OTT streaming is revolutionizing how entertainment content is consumed. The unparalleled quality of experience, vast libraries of on-demand content, seamless streaming, and personalized recommendations are driving remarkable subscriber growth-led convenience and flexibility.
No surprise that according to Allied Market Research, global revenue for the OTT market is projected to reach $1.039 trillion by 2027 (from $121.61 billion in 2019).
Now, standing out of the crowd in a fast-growing and competitive market requires a special focus on customer engagement.
What does that mean for broadcasters?
It’s simple math - if your subscribers aren’t satisfied or engaged, they won’t renew their subscriptions, or opt for high-tier paid plans. Worse, they’ll eventually churn. In that vein, the higher your churn rate, the greater will be the decline in recurring revenue for your OTT platform.
But that’s not all.
The risk with dissatisfied customers is not only cancelled subscriptions, Aggrieved customers often also engage in negative publicity, impacting your new subscriber acquisition efforts. Therefore ensuring subscribers are satisfied and well-engaged in the best way to grow sustainably.
Put simply, it’s all about maximizing viewers’ quality of experience.
In this blog post, you’ll find proven strategies to follow to improve viewer engagement, reduce customer acquisition costs, increase subscribers retention, and scale effectively.
Show to measure and prevent low subscriber satisfaction and engagement
The most successful OTT platforms typically use the following means to measure viewer engagement and protect themselves from the risks of churn.
Data collection & analysis
Collecting user data unlocks a goldmine of insights into customer preferences, behavior, and pain points.
What’s more, by tracking customer satisfaction metrics like content consumption patterns, time spent on the platform, and collecting user feedback, you can anticipate what your subscribers are planning.
Clear live dashboards
Following analytics dashboards is the simpler way to visualize and interpret the vast data that can be collected on your streaming platform.
Advanced dashboards present granular insights into what’s going on at a glance. You can leverage this information to take the exact corrective actions to notice and address signs of dissatisfaction before they become a problem.
For instance, Cleeng’s intuitive dashboards allow for quickly assessing essential aspects like performance and customer satisfaction metrics, user trends, and engagement levels.
Better even, with AI-powered analytics. These allow you to identify potential areas for improving engagement levels and optimize your offerings. In fact, ChurnIQ provides insights that predict churn with up to 92% accuracy. Following this is a great starting point to identify the unengaged and take focused steps to change that.
“As you know your customer, you're able to actually produce and deliver better content to your customer. This way, you can retain them and increase revenue,"
Ari Brock, Executive Director, Digital Media & Products at Tennis Channel.
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Let’s move over to what you can actually do to improve your subscriber engagement performance.
6 effective techniques to increase subscriber engagement and satisfaction
1. Build a seamless customer experience
An unparalleled user experience is essential to ensure subscriber engagement in the world of SVOD competition.
In a saturated OTT market, viewers have many options, and, beyond the content you offer, a safe bet to make them stick to yours is by going the extra mile and delivering a seamless user experience.
That includes:
- Optimizing the checkout process (more on this just below)
- Offering an effortless and secure sign-on process,
- Delivering stable and high-quality content with minimal disruptions,
- Providing customers with seamless integration between streaming devices.
This is how DOGTV managed to quickly grow user satisfaction and engagement. They’ve been allowing users to seamlessly switch between devices. Through this, their users can navigate the content their dogs enjoy on a TV at home, as well as ensure a similar customer experience on a mobile device during outdoor walks. This flexibility ensures uninterrupted entertainment, catering to users' preferences and their pets' needs.
2. Offer easy payments & renewals
Unoptimized OTT payment methods often deter potential customers from signing up or subscribers from renewing their existing subscriptions.
Now, you can eliminate this friction by incorporating billing automation and efficient OTT tax payment.
As a result, users get uninterrupted access to content, and you enjoy continued customer loyalty. Here’s what you can do:
- Enable smooth billing automation features: Integrate smooth and automatic payment processing for subscriptions to help users set up preferred payment methods and access easy recurring transaction systems.
- Simplify tax Management: Proper tax management reduces user confusion and provides transparent billing information, which builds trust and customer loyalty. So, strive to take the complexity out of tax management by handling taxes and fees on behalf of your users.
To learn more on this topic, learn how OUTtv gives users an accurate calculation of taxes based on location.
3. Personalize streaming experiences
Viewers are now used to receiving a personalized experience. Fail to deliver in this category, and they will notice.
By personalizing your streaming services to cater to individual user preferences, you will likely increase customer engagement and satisfaction rates..
Some effective ways to personalize experiences on your streaming platform include:
- Enabling building personalized watchlists on your platform
- Showing related content recommendations based on past user activity
- Streaming an exciting mix of regional content
- Providing the flexibility of choosing from various subscription packages, according to different users’ budgets and interests.
- Running campaigns like coupon marketing to offer personalized coupons like birthday discounts, and so on.
Want to see a case example? Take a look at RED.Sport. With a 360-degree view of their customer base, they are doing a great job at personalization and this is showing in their stellar retention rates.
4. Provide cutting-edge customer service
Getting prompt assistance and proper resolution to any queries is what most OTT subscribers expect today.
Building a dedicated customer support team is key to resolving queries efficiently, creating a more customer-centric environment, and fostering an ecosystem of satisfaction and customer loyalty.
You can improve your customer service and increase engagement by:
- Incorporating omni channel support across such as live chat, email, and phone
- Ensuring support is available round the clock
- Providing multilingual assistance
Of course, achieving the above effectively involves important costs. An efficient way to become more customer-centric without breaking the bank is to rely on a cloud-based AI-powered customer care solution that is capable of answering and resolving customer queries promptly.
5. Ensure proper security assurances
By assuring users of your commitment to privacy and data protection, you can create a trustworthy and secure environment that instills confidence. Some ways you can do this include:
- Deploying advanced encryption protocols and secure authentication measures to safeguard user data and protect against unauthorized access.
- Providing users with regular security updates, proactively monitoring interfaces, and fortifying against potential cyber threats.
- Only partner with solutions that meet high-security requirements to minimize breach risks and increase customer satisfaction.
Learn about Cleeng’s compliance and security certifications.
6. Run win-back campaigns to get customers back, before it’s too late
Win-back campaigns are an effective asset to regain the hearts of disengaged subscribers and elevate user satisfaction exponentially.
These are campaigns you run to reestablish customer relationships and showcase your platform's commitment to exceeding their expectations.
The idea is simple.
- Identify unengaged users
- Segment unengaged users based on key behavior indicators
- Address the pain point to win back the engagement with relevant campaigns.
An excellent case in point here is the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). They implemented a win-back campaign to regain lapsed subscribers and won 36% of them back thanks to well-targeted and implemented incentives.
Keep subscribers happy. They’ll stick around.
In the competitive OTT streaming world, customer engagement is the key to continued and sustainable growth.
The way forward lies in delivering world-class, secure streaming experiences while delivering a seamless subscriber experience from checkout to pushing relevant and quality content
Finally, keeping a close watch on your engagement levels and running focused win-back campaigns for any segments with dwindling engagement is the way to ensure you’re always on top of the game.
Want to know about a unified tool designed to increase SVOD engagement? Check out Cleeng’s SRM™ suite
