The new MTN Yendelela promotion: A Review
As part of the Jubilee celebrations and ofcourse to stay relevant, MTN has introduced a new promotion for their prepaid customers only called MTN Yendelela.
MTN Yendelela has 3 choice features, the Morning, Day and Night which have the following benefits:
Benefits:
• 300 Morning time minutes to use from 08:00 to 13:00 hours for only K6.
• 720 Day time minutes to use from 05:00 to 17:00 hours for only K10.
• 300 Night time minutes to use from 00:00 and 05:00 hours for only K1.5.
Seems like a good offer but what are the limitations?
Limitations:
- You can only use the minutes on MTN to MTN calls.
- The minutes expire if you don’t use them before their time limit.
- When you make a call, the call is dropped by the network after exactly an hour so you have to reconnect to continue the call.
- You cannot use the minutes on MTN Yendelela to pay for someone else’s call with their Pay4Me service, which is a reverse call service.
Do they have competition with other offers from the other two mobile operators?
Yes. Zamtel has had the Real Mahala deal which was made a permanent tariff plan. It basically gives you a total of 9 hours and 30 minutes for on-net calls (that’s 90 minutes between 6 am and 6pm and free calling between 10pm and 6 am the following morning) for K3.14 on on-net calls. For off-net calls you can pay K6.27 for the same offer as the on-net calls but with a 50% discount on all calls to other networks throughout the day. They also just launched a Get a life, Get a Gig promotion that sells their 1GB bundle at K49. Read more about it here.
The fact that the MTN Yendelela promotion does not cover off-net calls does not appeal to consumers who still have to pay extra for calls to other networks without any sort of discount. Maybe it was a customer retention as well as customer acquisition move to attract new customers to get on the network and stay on it. Also, to register for the promo in its 3 parts, Morning, Day and Night will mean spending a total of about K18.5 daily for 1,320 minutes to ONLY other MTN numbers. You don’t have to choose all of them, just the one(s) that suits you.
What has Airtel got to counter-offer? Their Jubilee Combo, seeing as MTN Yendelela is also about Jubilee celebrations. The Jubilee Combo gives 50MB, 50Min, 50 SMSes and a free Hello tune, all valid for 50 days. It costs K50, meaning we can break that to K1 a day. However, this will most likely target the low data user who doesn’t spend too much time browsing, texting or calling because those 50MB, texts and minutes will not live to see Day 4 for an average data user.
Who’s promotion/tariff has more to offer? In this case I say Zamtel tariff for the free calls and discounts on off-net calls, and they have the cheapest 1 GB data bundle on the market for those of us who live on the internet, even though it’s only valid for a week. They have the most practical offer among the 3, but then again, it’s up to you and what suits your personal needs, right? So there, a review about what’s happening promo-wise with the 3 mobile operators right now.
