In the universe of video services, the abandonment rate is a key metric to take into account. It measures the number of users who unsubscribe from your service during a certain period of time.
How Do We Calculate the Churn Rate?
Measuring your churn rate is simple: you must divide the total number of subscriptions that have been cancelled on a given period by the total number of subscriptions on a given period.
However, video services have a more complicated task. Much more complicated. Not only do people sign up or unsubscribe, but there are also those who simply switch packages, upgrading or downgrading.
For data regarding churn to be useful to video platforms, it’s important to understand the main influences that cause customers to churn from your platform. What are these factors? What factors attract new users? How well is the content offering working? Does your platform have a good UX? How is the quality of your user’s experience (QoE)?
Having all this information and being able to correlate it in an optimal way is key to anticipating and making business and marketing decisions focused on attracting and retaining customers. This way, the company can spend less capital on acquiring new customers, taking into account that attracting new users is way more expensive than working on keeping existing ones.
What Causes Customer Churn?
There are several reasons why users abandon a video service, but the most important ones are the following:
Price
The most common reason a user decides to leave is that they may have found a cheaper alternative that fits their needs. Hence why it’s important to know how to adapt the prices of your service based on demographics and geographic variables and, above all, how to play with different business models within the same platform, which is something we are seeing already with companies such as Peacock, with their hybrid AVOD/SVOD model, and Netflix, who are in the process of analyzing if an AVOD model would work for them.
It’s common for companies to offer free content (FVOD) that engages with their audience in a specific region, and then offer the following chapters in a subscription format (SVOD). On the other hand, it may also be a good alternative to create a diverse set of subscription packages at the same time, just like Prime Video, offering content through subscription (SVOD) as well as allowing their users to select a specific content they want to watch for a price (TVOD).
The options are endless, and each video service should explore, based on the data, the strategy that best suits their interests.
Affinity Between Content and Target
It’s important to have a clear understanding of the target audience and the content oriented towards them. If the content doesn’t fit the consumers, they will unsubscribe. Making personalized content recommendations and promotions will make users feel better about your service, retaining them on your platform.
User Experience
If the experience is negative, it will be less likely for customers to use or want to use your platform anymore, which will result in a loss of customers. In this case, Quality of Experience (QoE) tools are key for video services to solve real-time problems that may exist on their platforms before their users realize. Having this information is also key to helping their customer service departments by identifying the problems beforehand and solving requests.
How to avoid customer leakage?
Around 10% of customer churn can be avoided with proactive communication campaigns, attending to customers, and solving their problems. Thus, we suggest following three recommendations:
Plan and optimize the customer journey
When a lead becomes a client, the journey transforms from a buyer’s journey to a customer’s journey, which must include their post-sales experience, and the support you provide. It is here that CRM tools (meaning, a software platform that allows companies to unify the management of accounts, contacts, sales, communications, and other data about current and potential customers) bring value, as they can be used to record all types of interactions.
Communicate your platform’s value
By offering trials, interacting with your users, creating a content database, or publishing videos of your customer’s interaction with your platform, you can give your customers clear information on the value of your platform through different channels, educating them on what differentiates you from your competitors.
Create a data-driven personalized experience
By understanding your customer as deeply as possible, you can reduce customer churn, as knowing a lot about them, about their likes and dislikes, allows you to give them a personalized experience that is unique to them, thus avoiding abandonment.
If you want to learn more about cancellations, check JUMP’s whitepaper on how to reduce churn and avoid the mass SVOD cancellations predicted for 2022.
About JUMP Data-Driven Video
JUMP Data-Driven Video is a Software-as-a-Service (Saas) company that joined the media and entertainment industry in 2016 with the explicit mission to champion video services’ optimization. Their vision that business data —and its effective use— being the key differentiator for successful players in the industry has proven to be true.
By using Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning technologies to improve video businesses’ ROI, JUMP has developed a platform to optimize audience retention, personalization, engagement, and marketing effectiveness: Everything you need to jump to the next level!
Companies such as Vodafone, Hallmark, Pureflix, TVN Pass, among others, trust JUMP to get advanced analytics and personalization for their platforms through JUMP Insights, JUMP Personalizer, JUMP Lakehouse, JUMP Business Impact, JUMP Retention, JUMP User DNA, and JUMP QoE.
For more information visit JUMP Data-Driven Video at https://www.jumpdatadriven.com
