Village entertainment achieves record-breaking results with consumer-led strategy & Lexer CDP

Village Entertainment achieves unparalleled results by refocusing to a highly-strategic customer-first strategy with the Lexer Customer Data Platform at the heart.

A More Holistic Understanding of Customers

Village Entertainment, part of Village Roadshow Limited (VRL) and a leader in the cinema exhibition industry prioritized the use of customer data in order to form one-to-one relationships with all guests that enjoy their best-in-class cinematic experience.

To do so, Lexer’s Customer Data Platform (CDP) was implemented across VRL subsidiaries to aggregate customer information received from cinemas, distribution and theme parks. The cinemas rich database includes ticket purchases, offline behavior including food & beverage orders, paid, owned and partner campaign engagement, online and social intent – across not only loyalty but the wider customer base. Obtaining a view of all guests outside of the loyalty program allowed Village Entertainment to create a holistic framework for truly understanding the wants, needs, lifestyles and behaviors of their entire population, inclusive of Mosaic profiling. Equally impressive, VRL’s aggregated data in Lexer’s CDP gave Village Entertainment a humanized view of 80% of the Victorian market.

“The journey to date has been fulfilling, to connect and centralise a plethora of data sources and platforms in order to ultimately increase our understanding of all cinema goers. The business is putting itself in the best position to drive premium guest experiences.”
– Nic Robin, GM Marketing

This is part one in a two-part series demonstrating Village Entertainment's success with Lexer. Click here to read part two: "Village Entertainment Drives Revenue and Loyalty Growth with the Lexer CDP."

Integrating Disparate Data into a Single Customer View

Making the single customer view possible is Lexer’s ability to integrate with many disparate data sources. Today Lexer pulls data from a number of areas, inclusive of SAP BI, Vista Ticketing & Loyalty, GA360, Google Big Query, Adobe DMP (AAM) and Sitecore into the CDP. Lexer unifies the data from these sources at the customer level and displays it in a simple and intuitive user interface for Village Entertainment to analyze and gain insights. With all their data unified at a unique customer level, Village Entertainment are able to create very specific audiences such as people who live within 20 kilometers of a cinema location, love Gold Class burgers, enjoyed the last film featuring The Rock, haven’t purchased a ticket to his latest release, yet have browsed sessions and interacted with Dwayne on Facebook.

When it’s time to take action, Village Entertainment sends audiences and data to Facebook, Instagram, Google Ads, Adobe DMP (AAM), Sitecore, eDM and additional platforms to deliver customer engagement.

“Lexer as a CDP has enabled the unification and humanisation of our customer data from many disparate sources. As a team and a business, targeting based on past transactional behaviour is great, but overlaying intent-based segments through browsing and social behaviour allows additional opportunities. Subsequently, we can immediately activate bespoke offers and campaigns to these audiences.”
– Ben Murphy, Digital Marketing Manager

Opportunities During the Buyer’s Journey

Having a rich dataset at their fingertips, the marketing team can deliver highly targeted and efficient marketing campaigns that ultimately drive ticket sales. Additionally, utilizing suppression tactics to avoid spending ad budget on audiences who are less likely or equally important already purchased a ticket to a specific title.

For example, finding the right movie, session time and cinema location that works best for a couple, family, or friends takes planning and research. That results in a period of time where a group of people browse start times for different movies at various locations and watch trailers on Village Cinemas website without buying tickets.

By capturing customer intent within the Lexer CDP, Village Entertainment can identify customers who are in-market for specific movies, cinema concepts and locations to name a few. They then combine this information with rich historical transactional data to engage these in-market moviegoers through digital channels via tailored messages. Knowing the audience is currently in-market allows for campaigns that encourage viewers to book tickets immediately with Village instead of letting a trip to the movies slip off their radar or be fulfilled by direct and indirect competitors.

A Golden Mother’s Day

Mother’s Day is a tentpole gifting period, Village Entertainment utilized Lexer to drive voucher sales specifically surrounding a Mother’s Day Flash Sale. Village Entertainment use the CDP to create customer segments based on demographics, interests, past transactions, online product engagements and behaviors then aggregate the audiences to target through paid social media campaigns promoting their $30 Gold Class Ticket as a Mother’s Day gift. Campaign settings and creative were tailored to each segment.

This intelligent segmentation and personalization in these social media campaigns led to it being the fastest-growing acquisition channel. Within this sale period, paid social drove a 515% increase in revenue year-over-year.

Tentpole Technology and Blockbuster Outcomes

In addition to boosting the results from individual campaigns, Village Entertainment’s marketing team has been able to significantly strengthen some cornerstones of the company’s long-term growth strategy.

A customer’s loyalty to a brand and their desire to make repeat purchases of a product or service are two important ingredients in growing lifetime value. It naturally follows that these two ingredients are of paramount importance to the wider Village Entertainment team.

A common way brands build loyalty amongst their happy customer base is through loyalty programs. Village Entertainment established that members of their Vrewards loyalty program deliver an NPS score 26% higher than those of non-members. To quantify this satisfaction in terms of revenue, the business used Lexer’s CDP to discover that the annual value of a Vrewards member is 190% greater than that of non-members.

Thus, a key focal point of success is increasing their active loyalty base. Fortunately, Village Entertainment has used Lexer to grow their active member base by 62% year-over-year. Also earning a 36% year-over-year increase in contactable members which now exceed one million in Victoria and Tasmania alone.

“The implementation of an LTV strategy has enabled us to develop an understanding of our customers beyond their current transaction history. The ability to predict the annual value of individual customers allows us to identify gaps and reduce the risk of customer churn, as well as gives us the ability to recognise and reward our highest value members.”
– Stacey Kwijas, Marketing Manager

With the innovative minds at Village Entertainment and Lexer continuously working to improve platform capabilities, provide more data-driven insights, boost campaign performance and accelerate long-term growth drivers, we expect many profitable sequels in the years to come.

Schedule a demo with our team to see how Lexer can help your business.