We began using Movio Cinema in December 2015. As relatively new users we wanted to share our recent success stories and demonstrate how targeted email campaigns have yielded fantastic results for our cinemas. Nordisk Film Kino are based in Norway with 17 cinema locations that have over 3 million visitors a year and 200,000 members in our loyalty programme ‘Kinopluss’.

Over the last few years the screening of plays, concerts, operas or sports has seen event cinema grow in popularity all over the world. We are always looking for new opportunities and great experiences to offer our customers and we’re keen to develop a varied programme of event cinema screenings. In this blog we’ll tell you about our most recent events and how we leveraged Movio Cinema to ensure success and a great return on investment.

Bringing NYC to Oslo

Nordisk obtained the Norwegian rights to screen a live performance by Kanye West’s at Madison Square Garden in New York City on 11 February, 2016. The session was programmed for 10.15pm in a 240-seat screen at our Ringen cinema, located in the trendy suburb Grünerløkka in Oslo. We were confident the audience was out there as Kanye West has a big fan base here in Norway, however, we had little information prior to the session of exactly what was planned.

The exclusive show was highly secretive, providing the audience with a unique chance to be one of the first to hear Kanye’s new album: Waves. Due to this secrecy we couldn’t advertise any specific details and had to package it as an ‘exclusive performance,’ because no one besides perhaps Kanye himself knew what would be showcased – would it be a speech, a concert, a fashion show, or all of the above? We rolled out a campaign using our usual marketing channels with a front-page placement of the show on our website, a Facebook post and an article in our regular weekly newsletter.

Selling out Kanye

Being fairly new Movio Cinema users, we didn’t have the operational skills nor the technical architecture in place to start doing a lot of email campaigns with promotional codes and rebates. However, we knew we could create a target audience that would perfectly suit this event’s campaign.

Prior to sending out any targeted messaging, the session had sold a total of 37 seats. We had previous experience showing music gigs from Ed Sheeran and Roger Waters’ The Wall concerts, but the same group wouldn’t necessarily be interested in the Kanye West screening; we would need to find the correct audience for this event.

On 1 February, we had the idea to look at loyalty members that had already seen the movie Straight Outta Compton since we hadn’t had a lot of previous experiences with hiphop/rap concerts, so we felt that the audience for a hiphop music film would be similar to the fans of hiphop artists.

We found 822 customers from our 88,000 Oslo loyalty members that had seen the movie, and sent them a targeted email with information about the Kanye West show. It was very easy to pull together, and the team were very eager to see the results the next day. To our surprise and delight the targeted messaging had accelerated sales to fill ¾ of the seats and by lunchtime that day the whole session was fully booked -  a whole 10 days before the event! This was a very special result for us, especially since Norwegians tend to be spontaneous in their movie ticket buying habits -  usually booking on the same day or the day before a screening.

Not just a one-hit wonder

More success was to come when the Cinema Manager for Ringen called us wanting to set up a second screening due to the volume of requests she’d received. This time we picked a screen that had 407 seats and we were optimistic. The same pattern of slow ticket sales occurred again but this time we kept cool heads and waited until three days prior to the session before taking any action. With only 40 something seats sold we sent a new targeted email campaign to the same audience, but removed the loyalty members who had already bought tickets to the first screening so as not to alienate the existing ticket holders. The day after this campaign went out the second screen was completely sold out.

The results of these campaigns were as follows:

• 822 loyalty members targeted
• 42.3% open-rate
• 15.52% CTR
• 0% spam and unsubscribe (which is quite unique!!).
• 32% visitation rate (on average for our weekly newsletter we have 2,5-6% visitation rate)

It was a great success for us showing how our targeted email marketing campaigns can successfully trigger sales. We set out with the key objective to get to know Movio Cinema inside out to better utilise the functionalities within the console. We also thought they would give us solid benchmark metrics for future campaigns that would help us to adjust messaging and refine tactics.

The Kanye West email campaigns definitely raised the bar and it’s difficult to beat this type of newcomer success, however, we hope to continue to correctly interpret analytics and become stronger email marketers.

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