Denver – At the StreamTV Show in Denver on Wednesday, Paramount Streaming CMO and Chief Data Officer Domenic DiMeglio took to the stage for a keynote, where he described how marketing and data-driven insights are closely tied as the company looks to not only attract and engage consumers but keep them subscribed to the Paramount+ SVOD.
Churn is a known industry-wide issue for streaming services, but DiMeglio zeroed in on “early tenure churn” as “such a pivotal moment” – explaining that when a consumer first signs up for a service is when they’re actually at most risk to churn or likely to cancel.
And Paramount starts thinking about this factor even before users sign up for the SVOD, working closely with product and technology teams to implement strategies from the jump that will help retain users in that critical early window.
“We are myopically focused on what the onboarding experience is,” DiMeglio said
That includes a show picker when new subscribers first enter the app, which asks about favorite movies or shows so that the SVOD can immediately start customizing and personalizing both the content experience and marketing messages.
“That helps us solve the cold start problem, so that we’re able to start tailoring all of the marketing communications in terms of your welcome onboarding journey,” as well as emails and push notifications, he noted.
And it helps kick start algorithms within the SVOD product itself, “so that when you open up the app there is already a degree of sort of customization, personalization there for you.”
To help with churn Paramount also identifies what it sees as inflection points for users “that really sort of move the needle in terms of changing the churn dynamic in your first month” of subscribing, the CMO said, including engaging with multiple types of content on the platform.
For example, sports are key and pull users into the platform, but once someone has watched a live sporting event, getting them to then move on to stream a series, “has a very dramatic improvement in your churn,” he noted. Another example is getting a viewer to stream for four hours or engage with the app for a certain period of time.
“Then we basically identify those inflection points and all of the teams working across the board have shared goals of really trying to drive those outcomes” and personalization to improve churn.
DiMeglio also pointed the importance of live sports as helping to acquire subscribers for the first time, but reiterated that getting them to move on to other types of programming on the SVOD after the game action ends is another key part of retention and a factor for driving lifetime value (LTV) of subscribers – a key metric for the company.
“Just because you come in for a game for you to become a long-term subscriber to us, we’ve got to do more than just satiate you with live sports,” he noted. “I think it’s really the mix of everything that goes together and that’s what really drives our LTVs.”
And a focus for the CMO is sustainably bringing in new subscribers “at rates that are lower than their LTVs” – which he said has been working “incredibly well” for Paramount and helping to drive its path to streaming profitability, which it expects to achieve in the US this year.