It looks like the folks at OneMoney are now making a serious push to one million subscribers as well as looking to make some serious strides to closing the transaction gap to EcoCash. In a tweet by parent company NetOne, OneMoney is running a promotion where it is giving subscribers 500MB of data if they make a ZWL$1000 deposit into their wallet.
Once you make the ZWL$1000 (or more) deposit you will receive a voucher within 24 hours. The 500MB is of course for NetOne and you will have a 48 hr window to use the data.
Funding options for the OneMoney 500MB promotion are Bank to Wallet, a transfer from another OneMoney account or via ZIPIT. Customers are eligible to receive the free OneMoney 500MB data once a week and the promotion is running from the 29th of March to the 28th of June 2021.
This is actually brilliant, and here’s why
OneMoney and NetOne have suffered from a similar problem. Both companies have been able to add subscribers quarter to quarter according to POTRAZ but haven’t been able to convert that customer acquisition into the metrics that matter.
In Q4 OneMoney and NetOne were both able to add subscribers (81 540 and 236 037 respectively) as they try to narrow the chasm that separates them from Econet and EcoCash. However, even though they are making strides OneMoney and NetOne are still lagging behind in market share in their respective spheres.
This new OneMoney promotion is a way of hitting two birds with one stone. For OneMoney, it gets a slew of deposits that customers will just end up using to buy in stores as well as purchase NetOne services. The biggest one is of course the 10% discount OneMoney subscribers get for purchasing NetOne airtime.
The 500MB promotion could also help OneMoney make inroads in the share of volume and value of mobile money transactions. At present, the mobile money operator has 1.98% for the number of transactions and 4.10% for the value of transactions. EcoCash, on the other hand, comfortably commands 97.98% for the number of mobile transactions and 95.79% for the value of Zimbabwe’s mobile money transactions.
For NetOne this could help with closing the gap in the mobile data market. Econet gained 8.1% of the mobile data market share (78.4%) shrinking NetOne to 21.0% in Q4 from the 21.9% the MNO had in Q3 2020. The data “free” data will have a lot of people streaming over to NetOne.
Data isn’t cheap and I can imagine people could start saying “send the money to my OneMoney” to get themselves entered into this promotion.
OneMoney needs to learn from EcoCash rewards
If this is to work, OneMoney needs to learn from the laggy nature of EcoCash rewards. I recently got my rewards for December 2020 when I had totally forgotten that EcoCash rewards was a thing. OneMoney needs to stick to its promise of customers getting their voucher in 24 hours or they will suffer the same fate as EcoCash’s rewards program.
