Launching an OTT subscription service is hard. It involves building infrastructure, delivering experiences across multiple platforms, acquiring a compelling set of content, and marketing the service. It’s a huge investment. After you launch, though, the hard work is not done. You have to acquire new users. And even more importantly, you need to retain those subscription users which were so difficult to acquire in the first place.
Big Data, AI, and Machine Learning technologies are rapidly evolving and providing unique tools for executives, marketing teams, and product teams to predict and reduce churn across their entire user base. Below are 7 ways AI can help ensure churn is minimized and LTV is maximized across OTT subscription services.
1. Predict The Loyalty Of Every User
Your OTT service can quickly accumulate millions of subscribers. Across millions of users, how can you determine whether any particular user is in danger of churning? Machine learning algorithms can predict likelihood of churn for any user by learning from the behavior of past users. Examples of behaviors which are used to train machine learning models include: How often did past users login to the service? What devices did they use to login? What content did they watch? How often did they engage with email notifications? Did they watch series, movies, or live content? All user behaviors, potentially tens of thousands of actions for each user, can be used as inputs to machine learning algorithms in order to predict whether an existing user will churn.
The moment a subscriber engages with an online experience, the algorithms assess their satisfaction with the service and start to predict how likely that user is to leave the service in the future. The more behavioral data-points the AI collects, the better it knows your visitor, and the more accurate the assessment of their loyalty.
The result is the ultimate view of your OTT customer base (see the diagram below) – a comprehensive, data-driven look across your entire user base of who has the highest risk of churning and who is most loyal. All made possible with the power of big data and machine learning.
2. Understand ‘Why’ Each Customer Churns
Understanding “Why” each user churns is almost as important as knowing who will churn. AI can tell your marketing teams what actions and behaviors loyal users are doing vs. those who are likely to churn. This enables your team to focus on the metrics and experiences that matter most to your bottom line. For instance are loyal users watching more live content? Series? Movies? What genres of content are users who are least likely to churn watching? Armed with this information, teams can make informed, data-driven decisions about what content to acquire next.
3. Proactively Engage Users Before They Churn
One of the biggest benefits of having a predictive AI engine determining who will churn is to proactively engage users in danger of churning before they leave your OTT service. For instance if an AI predicts a user is close to churning it might make sense to send them a discount on the service or offer free premium content to keep them watching. The key, as visualized below, is to know who are your most loyal and least loyal users and engage these groups uniquely with content which will maximize their loyalty.
4. Determine The ROI of Licensing Or Creating New Content
Licensing and/or creating new content (like Netflix’s House of Cards) is expensive. AI helps you understand the ROI of adding new content to your subscription service. It can do this by predicting the likelihood of user churn before and after new content is added. AI also helps you differentiate between content which draws users into your service for a one-time free promotion from content which creates a long-term loyal customer base.
5. Calculate The ROI Of A New App Or Website Launch
Launching a new website or app can be a huge commitment in engineering and product resources. How can you measure whether that new experience is helping create a loyal customer base? To start, predictive AI can take the guesswork out of calculating the ROI by assessing the loyalty of users who see both the old and new version of your online experience. The result, seen below, is a quantitative comparison of loyalty to directly calculate the value your new app or website has had across your user base.
6. Understand The Impact Of Marketing Campaigns
How can you measure the ROI of offering 1 free month of your service? And what about the ROI of adding an additional email campaign on the weekends in addition to the campaign you are running during the week? AI can help. Predictive AI technology can tell you quantitatively how much those additional emails are increasing the loyalty of your user base.
7. Automation & Personalization
AI can help you predict which user will churn. But it can also go further by telling you exactly what content to promote in emails, push notifications, and onsite to keep those users loyal and when to send those outbound messages. For instance, Vidora users see increases in engagement by 75%+ across mobile push, emails, onsite, and in-app using predictive AI.
How Do You Get Started In Stopping User Churn?
What is the end result of using AI to prevent churn? For instance, improving customer retention by just 5% with AI, you can increase profits anywhere from 15-95%. And that’s a big deal. Vidora is already using AI to help some of the largest global OTT services minimize churn.
Contact us today to see how we can help your OTT service.
