Metrics that Matter - UNIC Cinema Days 2023

Today’s Success Metrics You Didn’t Know You Needed

With so many different success metrics available to us and an abundance of tools at our disposal, how do you focus on what’s really important? UNIC, The International Union of Cinema’s annual Cinema Days conference took place in Brussels on the 19th & 20th October and our Chief Communications Officer Maria Sweeney, and Director Client Services & Strategy Mark de Quervain were delighted to present some insights from the work we’ve been carrying out with our customers on taking the trends identifed within their own customer base and using it to drive their revenue and marketing strategies.

The Grail Metrics

Tracking The Correct KPIs

We use a lot of different metrics to monitor and measure our business. From a basic circuit level perspective we’re all familiar with certain key indicators of success, including: Occupancy, Ticket Revenue, Admissions, BO Revenue, Market Share, F&B Spend, Spend Per Head...the list is long and trying to plug them all together can feel like a real balancing act.

Then of course we have our digitial marketing metrics - those things we measure to gauge the success of the campaigns we’re running to try and impact our circuit level metrics. Email open rate, ad impressions, cost per click, conversion rate… the list is endless and while we’re all chasing a Return on Investment (ROI) with any digital campaigns we run, how that ROI is defined and measured can vary hugely depending on which metrics you’re focused on. Ultimately, we can find ourselves in a constantly reactive state driven by content, opening weekends and grabbing that all important market share, and while we’re so busy executing all these activities we don’t actually have sight of what effect it’s having on our customer base - the most important asset any of us have.

Customer Focused Metrics

If however we were to take a top down approach to our marketing and instead look at customer focused metrics as a strategy behind driving our tactical campaign efforts, then we can begin to build a strategic customer base that’s always there to be marketed to, where strategy is independent of content and Exhibitors are in better control.

First though, only by establishing what is currently happening in a customer base and what has historically happened in that base can we determine what needs to happen in the future. There are of course a multitude of ways to measure the health of our customer base, but we are going to look speficially at what we deem the 3 Grail Metrics that we can use to drive our strategy: Admissions Per Customer, Visits Per Customer and Revenue Per Customer - which when measured over time allows us to derive Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV) - and look at some of the controlling levers that will impact these key grail metrics.

Customer Focused Metrics

While every circuit’s base is different and as such needs analysis to understand what’s working and what isn’t, there are some commonalities we’ve identified across the multiple circuits we’ve performed this analysis with. Using a base sample size of over 7 million Identifiable customers, ranging in circuit size and across different global territories, we can identify that over the last 12 months:

• Single visit frequency customers make up between 50-75% of every Identiable customer base (those you can tie a booking back to to using an email address). These are people who only come to your circuit once in a 12 month period. What can you do to focus on this segment of customers to get even a small portion of them to come even once more in a year?

• Marketable customers are worth an average of 20% more in terms of Recency, Frequency & Revenue than Non-Marketable customers. Focus on driving marketing opt-ins with simple changes on your sign-up forms.

• Loyalty members are often worth x2 that of Marketable customers. Know your customers with the highest propensity to convert to a programme, and when they do - treat Loyalty as Royalty.

Customer Value Funnel

If we look at a Simple Customer Funnel, we should ideally be driving as many New and Unidentifiable customers as possible into the top and working to move them through the stages in order to positively impact our grail metrics.

The more Marketable customers you get, the greater the opportunity to drive them into higher Loyalty tiers to increase their value. The higher the levels of loyalty, the fewer the number of customers within each.

At a base level however, the more active marketable customers you get, the more money you will make.

Grail Metrics Averages

While there are obviously significant variances within each circuit and indeed down to individual sites that make up the circuits, within the 7 million+ base sample we analysed, the averages for each of the grail metrics were as follows:

• 2.14 Visits Per Customer

• 5.24 Admissions Per Customer (group size)

• €50.63 BO Revenue Per Customer

There are lots of marketing action levers we can use with our customers to drive the Grail Metrics, like encouraging and making it easy for new customers to opt in to marketing communications, focusing campaign efforts on lapsing customers to draw them back in and increasing single visit customers’ frequency with incentives. Of course there are additional controlling levers like programming, scheduling and pricing which will have an impact but if we focus our marketing efforts on making small changes to the big numbers, then we are positively impacting our grail metrics which we can then monitor, track and tweak over time to measure the success of our actions .

If you are interested in learning more about how Showtime can provide a strategic analysis of your customer base and help develop a revenue and marketing strategy for your circuit please get in touch below, or click here to learn more about our Customer Analytics platform.