With the era of AI in full swing and its rapid adoption, most industries are now looking for digital solutions to improve their existing processes. The media and entertainment industry is no different.
Media and entertainment companies make up one of the most important verticals in the business world. It’s well-known in the industry that revenue from subscriptions has been on a steady incline for the last few years. As such, businesses within the sector are creating new ways of interacting with their audience that entice them to subscribe and pay. With the rise of subscriptions, churn mitigation has become an essential technique to maintain a healthy bottom line and minimize revenue loss. Therefore, companies like HBO or Netflix have come up with simple yet powerful tricks to get the attention of their customers.
However, challenges like seasonality, hidden churn, etc., are harder to tackle solely with human intervention. This is where AI comes into the picture. As it stands, the global “AI in media and entertainment” market is projected to grow at a remarkable CAGR of 26.12% from 2022 to 2030. To that end, let’s discuss in detail how AI can help media and entertainment companies in churn mitigation.
What Is Customer Churning?
Churn is a major problem for many media and entertainment companies. These businesses rely on their customers to be loyal and stay with them long-term. However, some customers are more likely than others to leave the company. This can cause a major decline in revenue.
Customer churning is when customers switch between service providers (e.g., cable companies) or products over time. It’s noteworthy because it directly affects the company’s bottom line.
What Is Churn Mitigation?
Churn mitigation is identifying and preventing customers from leaving a service or product. It’s crucial for media and entertainment companies to understand their churn rate, as it can affect revenue and overall company performance.
Favorably, with the help of AI, media and entertainment companies can identify patterns that lead to churn and set up systems to mitigate them before they transpire. Using machine learning algorithms, brands can predict behaviors that will result in customers leaving their service or product. By doing this, they can proactively reach out to the customers who are likely to leave to offer assistance or other benefits that may keep them from leaving.
How Can AI Help Media and Entertainment Companies in Churn Mitigation?
Churn Mitigation is, in fact, one of the biggest issues facing media and entertainment companies. Customers are leaving in droves, costing the industry billions of dollars annually. But as mentioned above, AI can help address this problem. Let’s see how.
1. Using Machine Learning to Build a Customer Churn Prediction Model
Machine learning can help media and entertainment companies determine which customers will likely churn.
A customer churn prediction model is a mathematical model that uses historical data to predict the probability of future customer churn. Your company can use this to identify customers who are most likely to leave, so you can take action to prevent it.
Machine learning allows you to build this model with minimal exploration or upfront cost and quickly see results. It can also be used with other models, such as behavioral data, demographic data, or social network analysis.
The primary goal of machine learning is to detect patterns in data and use those patterns to make predictions about future events. Machine learning algorithms like Random Forest or Neural Networks come in handy for such use cases.
2. Creating a Churner Profile and Identifying Churn Behavior
Heuristics can identify which users are likely to churn based on their behaviors, such as how long they spend on the site, what content they consume, and how often they interact with ads.
By analyzing these behaviors, businesses can create a churner profile that will help them understand how their customers behave and why they might leave. They can also use this information to provide personalized services that will sustain loyalty for longer periods.
3. Implementing the Churn Scoring Mechanism
The churn scoring mechanism is an effective way to mitigate churn. The scoring system is based on a series of questions that help measure customer satisfaction with the service.
These questions will help you assess how satisfied your customers are with your product and what they think about their experience with it.
The answers to these questions will then be translated into a score indicating how likely a user is to continue using your product or service. Again, companies can use this score to identify customers considering leaving so they can take steps to retain them before it’s too late.
4. Re-targeting Strategy to Engage with Customers
Re-targeting strategy is one of the most effective ways of engaging with customers who have churned from your service. This strategy involves using the information that you have collected about your customers to target them with advertisements that are relevant to them.
Many media and entertainment companies are especially inclined toward re-targeting strategies since these help them increase the chances of converting their former customers by showing them offers and promotions that may interest them.
AI can be used to segment these customers so that they are targeted with appropriate, personalized messaging. This helps to increase engagement with the brand and reduce churn. It also allows businesses to engage specific customers with the content they find valuable. For example, if someone has bought a movie ticket online, they may also want to watch another movie. This can be used as an opportunity to send them an offer for another movie.
Conclusion
AI has high applicability in the media and entertainment industry, and the sooner companies realize that, the more likely they are to make improvements across their digital platforms. Hopefully, the insights we shared in this post will be helpful for your efforts with churn mitigation.
As for what AI can do for your business, the possibilities are endless. Consult with us to develop a concrete AI strategy and put the technology to work.