The State of Customer Engagement for Media and Entertainment Brands in 2023

This just in: The latest findings are here from the 2023 Global Customer Engagement Review.

Each year, Braze digs in to uncover the current state of customer engagement and what it means for brands, supporting smarter campaigns and more impactful strategies. Let’s take a look at where things stand for media and entertainment brands, as well as key priorities for the industry according to top marketing executives, and the most effective strategies for boosting customer activation, monetization, and retention.

In the Face of Subscription Fatigue, Media and Entertainment Brands Need to Double Down on Cross-Channel Engagement

As users “binge and bow out” and streaming evolves to become even more cross-channel in nature, media and entertainment companies need to lean into cross-channel capabilities to ensure consistent, engaging experiences that keep users coming back. The good news is that brands in this space should be well positioned to execute, since our research indicates that media and entertainment companies have the highest level of sophistication when it comes to using technology to manage cross-channel strategies.

That said, more than simply engaging with users across channels and devices, media and entertainment brands need to provide seamless, personalized messaging to avoid customers jumping ship due to broken, disjointed experiences.

Top Strategies for Improving Customer Engagement for Media and Entertainment Brands in 2023

Based on our 2023 Global Customer Engagement Review analysis, we uncovered these four tactics that media and entertainment brands can use to increase customer activation (sessions per user), monetization (purchases per user), and retention.

#1: Leveraging cross-channel customer engagement and hybrid messaging

Given the current tendency to binge and bounce, brands that find ways to encourage repeat sessions and purchases are setting themselves up for success—and that makes cross-channel engagement more important than ever. Even better? It can start with a single channel.

Media and entertainment brands that use just one channel—whether that’s mobile push, in-app messaging, email or something else—can improve results by a significant amount compared to sending no messages at all. For instance, based on our data sessions per user jumped by 4.6X, monetization increased 35.2X, and 90-day retention improved by 3X.

Using both push and pull messaging, also known as hybrid messaging, can lead to even more gains across activation, monetization, and retention for media and entertainment brands. This makes sense given the unique strengths of out-of-product (“push”) channels—such as push notifications, email, and SMS—for drawing customers in. Similarly, so-called in-product (“pull”) messages, such as in-app/in-browser messages and Content Cards, are an effective way to keep active users further engaged. And when you use these channels together, it’s possible to take performance to the next level.

#2: Utilizing the right combination of channels

According to the 2023 Customer Engagement Review, media and entertainment brands see greater results when using the following channels together in concert.

• Sending campaigns via Content Cards, email, in-app messaging, and mobile push drove a 8.5X increase in 6-month retention vs. sending no messages at all
• Sending campaigns via mobile push and in-app messages drove a 5.8X increase in sessions per user vs. sending messages via only one channel

#3: Using real-time data to power segmentation, targeting, and analytics

Top-performing media and entertainment brands (also known as “Ace” brands) are 14% more likely to use real-time data streaming capabilities, such as Braze Currents, to power segmentation, targeting, and analytics, and deliver greater results compared to non-Ace brands in the industry.

That’s according to the 2023 Customer Engagement Review. For this study, we used the Braze Customer Engagement Index proprietary framework to evaluate brands across industries on their adoption of core customer engagement competencies.

The index spans three levels of maturity. “Activate” includes brands that are just beginning to integrate customer engagement practices into their business, “Accelerate” includes brands that have more established customer engagement programs but aren’t yet achieving a comprehensive customer view, and “Ace” is made up of customer engagement leaders.

Based on our findings, Ace media and entertainment brands deliver stronger results, generating a:

• +27% higher repeat buyer rate than non-Ace brands
• +39% higher average user lifetime than non-Ace brands

#4: Leveraging real-time messaging powered by APIs

Ace brands are 78% more likely to pull dynamic content accessible via APIs directly into their campaigns to power personalized marketing and make their messaging more relevant. Taking advantage of this functionality can be a key way for brands in the space to enrich the experiences they’re serving up to consumers, making for more impactful marketing.

Critical Priorities for Customer Engagement for Media and Entertainment Brands in 2023

As part of a Braze-commissioned Wakefield Research survey of 1,500 VP+ marketing decision-makers across 14 global markets, we asked media and entertainment professionals about their outlook on customer engagement for the year and here are some noteworthy findings.

Media and entertainment brands need to prioritize…

#1: Convening cross-team syncs on customer engagement on a more frequent basis. Compared with other industries, media and entertainment brands meet less frequently (around once a month) to collaborate on cross-functional customer engagement strategies.

#2: Seamlessly executing campaigns across mobile, desktop, and connected TVs. Brands in this industry cite coordinating campaigns across channels, devices, and touchpoints as their greatest challenge.

#3: Better leveraging data for customer engagement. Compared to other industries, significantly more media and entertainment companies (54%) responded that “skepticism around the value of data” is a top challenge for leveraging data for customer engagement, compared to brands as a whole (where 36% cited this as a challenge).

#4: Sending fewer messages. Customer engagement messaging is critical to media and entertainment companies’ ability to grow loyalty and retention, but sending more messages isn’t necessarily an advantage. Sending fewer more personalized messages could lead to stronger results.

This Year’s Top 3 Worldwide Customer Engagement Trends

Find out the three key customer engagement trends shaping the marketing landscape in 2023—get your copy of the 2023 Global Customer Engagement Review today.

Methodology

For this analysis, Braze pulled anonymized and aggregated behavioral data from 100+ Braze customers across our US, APAC, and EU clusters to analyze app activity, message engagement, and purchasing trends by industry. These statistics span January 1, 2022 to December 31, 2022 and include data from over 100 brands, 1.8 billion user profiles, and 4 industry sub-verticals. The raw data has been cleaned using volume and company count checks so that no one brand or group of brands is over-represented. For all purchase- and messaging-related stats, only brands tracking the relevant information have been included so as not to skew the analysis. All uplift figures greater than 100% are rounded to the nearest decimal point, and all uplift figures below 100% are rounded to the nearest whole percent. When comparing two rounded numbers, percent change metrics are calculated as the difference between the two numbers after rounding.

The Braze Ace Technology, Teams, and Business Impact metrics for Media and Entertainment Brands were measured by selecting the top 50th percentile of Braze customers compared to the full data set of Media and Entertainment Brands based on sessions per user, average user lifetime, and message engagement rate for the period of January 1, 2022 to December 31, 2022.