How BookMyShow Can Achieve Hockey-stick Growth on its OTT Video Streaming Platform through Insight-led Engagement

Reading Time: 9 minutes

BookMyShow has perhaps adapted to the shift in consumer behavior due to COVID-19 in the best possible way. The brand launched its pay-per-view streaming platform, BookMyShow Stream, in February 2021. The TVoD (transactional video-on-demand) service enables BookMyShow customers to watch the latest movies and live events at their fingertips. Fans can live stream sports events, music concerts, and recent movie releases through the BookMyShow website and mobile apps from the comfort and safety of their homes.

In this article, we look at how BookMyShow can follow the insight-led engagement framework to accelerate user and business growth at this stage. New video streaming brands or existing telecom giants launching new OTT streaming services can also pick up the tips and strategies mentioned here.

BookMyShow understands the onset of subscription fatigue in the video streaming space

The adoption of subscription-based streaming services was driven primarily by two factors: unlimited access to content and access to exclusive content.

At the time of writing this article, there are 43 video streaming services (excluding television streaming companies like BBC or Comcast). And a majority of these services are subscription-based.

Despite the abundance of subscription services, consumers are dissatisfied. A survey conducted by GlobalWebIndex (GWI) mentions that consumers’ biggest frustration is the added-up cost of multiple subscription services for entertainment.

Clearly, subscription fatigue has set in. Instead of paying for multiple services, consumers are looking forward to a pay-per-view model. BookMyShow’s decision of launching a transaction-based video platform seems to be perfectly timed with the onset of this fatigue.

Will the biggest names in the subscription-based streaming space experiment with the TVoD monetization model in the near future? We’ll just have to wait and watch!

Insight-led engagement framework for OTT video streaming services like BookMyShow

When 21st-century consumers consent to their data being collected, they expect brands to put this data to good use. This is where insight-led engagement comes into the picture. By leveraging insights gathered from their customer data, BookMyShow can ensure that every digital micro-moment is highly relevant and personalized for each customer.

Here are the four steps of this framework:

Step 1: Gather insights and strengthen predictions

Not knowing what data to track and what insights to gather can throw growth, marketing, and product teams down an unrecoverable spiral. At this stage, it is imperative for OTT video streaming platforms like BookMyShow to set up the right processes and infrastructure to make data-backed decisions.

While it is common knowledge that creating the right user segments is key to effective engagement, here’s how the best approach would look like:

Recency, Frequency, and Monetary data will increase the proficiency of your predictions. Users with a high frequency and recency value have a higher chance of completing a transaction and renting or buying a movie than others. On the other hand, users with low frequency and monetary value have a high chance of churning out. Having a bird’ eye view of these segments will enable marketing and growth teams to run the right campaigns with the right objectives.

Data about the type of device or the OS will allow the teams to decide which communication channel to use. Web banners and notifications, push notifications, in-app messages, emails, messaging services – the list of digital touchpoints are endless. Knowing which channel to pick for which set of users helps improve campaign performances as well.

Step 2: Personalize all communication

Once the segments are set up and data is available, the next step is to use this information for personalization. While new streaming services at this stage start with personalizing their communication based on attributes, BookMyShow has an upper hand here – past behavior data.

True personalization is achieved by leveraging all available data points. You can look at personalization from a layered perspective:

While mobile apps like BookMyShow might not restrict content based on geographical location today, as they expand globally, this will become a key factor to consider. This is because the enforcement of intellectual property copyrights and royalties varies from country to country. Additionally, movie studios and production houses enforce copyright based on the demand for their content in each region. Setting this up in advance allows OTT video streaming brands to quickly and easily scale their services to other regions.

The segments created in the previous step based on genres, casts, directors, and production studios of previously watched movies help in leveraging content affinity for personalization. To explain this better, let’s consider the addition of Zack Snyder’s Justice League to BookMyShow’s repository.

Instead of sending the announcements of the availability of this movie to everyone, here are the segments BookMyShow should limit their communication to, with the corresponding message for each segment:

Adding rich media to push notifications and sending HTML emails increases the conversions from the respective channels. Different design variations can be created for each segment to make your messages more relevant for each customer.

What are the benefits of this approach?

1. Improve conversions: Our latest study shows that personalization uplifts conversion rates by up to 1.91X on push notifications.
2. Lesser unsubscriptions and churn: Airtel witnessed a retention rate of 61.4% on their OTT video platform, Xstream, using MoEngage. You can read their growth story here.
3. Increase brand reliance: Read how Gaana increased music streams and daily active users on their mobile app using MoEngage here.

Step 3: Create omnichannel customer journeys to engage and retain users

Combining emails, push notifications, in-app interstitials, and text messaging services into a single omnichannel customer journey will allow growth and marketing teams to communicate with its customer base across multiple digital touchpoints.

Continuing with the same example of the release of Zack Snyder’s Justice League, here’s an example of how BookMyShow can orchestrate an omnichannel customer journey:

While creating omnichannel journeys, you’ll notice there are several variable factors that you can experiment with to optimize each journey for maximum conversions. Is 24 hours the right time delay to consider? Should push notifications be the first touchpoint for your mobile app users? Do emails work better than text messages when combined with Facebook advertisements?

As the number of customer journeys (you create for onboarding, engagement, retention, and monetization) increases, these variables that determine the conversion rates will increase exponentially. Instead of spending several man-hours to go through the data and pick the most optimized path manually, OTT video streaming services like BookMyShow can use MoEngage’s Intelligent Path Optimizer to pick the best configuration for each journey automatically.

When OYO Rooms started scaling globally, they realized that ensuring uniform and seamless engagement was a key necessity, especially when their customers interacted with the brand via multiple digital channels. Using MoEngage to create customer journeys, OYO Rooms was able to increase the performance of their campaigns by 8X! You can read how they implemented MoEngage Flows here.

One other variable that you can experiment with is rich media. You can use different image variations for different channels or even experiment with different kinds of images for the same channel. Here are a few examples:

Conclusion and next steps

Currently, BookMyShow has over 600 movie titles and over 72,000 hours of content (with 22,000+ hours of content that is exclusive to the platform).

By understanding what content is resonating with different user segments, and then picking the common genres/actors/directors/movie studios that are common across the largest segments, BookMyShow will be able to double down on partnerships to scale their content repository. This information will also allow BookMyShow to penetrate tier 2 and tier 3 cities in India by adding more vernacular content to their library.

Exclusive content combined with insight-led engagement is the perfect recipe that will put OTT video streaming brands like BookMyShow on a hockey-stick growth trajectory. Setting up the right infrastructure to support scale today will enable them to grow faster than the other OTT players in India.

Here are the key takeaways mentioned in this article:

1. Create segments based on past behavior to gauge the content affinity of different user sets. Leveraging user attributes will help in strengthening the 1-1 connection with the brand and RFM data will improve prediction proficiency.
2. Build automated campaigns for different user segments to improve conversions, reduce unsubscriptions and churn, and increase the value you add to your customers. Execute, observe, and repeat for future campaigns.
3. Invest in automation to scale engagement and retention activities by creating multiple customer journeys for onboarding, engagement, and retention, without spending several hours doing it manually. Use machine learning to get insights from multiple experiments and optimize future campaigns.

As the next step, you can book a live, virtual session to watch MoEngage in action and at the same time discuss solutions to your current challenges and pain points by scheduling a call below:

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You can also check out our A-Z mobile marketing guide for the Media & Entertainment industry below: