According to Inc., it costs a business about 5-10 times more to acquire a new customer than it does to sell to an existing one, and current customers spend 67 per cent more on the marketers’ product than new customer would.

According to the Fourth Quarter Sector Statistics Report from CCK, of the four mobile operators, Safaricom was the only operator to record a decline in subscriptions. As of June 2012, its subscriptions stood at 19,006,981 from 19,074,700 in March 2012. This is perhaps the reason why Safaricom has rolled out several promotions over the past one month.

The first promotion Safaricom unveiled was a new M-Pesa AD campaign dubbed M-Pesa Relax. This campaign aimed at positioning M-Pesa as a lifestyle convenience tool. It came with awarding customers for paying bills, purchasing goods and services and making banking transactions through M-Pesa.

During CCK’s counterfeit switch off, Safaricom contacted all affected customers providing them with affordable genuine options.

To make some of its value added services more available, Safaricom lowered its ‘Dakatari 1525’, a teletriage service which allows customers to get medical help from qualified doctors through the phone, call rates by 50 percent. Other promotions promotion’s include the KES 85 Million promo, Safaricoms’ largest this year, where 60 customers will win KES 1 million, and one winner will get KES 10 million.

Airtel on the other hand recorded the largest gains in new subscriptions from the period between March 2012 to June 2012, and has in the recent past made a couple of tariff adjustments and expansion to keep its customers coming back for more. The most recent ones being the availing of Airtel Money services at all Posta branches country wide, scrapping off of money transfer fees for sending money via Airtel Money and the latest KES 20 million ‘Shinda Karo ya Mwaka Moja promotion.

Orange Mobile has, in the recent past, unveiled several high speed modems such as the Orange Internet Everywhere 42 Mbps modem and has also been part of CCN’s new E-ticket parking system through its Orange Money service. During the recent counterfeit phones switch off, Orange offered genuine phones at discounted prices of as low as KES 499 and it recently launched its emergency credit airtime service dubbed Pewa.

Orange recently reviewed some of its internet bundle prices which saw the Orange weekly unlimited bundle increase to KES 1,200 to KES 990 and its mobile daily unlimited bundle increase from KES 39 to KES 50, a move that might not go down well with subscribers.

To award its subscribers, yuMobile launched “yuCover”, a free life and disability insurance cover for yuMobile prepaid subscribers. Based on the amount of airtime one consumes in a given month, a certain limit of life cover will be awarded to them.

To further tap into the mobile money transfer service, yuMobile partnered with Postbank to avail yuCash service at all Postbank branches and recently unveiled its long awaited BlackBerry Internet Service plans.

Based on the above tariff adjustments, expansions and promotions, do you think the mobile service providers are doing enough to keep you coming back?