The conventional wisdom around loyalty, emotional bonds, deep connections, and meaningful relationships doesn't match how customers actually behave. When choosing travel connectivity services, consumers prioritize tangible benefits over brand sentiment. They're loyal to the brands that make their lives easier.
We can distil it down into the idea that customers are loyal to brands that they feel give them more. Look at the research from Adobe for Business, examining what consumers perceive as the motivation behind their purchasing habits:
Knowing that today’s loyalty comes from giving customers more, the question is how to achieve this? Brands need to understand their customers and know where the value-add for them sits. Identify which offerings have greater ‘currency’ in the customer's eyes but can be easily implemented by the brand. This is where travel eSIMs shine – especially for those across the travel, hospitality, and FinTech sectors.
Mobile data is a virtually universal want and never more so than when travelling. Consumers rely on cell phones almost constantly for travel, money, tickets, navigation… and accessing data while travelling can be a huge headache.
This is what gives this particular space such huge potential for building relationships and a reputation as a trusted, valuable brand.
Giving users access to travel eSIMs that provide seamless connectivity wherever they go allows a brand to stay with the customer throughout their entire journey. It creates a huge opportunity to turn this value-add for the customer into loyalty and reduced churn for the brand.
It sounds great for the consumer, but what does it mean practically for the brands looking to sell eSIM for travelling?
Not all businesses can or want to offer eSIMs in the same way. Finding the right approach to integrate travel eSIMs is an essential part of ensuring that brands maximize their revenue potential.
Here, we will look at the business model options, as different eSIM integration models offer different ways to add value depending on a company’s goals and customer experience strategy.
Embedding an eSIM store directly into your app or website is a way to drive immediate revenue. This is one of the easiest and most seamless ways for brands to integrate an eSIM offering. The benefit to the customer is the convenience of addressing more of their essential travel needs in a single ecosystem. Plus, by integrating the store via an established partner, brands can offer competitive pricing, ensuring the cost of convenience remains low.
By integrating eSIMs into both subscription offerings and loyalty/reward schemes, brands build a strong differentiator. Data access while travelling has exceptionally high perceived value for customers, which creates a strong loyalty incentive. Subscription-based models are supported by platforms like Connect Flex making what looks like a complex integration model simple to deliver without in-house expertise.
Bundling eSIMs with existing products at key customer touchpoints—such as during a booking, insurance purchase, or device sale—adds meaningful value at the exact moment customers need it. Brands become a ‘one-stop-shop’ delivering the convenience customers crave and helping remove friction from the entire travel process. From a brand perspective, this has a similar ease of deployment to direct sales and has huge potential to extend customer relationships.
Building loyalty via an eSIM strategy can be hugely effective. Selecting the right model is key to achieving this in a way that ensures the outcome balances with the broader business goals and strategy.
You can see the different options for integrating a Travel eSIM offering into your business, but what does it actually mean? How will revenues stack up against your investment?
Telna’s eSIM revenue calculator gives you an idea instantly, allowing you to understand how each of the implementation models could drive return for your business
Test out our tool to find out how much you could earn.
A key part of both model and partner selection, especially in the context of customer loyalty, is the need for a frictionless experience. Just look back at the statistics we cited on the demand for convenience. Delivering a value-added feature for customers cannot be at the expense of the user experience.
This is an area where Telna’s experience in the eSIM space sets us apart. We have a deep understanding of where friction points can occur across the entire eSIM ecosystem and have developed solutions to address them. From the Connect Flex platform, which enables easy connectivity management, to our universal eSIM offering for simplified connectivity for consumers, Telna makes it easier than ever to deliver eSIM value with no drawbacks.
Modern customer loyalty is hard won and easily lost. But by delivering an offering that shows a deep understanding of customer needs and represents high value for the customer, brands gain an edge in a competitive market.
Adding value, with whatever model suits your business, is fast and straightforward using Telna’s Connect Flex. Connect Flex allows businesses to quickly integrate eSIM offerings without dealing with the technical complexity. Deliver the connectivity experience your customers want with Telna.
Find out more about how to integrate Connect Flex by reaching out to our sales team today.
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