Are You Still Watching? How Streaming Media Brands Keep Consumers’ Attention

In the world of streaming media, it takes more than a breakout TV series to keep users coming back for more. With more options than ever before—hello, platinum age of television—a great content strategy must be supported by an equally great customer engagement strategy.

To dig into what nudges users off the content carousel and back into a binge-watch, Braze partnered with mobile data expert Apptopia to analyze the effect of streaming media brands’ engagement efforts on consumer behavior. Here’s what we found.

Content Is King—but Engagement Strategy Reigns

When looking into the data, we had strong suspicions that even the most compelling content needed to be teed up by a strong customer engagement strategy. Turns out, when the Night Watch is battling out with the Dark Side for consumers’ attention, a well-timed push notification goes a long way.

Out of the 35 streaming services we looked at, the brands that saw the most success—aka consistently high Monthly Active Users (MAU), Daily Active Users (DAU), and time spent in app—also had a robust consumer messaging strategy built on personalized, relevant communication.

For streaming media brands, push notifications are a key tool for marketers looking to cut through the noise and grab their customers’ attention. By leveraging this channel to promote new or existing content on their services, these brands are reaching their audiences instantly in a memorable, hard to miss way. On the flip side, in-app messages (IAMs) are built to help marketers communicate effectively with viewers already watching titles via app, making them an ideal way to drive continued loyalty.

Additionally, we’ve seen that combining push notifications and IAMs, both native channels, earns the highest level of engagement. These two channels may be fundamentally complementary, not just for streaming media, but for all brands.

Our analysis also found that successful streaming services were taking advantage of action-based messages—that is, messages that are sent not at a predetermined time, but rather triggered in response to actions taken by the recipient. (For instance, a streaming service might trigger an email campaign letting a user know about new comedy movies when they favorite a movie in that genre.) Action-based campaigns allow marketers to be more responsive to user behaviors and preferences and communicate at more convenient times, making them a powerful way to bolster the impact of the outreach you send.

Whether it’s a push notification announcing a new series or an IAM with movie recommendations, brands need to be smart about when and why they message their customers. Thoughtful, personalized communication has a big impact—for example, leading African streaming service Showmax increased subscribers by 204% with a consumer segmentation strategy.

Want to Learn More?

Braze and Apptopia discovered a lot about the current age of streaming media, as well as gleaned many insights on how brands in any industry can drive higher engagement rates. Download the full data report to learn everything we uncovered.