Growing Your Attendance & Market Share With Segmented Campaigns

While the Summer 2022 slate has been undeniably strong, we all know we can no longer rely on just the availability of content to fill those movie theatre seats. So how can you be smart with your cinema’s data to ensure you’re driving the maximum conversion rate from your campaigns and not have your competitors eating up your market share?

First, let’s look at a very typical marketing approach from Exhibitor A during the month of July:

Send a weekly email to the database of subscribers to tell them what awesome movies are coming out this weekend. Maybe there’s even an incentive for loyalty programme members to help them visit more than once this month. Between the new releases of Minions, Thor, DC League of Superpets, Crawdads and Nope, as well as the seemingly never ending long tail success of Maverick, customers have plenty of reasons to flock to the big screen. So, this exhibitor just needs to sit back and hope that the rich slate is enough to drive these people through their doors, right?

On Monday morning the POS report comes through and while the admissions number isn’t too bad, it is down again on the previous week. Must have been because of the good weather this weekend. F&B spend isn’t quite where it should be and overall market share is down but they can attribute that to the new site their competitor opened recently only 5kms away. Hopefully the novelty will wear off and their loyal customers will start coming back to them soon.

Now, let’s look at a data driven marketing approach from Exhibitor B who is specifically focusing on incremental revenue from Minions and DC League of Superpets. Both films are ranking well in the Gower St forecast so they want to make sure they’re capitalising on the demand.

With Minions releasing on July 1st, they know there’s a big family audience appetite for this popular movie. Aside from notifying their newsletter subscribers, they also run a specific campaign to all those marketable customers who have been to see Sonic 2 or The Bad Guys - this cohort have been recently (last 60 days) and are likely to be tempted back more easily than someone who hasn’t visited in the last 6 months.

Segmentation and Campaign Builder in Showtime Engage

Exhibitor B also sends another campaign to all those marketable customers who haven’t been back since they came to see Sing 2 in January. Maybe they’ve been to another theatre, but let’s see if a 2-for-1 promo on a popcorn will sway them in this direction. With 740 customers accounting for 2540 admissions in this bucket, at an average ticket price of €6.70, an 8.6% conversion rate on the campaign drives an additional €1463 Box Office revenue for opening weekend. This incremental revenue pushes their market share by 0.8% for Minions and they rank higher than their major competitor at the end of the cinema week.

A post show survey gets sent to everyone who booked tickets for Minions, and asked them what upcoming movies they were most looking forward to seeing. DC League of Superpets opens on July 29th and 42% of the survey respondents say they want to see it in the cinema, so it makes sense to include them on the pre-sales campaign in advance of opening weekend. 

Showtime Sentiment Survey

The campaign includes a trailer to the movie and the showtimes at their preferred site, with an incentive for booking early. Everyone who came to see Sonic 2 and The Bad Guys also received a DC Leauge of Superpets campaign, and combined these two efforts have an 11.86% conversion rate. Due to the uptick in demand they know to schedule a further show for both weekend days.

For those who didn’t convert on either of these campaigns but who did open the email, a retargeting campaign is triggered on social media and it has a 1.7% conversion rate. At the same time, a look-alike audience is created on social for everyone in the combined campaigns segment, so as to reach an additional 9870 people. This returns a conversion rate of 1.3%. 

Again this week, Exhibitor B increases their market share by 0.7% through these simple efforts.

Showtime Benchmark dashboard displaying Comscore Box Office data

By taking a data driven approach to your marketing, and having the right tools to implement your strategy, you put yourself in the driving seat when it comes to the factors you can control in maximising attendance at your movie theatre. With the usual lull in content between the Summer blockbusters and the big Christmas releases looming just around the corner, these types of precise marketing campaigns designed to generate small % uplifts will play an essential part of any cinema marketer’s overall strategy.

Sample Showtime Engage Campaign Report

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.

For a more detailed guide on Behavioural Segmentation Strategies for Cinema check out our previous post here.