One place subscription streamers can learn from the traditional Pay TV industry is in anti-churn activities, with Paolo Cuttorelli, SVP Global Sales at Evergent, observing recently that customer retention marketing is not as prevalent as we might expect. “When I engage with prospective customers, I or someone on my team subscribes to the service and then cancels to see what happens. In lots of cases there is no mechanism to try to keep people in the service.”
Evergent provides extensive monetization and marketing platform capabilities including billing, offer management for customer acquisition and retention, and subscriber analytics, among other things. Drawing on its experience in the Pay TV market, the vendor sees ‘churn deflection’ features as a natural part of any subscription business and Cuttorelli stresses the impact it can have, with one streaming customer reducing churn by 20% after working with the company.
He emphasizes: “For every five people who hit the ‘cancel’ button, they started to keep one of them.” The streamer in question had a strong sports focus and once it was clear that sports fans were cancelling during the close season, Evergent’s platform implemented a dual response, one of which was to offer a smaller package (with less sport) and the other was to offer a subscription ‘holiday’ so the streamer effectively paused payments for a few months, meaning there was no need for customers to proactively rejoin and provide credit card details again when the new season began.
“This is all completely automated. We know how to handle customer care scenarios, but in streaming there are no call centres. It is all performed through chat bots and email or through the self-care part of the app.”
In the traditional Pay TV environment, customer care agents would be trained to know how to understand customer motives and apply incentives to keep them onboard, supported by intelligence-led prompts. In the streaming world, the same background intelligence is directed into the D2C decision making via the automated interface. Anti-churn marketing is an opportunity streamers should pay more attention to, Cuttorelli reckons.
He details other data-led marketing that can strengthen monetization in streaming – or indeed in classic Pay TV, whether at the point of customer acquisition or when dealing with established subscribers. This includes discounting or additional incentives (like a PPV movie) at the point of sale through to personalized product promotions – such as targeting a $20 premium VOD release only at users who are more affluent and have a propensity to buy lots of PPV.
A key strength at Evergent is the use of machine learning to maximize the understanding of an existing customer base and carve out user cohorts for targeting. “We power apps that span dozens of countries and in each market need fine-grain insights on when people are most likely to convert and at what prices. We identify cohorts so we can make specific offers and help push those offers to market, which could be via email or WhatsApp or other push notifications,” Cuttorelli explains.
The full-lifecycle marketing includes ‘win-back’ of former subscribers who churned and Cuttorelli reckons a smart understanding of what people liked can help design personalized offers that get people back in the door. Depending on commercial agreements it might even be possible to re-sign a casual sports fan using an offer that gives them limited access to specific content – with this treated as the basis for an attempted upsell later.
Depending on privacy rules and data available, initial customer acquisition marketing could be targeted based on spending power – thus a more affluent consumer (or region) sees the annual subscription price front-and-centre in promotions while for others the monthly subscription price is most prominent.
Monetization and marketing platforms are so sophisticated now they could easily apply dynamic pricing, as seen in the airline or accommodation sectors, and given that one pub chain reportedly started to charge more for beer during peak hours in 2023, it is worth asking whether we could ever see such an unfortunate development in television – with higher prices for a big game that is attracting loads of media attention, for example.
Thankfully, this kind of price marketing is not something we are likely to see in television, Cuttorelli believes. Marketing in this sector will focus on offering a standard price to all for any given product, although Cuttorelli reckons personalized offers and discounts are acceptable to consumers. The closest use-case he can imagine is actually a time-based discount – so a major PPV sports event can be purchased at lower cost if a consumer commits well ahead of time as opposed to the day before (but the same offer is available to everyone).
Affluent consumers may see the annual subscription price first, but what we are not going to have is affluent consumers charged more for a subscription just because they can afford it. In a data-rich world where consumption and purchase behaviors can be obtained even within GDPR rules, this is good to know.
