The holiday season is almost knocking at the door, starting from the festivities around Diwali, Halloween to Thanksgiving, leading up to Christmas and New Year.

As retail sales increase, the media and entertainment sector might see a drop in engagement with their content.

This can be attributed to the change in consumer behavior.

People are more willing to shop for the holiday season and have a budget cut for non-essential things like renewing an OTT subscription or online gaming.

The economic slowdown and inflation can be other causes, too. So, if you’re in the media and entertainment sector, here’s what you can do to not experience a lull during this holiday season.

User engagement strategies for media and entertainment companies for the holiday season

While one size does not fit all, here are some strategies that are sure to work to boost user engagement for media and entertainment companies:

1. Hybrid messaging and cross-channel customer engagement

Binge and bounce are common among users especially during the holiday season when people are busy in celebrations.

So media and entertainment brands must encourage their audience to repeat sessions and purchases. To do so, brands need to leverage cross-channel engagement.

But if you’re not engaging at all, start with a single-channel approach first! Remember that brands that communicate on at least one channel saw better engagement than those that don’t.

A report mentions that their user base rose by 4.6X, monetization increased by 35.2 x, and retention jumped by 3X when they engaged over at least one channel rather than doing nothing.

Along with consistent messaging, media and entertainment brands must also focus on hybrid messaging for further user activation, monetization, and retention. The channels brands can explore are pushed notifications, SMS, email, in-app/browser messaging, content cards, etc.

Engaging with customers through all these channels can boost performance to a significant level even during the holiday season.

For example, Alt Balaji, a popular on-demand video platform, wanted to drive user engagement and retention. So, they partnered with WebEngage to leverage their WebEngage effect to increase user video views.

Once a user installs/ upgrades the app, a user journey (designed by AltBalaji) gets triggered for them. The journey employs a two-pronged communication approach to user engagement: Push Notification and email, triggered upon app installation and upgrade.

One month later, ALTBalaji noted a significant increase in their Day 1 to Day 7 retention percentages.

By leveraging contextual nudges via Push notifications and Emails, ALTBalaji increased user engagement intelligently and drove more users into playing video content on the platform.

While multi-channel communication is important, implementing the right channel combination is important to see the best results.

For example, sending campaigns via mobile push and in-app messages can drive 5.8X more sessions per user vs. sending messages via only one channel. So, if you want to boost your engagement during the festivities, experiment with combinations based on channel delivery.

2. Real-time messaging

With the rise in on-demand video platforms, the one-size-fits-all approach no longer works. Customers now prefer personalization/to satisfy their needs. Top brands use dynamic content accessible via APIs to personalize their marketing campaigns and make messaging more relevant.

For example, if you’re an on-demand streaming platform, you might want to use data and understand the user preference. So, if a viewer has watched a movie in a specific genre, sending them recommendations from a similar genre is likely to increase engagement. Or you may want to send show recommendations that go well with the holiday spirit.

You can also segment the audience by various attributes like age, language, and past viewing histories to send recommendations.

However, don’t go overboard here; otherwise, you might be perceived as an intrusive brand. Conducting customer surveys can help you understand the level of hyper-personalization your audience prefers.

3. Be authentic and show customer empathy

One of the best ways to establish meaningful connections with your customers is to be authentic in promoting your brand values. Customers deeply relate to brands that share similar sentiments with them. Besides being authentic, bring in a lot of empathy in your communications through actions.

For example, you might want to promote content with diverse voices as a media brand. This means suggesting shows and movies that are based on various festivals, traditions, and beliefs.

A news channel can promote empathy by sticking to authentic journalists. Also, gather your customers’ feedback on what they like about you and where they want to see changes. And when you implement those changes, don’t forget to communicate back to them.

4. Use in-app content campaigns

By pitching new video content that matches a user’s viewing history, you can encourage users to spend more time in the app. These related content notifications pique curiosity and provide a more customized user experience. This is a virtual form of content cross-selling.

Non-intrusive in-app notifications encourage users to engage with new content without disrupting the user experience.

It’s one of the strategies that Netflix makes use of the most to keep their content suggestions ‘relevant.’

5. Feedback-based campaigns

A feedback-based campaign is a strategy apps and platforms use to collect user feedback and improve the overall user experience. Instead of bombarding every user with requests for ratings and reviews, feedback-based campaigns target repeat users who have interacted with the app multiple times. So, the feedback will come from those more familiar with the platform.

The main purpose of these campaigns is to gather valuable insights from users about their experiences with the app. This feedback can include improvement suggestions, bug reports, and overall satisfaction ratings. By doing so, the platform aims to become more user-centric. Addressing user concerns and enhancing the features are important to satisfy and retain the audience.

On the other hand, getting favorable ratings and reviews from satisfied users positively impacts the platform’s visibility and ranking in app stores. Higher ratings and positive reviews can attract more potential users to download and try the app. Positive reviews exhibit trustworthiness and quality, ultimately helping the platform grow its user base.

Imagine getting positive reviews around being able to spend more time with family watching your favorite movies during the holidays. It’s like a nudge to users in a similar audience segment!

6. Personalize content suggestions

Personalizing content is crucial to your users’ engagement and retention strategies. Personalized content ensures that users receive recommendations and notifications that align with their interests, content consumption history, and usage patterns. This approach keeps users hooked on the app and encourages them to explore and consume more of its offerings.

Personalizing content empowers platforms to deliver tailored experiences to users. It helps make your users feel more connected and valued, ultimately leading to higher engagement rates and improved user retention.

For instance – Vikatan is a prominent player in the Indian media industry. With a massive readership of over 30 million worldwide,

Vikatan aimed to retain its existing readers and improve its Return on Experience (ROX). So, they partnered with WebEngage to enhance user engagement and retention.

Their key challenges included real-time engagement at scale and a lack of app uninstall data. WebEngage helped Vikatan use hyper-personalized genre-based engagement through their ‘Relays’ feature. As a result, 40% of readers were successfully engaged via Relays.

Unique article viewers increased by 5%, and 18% more readers upgraded the Vikatan app. These achievements not only retained readers but also improved the ROX metric.

Vikatan’s partnership with WebEngage showcased the power of data-driven, genre-based engagement in delivering exceptional reader experiences and solidifying its position as a media powerhouse in South India.

You can apply the same strategy during the holiday season to even strategize for local festivities, catering to different location demographics more contextually.

Conclusion

In this ever-changing world of media and entertainment, getting and holding your audiences’ attention has become challenging. There are multiple competitors offering content across numerous channels. So, the media and entertainment firms have to be aggressive in their engagement initiatives and acquisition efforts.

Here, WebEngage can help you by offering valuable solutions.

By diving deep into audience insights and leveraging cross-channel campaigns, media brands can capture their audience’s attention and keep them engaged, satisfied, and loyal.

Want to know how we can help you improve user engagement during the holiday season?

Book a demo of WebEngage today.