It’s a good time to be in show business. Or at least, the digital, OTT, and on-demand side of show business as the impact of Covid-19 begins to take shape—and alter industry trends for the next year. In ComScore’s ‘State of OTT’ report, the number of households using OTT services rose by 5.2 million homes from April 2019 to April 2020. And it doesn’t end there—the global OTT streaming market is expected to grow from $104.11 billion in 2019 to $161.37 billion in 2020 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of a whopping 55%. 

This growth is mainly due Covid-19 related lockdown measures—but important to keep in mind is that consumer habits were already changing. Traditional paid TV was, and continues to be in decline, cord-cutting is on the rise, and 65% of millennials use OTT services exclusively—indicating that they will never be lured to traditional cable companies (hence the dubbing of this group as ‘cord-nevers’). 

With that in mind, it should be a no brainer to get an engagement strategy in place to capture the attention, and loyalty of your customers with customer experiences that add value to the way they consume content. To help, we’ve outlined key use cases centred around delivering contextual customer experiences that will move the needle for digital streaming companies. 

Managing Onboarding to Secure Conversion 

For many digital streaming services the moment an app is installed or a trial is commenced is just the beginning. What really counts is ensuring that the trial customer becomes a paying customer. 

In most cases, new visitors came from somewhere, or responded to a specific marketing campaign. Great onboarding experiences use that knowledge to deliver customized material from the very first interaction.

Initial onboarding screens on mobile or tablet introduce key features of the service and maintain the connection with the ad the user just clicked on.

Customized and personalized onboarding experiences have been shown to improve user acquisition goal attainment by 132% post-30 day retention rates by 110% and drive 2.7X more in-app spending.

Using Personalized, Targeted Campaigns to Drive Upsell

Subscription isn’t always the end goal for video streaming businesses. In many cases lifetime value, and consequently revenue, will be greatly impacted by migrating users from more basic packages to more premium services such as sports, movies and pay per view events.

To upsell effectively, we want to identify an audience likely to respond to the offer and exclude those who won’t be interested and for whom campaigns will only mean irritation and distraction. 

To deliver a unified customer experience, ensure that you reach your customer across channels. Create native, personalized, targeted messaging over mobile push notifications, and in-app messages and correlate them to native, pixel perfect messages on OTT.  Research consistently suggests that multi-touch campaigns are more effective when it comes to driving action on the part of consumers.

Targeting and personalized upsell and cross-sell promotions can increase revenue per customer by up to 30%

Swrve is the only customer engagement platform that connects brands with their customers via OTT platforms and services. Swrve currently supports native in-app OTT messaging on Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, Android TV, and Smart TV. Unlike mobile app messaging, where users engage with a call to action in the palm of their hands, Swrve provides an OTT focus guide, enabling the user to engage with messages easily using their remote control. To learn more, see how Cinedigm increased engagement on the Dove Channel by 3x using targeted in-app messaging, and personalized push notifications with Swrve.

Hear from the Experts

Register for our webinar The Next Frontier: Customer Engagement Strategies for Digital TV, On-demand TV, and Streaming with Salesforce.  

Key Takeaways:

  • The key marketplace factors and trends driving OTT service engagement and customer churn
  • Strategies to increase engagement in the video consumer journey: initial interaction before subscribing or viewing of the service starts, when a free trial or promotional period ends, after a popular series ends, and during a long period of customer inactivity
  • Best practices of customer engagement strategies

Register here.