Did it work? This is a question most of us have probably heard from our finance department at one time or another. Such a simple question, but one that has historically been difficult for marketers to answer about the effectiveness of their campaigns.
This fourth post in the 'Mastering cinema marketing campaigns' blog series will focus on reviewing and analysing results in an effort to help marketers to better answer this question.
One of the great things about Movio Cinema is its integration directly with point-of-sale software. This enables our clients to gain access to all of the transactional and behavioural data of members you’ve sent your campaigns to. As a result, you are able to understand what films your members saw, what admission tickets they purchased, whether they brought more guests with them than usual, and what they spent at the concession stand as a direct result of your marketing efforts.
Additionally, because Movio Cinema’s campaign management tool automatically calculates and withholds a statistically significant control group from your campaign, you are able to accurately measure the impact of your campaign. You can see your targeted member group’s transactions and behaviours versus that of your control group. This allows you to better understand if your offer or campaign influenced customer behaviour, or if it was behaviour that your customers would have exhibited anyway.
Constantly reviewing your campaign results, using statistically significant control groups as a reference point, will enable you to use Movio Cinema as a self-teaching tool to learn from and to ensure continual improvement with your campaigns. But, how do you go about achieving this consistently? It should really be a matter of a few simple pre and post-campaign actions:
Pre-campaign actions
The ability to measure the success of a campaign will often depend on these two key steps:
- Clearly identifying a measurable goal for your campaign
- Setting aside a statistically significant control group
Clearly identifying a measurable goal helps in:
- Knowing how to segment your database appropriately
- Determining how to analyse campaign results
Setting aside a statistically significant control group allows for:
- ROI measurement
- Confidently interpreting and learning from campaign results
I’d like to go through two examples of some of the types of campaign goals that our customers set and execute via Movio Cinema.
1 - Customer Goal: Increase email engagement
Measuring the success of campaigns comes in different shapes and sizes. Many of our clients were accustomed to sending more mass showtime email blasts so, when starting out with Movio Cinema and moving to a more targeted communication approach, something as simple as seeing a positive change in email open rates becomes a first goal.
The transition from a mass e-blast to relevant, targeted communications can often be overwhelming, but the simplest of segmentation can prove extremely powerful. In this example, a cinema client was encouraged to focus on segmenting by movie interest and ignore all other behaviours and solely focus on movies watched.
Results
- Mass e-blasts - 8% avg unique open rate
- 1st movie-targeted email communication - 35% unique open rate
- 2nd movie-targeted email communication - 45% unique open rate
Without glancing at transactional data, the significant uplift in unique open rates suggests that targeting was done properly, allowing relevant content to be sent to the right members, resulting in member interest and engagement.
2 - Customer Goal: Identify the most cost-effective way to increase visitation rate
The ability to increase visitation to the cinema is a common goal. It may pertain to members who have not been to the theatre in quite some time, or it may simply be to alert the right audience about the right movie and encourage an incremental visit.
In this instance, the primary goal was to target members who were moderate moviegoers. Members were identified and then broken into two groups to run a split test in order to identify the most cost-effective way to increase their visitation rate.
Each segment was sent a campaign with a distinct admission incentive. One received a concession discount offer, the other received a free admission ticket offer. Each segment had a control group. Heading into the campaign, this client assumed that the free admission ticket offer would greatly outperform the concession incentive. The results painted a very different story.
Results
- Free ticket offer - Over 7% increase in visitation rate
- Concession discount - Over 50% increase in visitation rate
Having eliminated the nuances of movie seasonality, weather, etc. by deploying the campaigns simultaneously, the results were confidently actioned into an on-going strategy. The concession discount proved to be more cost-effective as well as much more impactful. This example reinforced that Movio Cinema can be used as a tool to both validate and disprove hypothesis’ such as the notion it always takes an admission offer to drive visitation.
Post-campaign actions
Do all campaigns work? No is the simple answer. There is not an exact science to campaign success and it's going to be slightly different based on who you are, who your competitors are and who your members are.
However, through regular review and analysis of campaign reports and the consistent use of control groups to measure campaign effectiveness, Movio Cinema becomes a self-teaching tool. It becomes a way to make informed decisions, form future strategies, and to be able to confidently tell your finance department if your loyalty campaigns are positively contributing to your company's bottom-line.
My final post in this series will cover how you can refine your campaigns and re-engage with your loyalty members.
