This is the fifth and final post in my ‘Mastering Cinema Marketing Campaigns’ blog series. Looking at Movio Cinema customers worldwide, we’ve observed a trend towards a five-point performance cycle, which informed the framework for these posts.

Our firstpost covered how you can anticipate customer wants and needs, the secondandthird ensuring customer relevance, and the fourth, how to best analyse your results. In this concluding post, I’d like to show you how you can refine your strategies to better re-engage with your loyalty members.

Refine

Regularly reviewing results ensures that you understand which of your campaigns are working, and which require improvements in order to achieve the best possible ROI, a subject I discussed in my previous post. In order to make sure you get the most out of your database marketing strategy, your next step is to refine your campaigns based on these results.

Movio Cinema gives you full visibility to how your campaigns are impacting customer behaviour. Did your messaging or offer drive incremental spend or visitation? Has your campaign been profitable? This level of reporting and insight has traditionally been difficult for marketers to access, but when you are able to tie a campaign back to its actual impact on customer behaviour, these metrics can be powerful.

Using these metrics to refine your campaigns, your ability to continually improve and adjust your messaging and incentives is greatly improved. In time, the self-teaching nature of Movio Cinema will give you a toolkit of effective campaign tactics that can be drawn upon as required, meaning myriad ways to keep your customer database active and engaged within your programme.

Re-engage

What happens, though, when a member starts to disengage? This is where that toolkit of tactics can be useful not just for customer retention, but also for winning back those disengaged or lapsed customers if need be.

I’d like to give an example of a Movio Cinema customer who wanted to do just this. Seeing a considerable number of lapsed members in their loyalty database, they developed a strategy targeting these lapsed members with a view towards driving re-engagement.

This exhibitor wanted to target those who had not been to the cinema in over 270 days, hypothesising that these were members that they were on the verge of losing entirely. The offer sent to this group was a single free movie ticket, but one that was valid for only seven days, aiming to incentivise these members to get back to the movies with a short-term, urgent offer.

The results achieved were impressive, with a positive outcome in every metric measured:

• 43% visitation uplift on first execution of the campaign
• 74% increase in average spend per member
• 15% increase in box office spend
• 15% increase in average admissions per transaction
• 18.5% total visitation rate to date

What made this campaign even more impressive was that this exhibitor was subsequently able to re-engage the base that re-activated as a result of this offer, and that this audience now represents 5% of their total active member base.

From a position where they were in danger of losing a segment of their database entirely, this customer’s implementation of a well-refined strategy led to both short-term gains and long-term member retention. As a result, their marketing arsenal now boasts a reliable and field-tested technique for reaching lapsed members, as well as experience that will assist their decision-making should a similar situation occur in the future.

Learn about your customers

For all of their benefits, it’s important to remember that loyalty programmes in and of themselves do not provide a silver bullet solution for cinema marketing. Throughout this series, we’ve referred repeatedly to the need to take your time with campaign management; to continually use customer data to anticipate demand, to personalise and ensure relevance in your communications, to leverage campaign analytics to optimise your tactics, and to test, learn and refine as you go.

The rationale behind taking that time is that it’ll help considerably with understanding your own specific market, since worldwide data shows us that what works globally may not work in every territory. Following the cyclical performance management process that informed this series, and using the various tools and techniques outlined and examined throughout, you’ll be able to make informed decisions towards future strategies for best managing the long-term investment that is your loyalty programme. In doing this, you’ll be able to get the most out of your database and deliver positive and lasting results for your organisation.

We'd love to hear your thoughts on this series – feel free to share your experiences and opinions in the comments below.

Read the rest of this series:
Part One: Anticipate
Part Two: Relevancy by Channel
Part Three: Relevancy by Message
Part Four: Review Your Results