The cost of acquiring customers for your SVOD service is far greater than trying to retain them. This simple fact is essential to survival as the OTT battle intensifies.
That’s according to Gilles Domartini, CEO and Founder of Cleeng, in conversation with Co-founders of the Subscription Agency, Bhavesh Vaghela and Debbie Leishman and in a new episode of the Art of Subscription podcast ‘Retention, Retention, Retention!'.
Subscriber Retention Management™ - a secret weapon in the streaming wars
The battle for eyeballs and share of wallet among streamers is entering a new phase of maturity. The pure-play SVOD model exemplified by Netflix which amassed subscribers by spending billions of dollars on content is being seriously questioned for the first time. Increased competition and the universal squeeze on incomes are among factors putting pressure on streaming services to add advertising-based video on demand (AVOD) tiers to their consumer offer. But there’s another card close to home that they should already be playing.
As Gilles, Cleeng CEO explains, “Content is an essential factor that will bring in customers but it's not sufficient to keep them. OTT businesses need to invest in the other services surrounding their content.”
It is actually Amazon that is the exemplar here. It has invested in improving the quality of experience, logistics, customer care and ease of payment in parallel to its central store, revolutionizing the ecommerce space in the process.
In the podcast, Gilles argues that OTT platforms are sitting on a gold mine of data that can be used in similar ways to transform churn and keep paying customers onboard.
“For a long time OTT broadcasters have focused on personalizing for content preferences but have failed to take into account how various steps from account creation to starting a subscription can be optimized nor how the overall lifetime value of a customer can be maximized.”
How to use subscriber data to power your subscriber retention strategy
One problem is that subscriber data is typically fragmented among different parts of an OTT business. Gilles offers advice on how to unlock, integrate and interrogate this data to provide crucial insight into marketing actions that you can take to address churn. The unique selling point of Cleeng is that we provide around 40 different dashboards with many different metrics around the customer journey.
During the podcast, Gilles discusses the industry's current benchmarks for typical subscriber churn and winback rates. He also shares some of the incredible improvements that we have seen among our clients that have been using Subscriber Retention Management™, or running targeted winback campaigns.
Think you can’t predict the likelihood that a user will churn or stay, and figure out how to potentially mitigate churn? Cleeng will give you cause to think again.
What’s to come for the OTT industry?
Also on the podcast, Gilles shares his views on the future of the OTT industry which he believes will become increasingly active with brands and content creators. Many of these platforms will accelerate, some may consolidate, but to be a serious force they will need the right analytics tools to scale.
The subscription model is no zero-sum game. The OTT business model is evolving into blends of FAST, AVOD, P-VOD, subscription and pay-per-view as the streaming game enters its third and most complex phase of maturity.
Churn can undermine your OTT business but astute use of subscriber data can turn your fortunes on its head.
Listen to the Art of Subscription, episode 5, ‘Retention, Retention, Retention!’:
