Vodafone Qatar helped thousands of people thank loved ones during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan (15 May–14 June this year) as part of the company’s “Shukran” (“thank you”) campaign. The operator said that encourage customers to give thanks and to thank them, it gave them the opportunity to gift up to 100 MB of free data every day and with every recharge, via the MyVodafone App.

More than 850,000 Shukran gifts have been sent to date, totaling 83 TB of data on the Vodafone’s network. By the end of Ramadan, it is expected that the number of Shukran gifts sent by Vodafone Qatar’s customers will have exceed one million.

Tarifica’s Take

We have written on a number of occasions about the power of religiously oriented mobile promotions, especially those keyed to holidays or sacred periods of the year. Giving out bonus data is a frequently used approach in this regard, but Vodafone Qatar’s Ramadan promotion is innovative in that it allows subscribers to give each other the bonus data.

By doing do, the operator not only boosts loyalty and retention by increasing goodwill and connecting itself with religious virtue in the minds of its customers, it also promotes data use. The Shukran campaign enables users to encourage their friends, family, and associates to use more data, and this will likely be more persuasive than a simple gift directly from the operator, due to the social reinforcement aspect. By strengthening mobile relationships between users who are already linked by social relationships, the promotion can foster higher network traffic going forward.