National Cinema Day-Ta: An Irish Case Study
National Cinema Day was an unquestionable success in both bringing new customers to the cinema, and getting lapsed customers who hadn’t been seen since pre-pandemic to return. The industry’s initiative has pushed open the door, so how can Exhibitors capitalise on bringing these customers back through it again?
30 DAYS ON FROM NATIONAL CINEMA DAY - WHAT DO WE KNOW SO FAR?
In this case study we look at a Showtime client circuit in Rep of Ireland, whose National Cinema Day figures accounted for over 13% of the country’s admissions (comscore), and review what impact it had on their customer base.
Saturday 3rd September 2022 was the biggest Saturday in this circuit’s history, with a staggering 40% increase on their previous biggest Saturday in 2018, when a rich slate including Mission Impossible: Fallout, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again and Incredibles 2 were the titles driving their admission figures. Given there were no major releases on National Cinema Day, and the top performing movie was a 40 year old title re-release, it’s no surprise that the €4 price was the key driver to getting people back to the Big Screen.
Using the Showtime data platform we could identify 25% of this circuit’s National Cinema Day customers, which we used to carry out detailed analytics on their behaviour patterns (pre and post pandemic), and will continue to track over time to measure the success of our ongoing marketing efforts.
SHOWTIME PLATFORM DATA
Aside from the obvious key wins of bringing in more new customers who we can market to, bringing back lapsed customers who had fallen out of the habit of visiting this chain (or possibly even any cinema altogether), the key win here is that in only 30 days 9% of customers have been back to see another film at this cinema. Even more cause for celebration of National Cinema Day perhaps is the fact that of that 9% of customers, 23% hadn’t been in 2022 before National Cinema Day - meaning these people were brought back into the cinema going habit because of the initiative, and overall, 2% of lapsed customers who hadn’t been seen in 2022 before National Cinema Day have already been twice in 30 days.
CUSTOMER SURVEY DATA
In addition to what the hard data tells us, we also ran Sentiment surveys with the National Cinema Day visitors via Showtime Engage, giving us valuable information we can help this circuit to incorporate into future marketing.
86% of people said they came on National Cinema Day because of the special offer, while only 14% said they were coming anyway.
When asked what they believed a normal cinema ticket price was, 41% said they believed it to be between €9 - €10, 28% said €6 - €8 and 18% said €11 - €12. This would correlate to their value for money perception and their reason to go. The average perceived price is €9, so the €4 price which is less than half drove nearly a 50% uplift.
FUTURE ACTIONS
The data from National Cinema Day gave us some key initiatives we can execute on as part of the ongoing marketing strategy.
With over 60% of people saying their visit has made them likely to come again to the cinema in the future, we can now focus on making sure these people who want to come again are receiving the right offers through the Showtime platform based on their behavioural data.
Given that price was the key driver for the huge jump in admissions, and that the mix of customers skewed heavily towards families (data based on demographics, retail spend analysis, survey responses and mix of movies seen) we can also drive more awareness towards future discount days, Kids Club and family events to get these customers back for the offers that matter to them.
The Showtime suite of Marketing and Customer Analytics tools including Engage, Sentiment and RFM give you the power to harness all the customer data you collect and turn it into incremental revenue. To learn more about our solutions or for help with designing and implementing a marketing strategy get in touch with our cinema marketing experts today.