Why have missed call campaigns gained a stronghold over Indian market?

What is a missed call even and why is it so popular in India? Turns out the humble missed call is actually a very popular form of communication amongst people, be it within friends or family or even employee-employers, in the developing south Asian and African countries. It is called as Miskol in the Philippines, as flash call in Pakistan, memancing in Indonesia and as beep in Africa. And inevitably missed calls in all these places cost nothing to the caller or the receiver. 

A missed call is simply the act of dialling a number and letting the call ring a couple of times, then disconnecting the call deliberately to avoid being connected, hence charged for the call. In India, drivers and maids often do the same so that their employers can call them back, thereby transferring the charges of the call to their employer. But in the recent times, several missed campaigns have been launched and offered glorious results in the country. Like:

The Prime Minister, Narendra Modi’s missed call campaign related to his show Mann ki baat; one can just give a missed call to a certain number to start listening to the show on their phones, while on the go. The campaign received successful participation and great responses from more than 10 lac people around the country. 

Banks and other financial institutions are using the missed call as a tool to gather responses and to offer information. Customers can now easily give a missed call to their bank’s designated inquiry number from their registered phone numbers to be able to get alerts on their credit balance, special announcements and much more. Recently, the Employees Provident Fund Organization has also joined the missed call bandwagon and began a missed-call service for its 35 million contributing members all over the nation, which enables them to track their account balance through such alerts. 

These days various social media sites, like Facebook and Twitter, job portals, and even food delivery apps among several other web-enabled services are using missed calls as a tool to gather responses or feedbacks or offer the same through a one-to-one, customer facing service. 

Yet another glorious example of use of missed call campaign with intelligent use of curated content was from the FMCG giant Hindustan Unilever, they launched their Kan Khajura Tesan, missed call campaign that allows customers to engage with content for entertainment purposes curated by the company, which are interspersed with ads of their various products. 

Nestle another big player of the corporate FMCG world has started a missed call campaign that offers free talk time top-up balance to people who would give a missed call to a specific number and listened to their buniyad message. 

The media has been using missed calls for tele-voting, to gather responses as well as run polls and promote their films or even offer score alerts of matches to people who would ring missed calls. 

The simple answer is that missed call service numbers are cheap, easy, unobtrusive to the daily lives of people, quick and scalable. This is a customer driven marketing tool, in which the interested customers or users give missed calls. So, they should be genuinely interested in the subject and this will make marketing for the brand easier by several manifolds and offer effectively warm leads. Most telephony companies in the market are already missed call number providers, who offer scalable missed call campaign packages with data driven insights. Given the benefits of the system and the results it offers, missed calls will stick around to be a game changer in the field of mobile marketing.