This blog is continuing the 'Mastering cinema marketing campaigns' blog series and the second covering relevancy. This series will cover a 5-point performance cycle that the best loyalty programmes follow and show you the different ways you can go about getting the most out of your loyalty programme data in Movio Cinema.

In the last post, I talked about relevancy by channeland now I’d like to expand this topic to cover relevancy by message.

Your customers want to be communicated to with relevant messaging, it is no longer a nice-to-have in your communication strategy, it is a customer expectation. By giving you data about themselves, customers expect that you will use that information to deliver targeted, personalised and relevant value back-to-them.  However, this is not always happening and even within our own industry we sometimes see examples of incredibly mistargeted campaigns.

A male colleague of mine at Movio shared an example with me recently that reinforced this. As an avid moviegoer, and participant in cinema loyalty programmes, my colleague often receives emails and SMS’s suggesting film titles or events that he might be interested in.  Yet, on this particular occasion, he received a Ladies Night email from a cinema chain, suggesting he come out for this special ladies-only event.  This was a clear mistargeting on the cinema chain’s part. The risk with this type of irrelevant messaging is that it can cause customers to disengage or unsubscribe to your communications, and it could potentially cause you to negatively impact consumer spending. Movio’s data science white paper on ‘Successfully target your campaigns’ reinforces this fact.

Start with your goals

I believe that the best way to achieve a relevant message is to start by setting clear goals for your campaign.

Movio Cinema now has over 100 filters, and by starting with a clear campaign goal, you are able to start slicing and dicing your customer database in order to narrow down a target audience accordingly. Sometimes less is truly more, and by getting the right offer or message in front of a small but highly targeted group of customers not only will you increase your likelihood of a positive ROI on your campaign efforts, but this will help to reinforce a personalised 1:1 marketing approach for your brand.

To craft relevant messaging for your campaigns, start with your goal and work backwards:

• Use cinema behaviours (i.e. films watched, concession spending) in addition to traditional demographic filters (i.e. age, gender)
• Vary images, copy tone and manner, and even the offers themselves to specifically appeal to the target audience
• Leverage personalisation by using markers and conditional content tools within your email to provide even more relevance to your customers

Example - relevant messaging for high concession spenders

The example I wanted to share is from Goodrich Quality Theaters in the USA, as it’s a really great case study of a campaign that was very well targeted. Goodrich’s goal was to target families who spent a lot at the concession stand. They started by creating a group of target customers by filtering their database based on who had seen family films in the past 24 months. They then wanted to refine this target even further by going after only high concession spenders.

They were able to use the ‘average concession transaction value’ filter within Movio Cinema to identify members who were in a high decile of concession purchases. Their message was then crafted with a suggestion for a new family film. They did not include an added value offer, but rather wanted to carefully target a recommendation to high spenders with the goal that this recommendation would spark an incremental visit.

The results were astounding. The message was so well targeted that they saw phenomenal results without even having an offer attached to the communication.

This highly relevant communication sent to high spending families resulted in:

• Visitation rate of the targeted group increased by 10% (versus control group)
• Their average spend went up 14% (versus control group)
• Even the transaction value at the concession stand increased, despite the fact they were already high spenders

Summary

Value comes in all different forms. For some customers, a highly relevant, well-targeted communication is value in itself.  As the Goodrich example showed, you don’t always need to add discounts or offers to influence customer behaviour. If your number one focus is on relevancy - taking into consideration the communication channel and ultimately the message itself, your communications are more likely going to influence customer behaviour in a positive way. My next post in this series will focus on reviewing and analysing your campaign results.

We’d love to hear about campaigns that you have executed that have resulted in positive ROI through well-targeted, relevant messaging to your customers. Feel free to share your examples below or get in contact us.