Leading Scottish digital media brand STV wanted to find opportunities to increase marketing efficiency while boosting viewership. STV was creating email promotions manually, which was too labor-intensive for the team. To save time and effort, STV now automates both its email and mobile push communications with Acoustic Campaign to improve engagement and increase viewer streaming on its platform. Using personalized marketing automation, the team at STV can now identify and recommend shows that match viewers’ individual tastes.

STV’s communications campaigns took two hard hits in a row. Following the enactment of GDPR in the EU, David Handling, Customer Experience Manager at STV remembers, “We went from about 1.2 million people opted into email marketing, down to 120,000. It was quite a drop.”

Then came the COVID-19 pandemic, which changed STV’s business model. “Our
TV schedules were thrown up in the air. Shows were cancelled or moved about. We looked at our back catalog but began to buy more of our own content so we’d be more than just a catch-up service in the event you missed your favorite show. Now we’re buying a lot of Australian and U.S. drama, crime dramas, and documentary series. We had always been sending email recommendations to viewers based on what they’d watched previously, but those manual sends at the end of a series with recommendations were labor-intensive. We wanted to automate all of this.”

Step one was to rebuild the marketing communications contact database by encouraging opt-ins. To do this, STV launched a new loyalty program named STV Player VIP. Members can skip the advertisements before a program starts, receive recommendation emails, and be entered into a prize draw every month to win prizes such as TVs, sound bars, or tickets to soccer matches.

To increase the contact database, Handling began to download different Acoustic Campaign automation journeys and triggers to speed up communications and help make them more precise. Emails and mobile push notifications are now highly automated.

“When you finish a series on the STV Player, on the following day, you will be sent an email and a push notification with recommendations on what to watch next. This uses dynamic content, so it won’t show you a title [you’ve] already watched; it will only surface content that is brand new to you,” explains Handling.

Another trigger also encourages viewers to stream more. “If you watch two or more episodes of a series and go five days without watching the next one, we’ll send you
a reminder via email and via push. Just a little nudge saying, ‘Pick up where you left off.’ We also include in the email recommendations that if you don’t want to continue viewing, here’s something else you might like.”

A third trigger also prompts viewership. “If you watch episode one [of a show], but then don’t watch episode two, we take that as a hint that you didn’t really enjoy the show. We’ll send you a new recommendation, but not mention the dropped series – we don’t want to be creepy. Instead, we’ll say, ‘Here are some shows you might like.’”

Acoustic Campaign is also valuable for measuring success. Handling reports, “The Bay is the big crime drama right now. If we send an email out to people saying, ‘The full series of The Bay is now on STV Player. Go and watch,’ – we can then look at the viewers we sent the email to and know if they’ve opened that email. If they’ve watched within five days, we can attribute that back to the email.”

Acoustic’s Services team also ran a vision and value workshop with STV to help strategize how the company can remain competitive in the streaming market. According to Handling, “That was a great way to bring together lots of stakeholders from the STV side for ideation. It was a good foundation just to ask, ‘What is the strategic vision of the business?’ And we came up with lots of interesting ideas that we’ve put in practice or plan to put in practice.”

“We used the professional services team to look at the landscape, essentially – to go and look at our competitors to see what they’re doing with their emails just in case we were missing anything. We also do this ourselves, but sometimes you need a fresh pair of eyes to say, ‘This is a really cool thing that you should be doing.’ It was actually quite refreshing because it validated our strategy,” says Handling.

He continues, “Off the back of that [workshop] came a template review. Our design team designed a host of new templates which Acoustic helped build for us. The professional services team is especially helpful with building new HTML templates – skills that we don’t always have in-house.”

But the team at STV doesn’t just use Acoustic for strategizing and optimizing customer communications. “Our internal staff database is loaded into Acoustic. We use it for a staff update named ‘Daily News.’ And across the business there’s a weekly ‘Insights’ email sent to our full staff of 500 using Campaign.”

“We see that the users who are opted in to receive our emails stream 42% more than users who are opted out,” reports Handling. And more streaming means that the advertisements are being seen more often – helping power the revenue engine of a “free TV” service. The total number of viewers who have opted-in to receive marketing emails and push notifications rose from 120,000 following GDPR’s enactment up to the current total of 300,000. That’s a 150% increase, “...which is absolutely amazing for us and the conversion rate.”

“Beforehand it was all about the open rate for us, but as we’ve increased our sends, open rate isn’t as important of a metric. It’s more about the streams that will generate off the back of our sends. Our send figures have increased by 143% over the last two years totally driven by automation.”

Handling also notes, “The streams that are directly driven from email and push have increased 250%, which is absolutely amazing for us, and the conversion rate – which we thought was going to dip because of the increased volume of our sends – has actually increased by 39%. We’re driving really big numbers and that’s direct. For an industry like media, a direct conversion from an email is quite rare.”

The automation with Campaign enables a small team to make many timely and targeted viewing suggestions. “In 2021, we sent 31 million messages across email and push, which is a massive increase over the 12 million sent in 2019. And our streams went from 115,000 to 405,000 with just email and push alone. That’s really impressive.”

Acoustic Campaign has also enabled Handling and his team to validate their marketing spend and prove ROI for their campaigns. He states, “When you compare to social media and all the other forms of marketing, no other platform or channel in the business is delivering those numbers for us. So, it really makes us stand out and gets us the validation we need when it comes to asking for more budget.”