How to do Personalized Marketing in 10 Steps

This checklist is designed to help pay-TV providers take a data-driven approach to marketing.

1. Collect consumption data: The key to understanding your customer is to collect personal consumption data: who watches what, when, on which device, and through which discovery path (e.g., live EPG, replay TV, navigation in VOD catalog.)
2. Cover all delivery networks: If you have an open-device OTT service in addition to your traditional STB-based broadcast network, it’s crucial to have an integrated overview covering both services to understand how to retain subscribers who are likely to switch to OTT services: either yours or someone else’s.
3. Connect CRM data: It’s critical to connect your consumption data with data from your subscriber management system and CRM. This allows you to model the purchasing behavior of your subscribers and the history of your interaction with them.
4. Use external demographic data: Combined with the data you collect yourself, this will give you a complete view of your customers: a high-value dataset that only operators can create.
5. Enrich your content metadata: To personalize the recommendations you make to users, including upcoming live content, it’s essential to enrich your content metadata with external data that provides a coherent, up-to-date and complete view of the content. EPG and VOD catalog metadata is usually not rich enough to provide sufficient predictive value.
6. Quantify content value: What your content is worth depends on how much your subscribers value it plus, as the case may be, the advertising dollars it can generate. By predicting the engagement that your content (live service, replay TV or VOD) will generate, you can move to the next level in terms of content efficiency — i.e. maximizing happiness generated per content dollar — and coverage, i.e. making sure subscribers find the content they love.
7. Use recommendations everywhere: People watch TV for content, so recommendations tailored to their personal taste are essential in driving engagement and user satisfaction. Recommendations can be leveraged every time there is interaction with customers: on the set-top-box during discovery, in engagement emails or SMS, in marketing campaigns, in interactions with the call center and so on. A mix of personalized and popularity-based recommendations works best.
8. Manage OTT quality: The #1 churn factor on OTT is low-quality video delivery. Seamless delivery to hundreds of mobile device models over an open mobile network is a challenge that should not be underestimated. When problems are detected, you should be able to understand which users were affected and possibly offer something to compensate your prime customers among them.
9. Don’t stop at analytics: generate actions. Data and AI have their full impact when they are used to generate actions that improve business metrics. Analytics are great for providing understanding, but they are just the first step.
10. Adopt a try-measure-iterate mindset: The market is moving fast and so are consumption habits: no-one can predict what will work and what won’t. As with startups, success will come by trying things out, measuring their impact, and improving them iteratively or moving on to the next thing if they don’t work out.