Village Cinemas relaunches customer loyalty program using data insights

Village Cinemas says its new-look loyalty program is the direct result of customer data insights and a desire to give consumer flexibility in the types of rewards they can earn across their cinema experience.

The relaunch of the Vrewards program sees consumers earning point-based rewards on every dollar spent at the cinema’s ticket box, candy bar and Gold Class experience. Previously, points could only be collected by purchasing tickets, and members were rewarded with discounted or free tickets after a number of visits. Members can now redeem points wherever they wish to across the experience, as well as gain access to exclusive benefits and offers.

Villages Cinemas worked with marketing analytics company, Movio, and its Movio Cinema offering, to come up with the new design of the loyalty program. The pair said they worked together on evaluating the cinema operator’s member communications strategy as well as program look and feel, tapping into its existing customer base as well as Movio’s marketing data across global movie screens to generate data-based insights that helped informed the process.

Movio claims to have marketing data covering 83 per cent of Australian cinema screens and 29 per cent globally, representing at least 37 million active moviegoers.

As a result, Village Cinemas has also made changes to its overall communications strategy, introducing a new email design, segmentation schemes and campaign strategies.

Village Cinemas general manager of sales and marketing, Mohit Bhargava, said the loyalty program redesign benefitted from surveys and feedback sessions across more than 15,000 customers.

“It became clear to us that an effective reward program ought to offer more choice, control and flexibility in what you value, whether it is at the ticket box, candy bar or within Gold Class,” he said. “We are constantly looking for innovative concepts to reward our members. With the introduction of concepts such as Gold Class, Vjunior and VPremium, guests can not choose how they experience their film.

“We thought they deserve the same amount of freedom to choose their rewards and make the most of what Village Cinemas has to offer.”

Village Cinemas has been on a wider mission to improve the way it engages with customers both digitally as well as onsite. Another recent initiative has been launching an in-seat food and beverage service for VPremium cinema patrons via its new mobile app.

The app was the result of a live innovation project conducted across cinemas in Melbourne last year aimed at finding ways of better incorporating mobile into the overall cinema experience.

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