seems as though this relationship is mainly benefiting only one side, but there is an important additional factor we should not ignore. I’ve been in three T-Mobile retail stores lately, and all of them have computers set up for shoppers to use BillShrink.com (though we should note we cannot track activity on BillShrink.com from T-Mobile stores). I imagine this is a very powerful tool for T-Mobile Sales reps, as it is hard for a shopper to argue that they need to continue to shop when BillShrink.com is showing them T-Mobile will save them the most money. I have a hunch that BillShrink.com is actually having a larger impact on offline sales than we’ve seen online so far.

This campaign only truly began in May, so in the coming months we will be watching to see if it starts to have a bigger impact on T-Mobile.com sales. Still, T-Mobile’s use of Billshrink.com in its campaign was creative, and in the long run will likely benefit the carrier as T-Mobile continues to promote it heavily and more shoppers continue to use BillShrink.com. T-Mobile has found a way to promote its value and its growing coverage area while using an independent company to validate its claims.

So, now that I know I could save $700 over the next two years by switching to T-Mobile, am I going to? To be honest, I replaced my 1st generation iPhone with the 3rd generation iPhone last Friday. For me, more went into my wireless phone and plan purchase decision than just the cost.

BillShrink.com may not have convinced me to switch, but I have no doubt that for many wireless shoppers finding the best value is the most important thing in their wireless phone and plan decision, and BillShrink.com will likely help them in that decision.

Last week, Sprint and Palm released the Pre to rave reviews that praised the device for being the first true competition to the iPhone juggernaut.

Palm and Sprint drove substantial traffic to their web sites with the announcement of the Pre at CES in January, in a move similar to Apple’s unveiling of the first generation iPhone at MacWorld two years earlier. Nearly 400,000 people visited Pre-related pages on Sprint.com and/or Palm.com the week of the announcement.

After months of speculation from industry analysts and consumers, Sprint and Palm announced on May 19th that the Pre would be available for purchase on June 6th. As one might expect, visitors to the Pre pages on Sprint.com and Palm.com jumped after many weeks of flat traffic and jumped again the week the device finally became available for purchase.

This chart shows the number of people researching the Pre and the original iPhone, indexed to the device’s launch week. As you can see, the Pre may be getting a healthy amount of interest from consumers online, but it doesn’t rival the interest seen in the original iPhone launch. Likewise, Sprint and Palm’s traffic spike the week of the Pre launch didn’t match the massive jump Apple experienced upon the iPhone’s release.

• Aggregate traffic for the Pre from both Sprint and Palm’s web sites increased 84% the week of launch to over 475,000 unique visitors.
• Traffic to Apple.com’s iPhone content increased 102% the week of the iPhone launch to over 750,000 unique visitors. Note that this is just traffic to Apple.com – this number would be even higher if AT&T’s traffic was included.

Apple’s relentless hype machine and strong brand equity played significant roles in this major increase, but a significant factor may have simply been the relative sizes of the websites involved, as you can see in the following chart.

The truth is that Palm.com does not attract visitors at comparable levels to Apple.com, and, to a lesser extent, the same can be said about Sprint.com compared to Wireless.ATT.com. However, considering the relative sizes of these sites, Palm and Sprint did a solid job at driving interest in the Pre and are already reaping the benefits of this highly anticipated launch.

The next real challenge will be sustaining interest and sales of the device – one great sales week hasn’t propelled any of the previous iPhone challengers to the top of the heap.

Bob Stohrer of Virgin Mobile talked with the Digital 180 series about the unique marketing challenges facing a company that operates without a customer contract. He also shared his thoughts on finding the optimal media mix and the importance of churn reduction.

To hear more insights from some of the top marketers in various industries, check out the Digital 180 channel and check back with the Compete blog for new interviews.