Case study · Telecom
Cricket Wireless
From regional carrier to AT&T acquisition.
A regional prepaid carrier built into a national eCommerce engine. $80M+ in eCommerce revenue and a 71% drop in traffic acquisition costs.
My role: Director of eCommerce and Digital Marketing, inside AT&T. Owned the eCommerce P&L, paid media, SEO, email, display, and affiliate.
What happened
$80M+
In eCommerce revenue, 2013
40M+
Visitors to the website, 22% year over year
71%
Improvement in traffic acquisition costs
19%
Year-over-year increase in conversion rate
Where they were stuck
Cricket was a prepaid mobile carrier in a market dominated by tier-one telecoms. The product was right for the audience. The eCommerce platform was not. It leaked traffic at every conversion gate, and SEM, SEO, email, display, and affiliate each ran on their own playbook, which left a unit-economics problem hiding inside the customer acquisition cost.
What the market believed
The market read Cricket as a discount brand while the company marketed like a premium one, and the online experience did not match the in-store experience. A buyer met a different Cricket at every touchpoint. That gap is narrative debt, and in a category where switching costs are low, it compounds monthly.
What I changed
One narrative across every channel.
- Digital media restructure. Rebuilt SEM, SEO, email, display, and affiliate programs around a single coherent narrative.
- Cross-platform GTM. Aligned pricing, promotion, and marketing language across online and in-store experiences.
- eCommerce as a revenue engine. Repositioned the website from a brochure into a transactional platform built for scale.
- Conversion architecture. Engineered the path from impression to checkout to remove friction at every gate.
- Channel economics. Re-mixed paid spend toward the channels with the lowest CAC and the highest LTV.
- Brand-to-business alignment. Connected marketing decisions to the metrics that mattered to corporate development.
Acquisition outcome: The work positioned Cricket for its acquisition by AT&T.
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