Lightbox, a local start up from the SPARK ventures incubator, is an online TV service giving Kiwis access to some of the very best TV series in the world, on-demand and ad free. During the first year of operation the primary focus was acquisition, however by year two, having survived and proved itself, engagement and retention became vital.

SPARK, in a retention play, had begun using Lightbox as a great way to add value to specific customer segments. This base complemented fully paid up customers.  For both sections of the base the same goes – if customers aren’t watching they aren’t getting value.  If paying customers don’t see value they unsubscribe; if SPARK customers don’t place value on their subscription, then it delivers zero retention value to SPARK.  Lightbox had to join the hunt to win eyeballs every day - to get more customers watching more programmes more often.

The marketing strategy had to be all about MORE - get more customers watching more programmes more often by delivering to their needs:

• Help me get started/sorted with set up
• Help me find shows I will like
• Remind when shows I like are ready for me to watch

In other words, setting customers up so they really could be watching what they wanted, when and where they wanted.

Lightbox set about delivering on this by creating comprehensive, automated, hyper-relevant content discovery email engagement programmes for each stage of the customer lifecycle.

Within nine months the business had rolled out seven programmes, including over 50 individual emails which are complemented by regular new show drop messaging. These programmes out-performed on all conversion, winback, churn and activity targets.  They have also allowed Lightbox to establish proof of concepts to guide future investment by using the email channel as a concept testing ground to enable business casing for investment in the roll out of other channels.