Established in 1989, Picturehouse Cinemas (Picturehouse) is one of the most popular exhibitors in the United Kingdom. The company owns and operates 23 cinemas, and programmes a further 37 venues across the country, and is now part of the Cineworld family of cinemas. Picturehouse’s venues are architecturally unique with cafes, bars, restaurants, and provide live events alongside their film programme.

The exhibitor’s programming and marketing is tailored to each of its individual cinemas, with a marketing team at each location. “It’s important for us to act locally because our cinemas are in quite unique locations,” says John-Paul Pierrot, Marketing Executive at Picturehouse. This approach has helped to shape their customer loyalty programme, which now has more than 740,000 contactable member records and thousands of regularly active members.

Picturehouse has been using email to communicate with its loyalty programme members, as well as to a database of subscribers who receive a weekly newsletter from the company. However, they found their original email tool very difficult to use, and often had to involve input from their IT department, so consequently they didn’t use it very often.

Picturehouse decided to implement Movio Cinema to combine marketing data analysis and campaign management in February 2015, and now have 40+ people using the platform in their organisation. “Movio Cinema has changed the way we approach our email communication. It enables us to be more precise and creative in our marketing, without IT involvement, and in a fraction of the time it used to take,” says Sam Clements, Marketing Manager at Picturehouse. In 2015 they won ‘Cinema Marketing Campaign of the Year’ at the Screen Awards in London in recognition of their efforts.

This case study covers Picturehouse’s unique implementation using historical data and how they were able to send over 1,500 campaigns and measure their return on investment in their first year using Movio Cinema.