The third-ranked movie theater circuit just reached 1 million accounts for its main loyalty program, a first for any exhibitor-based offer. The customer lists that such loyalty programs generate are potent tools for use in direct marketing to moviegoers.
Launched in December 2017, Cinemark Movie Club now has 3,000 members for each of Cinemark 321 theater locations in the United States (with 4,408 U.S. screens). Movie Club is the largest of three loyalty initiatives, which are also known in industry as rewards programs.
A Cinemark press release points to a “tremendous value proposition with guest satisfaction scores in excess of 90 percent. … Movie Club members visit Cinemark theaters three times more often than our average moviegoer with more frequent visits to the concession stand. Since the inception of the program, members have purchased more than 80 million tickets and 23 million orders of binge-worthy Cinemark popcorn.”
In the first quarter of the year, 20 percent of Cinemark ticket sales were to Movie Club account holders, which is a high-water mark; in 2019, the comparable figure was 14 percent.
For $9.99 a month, each Movie Club account gets one ticket a month, member prices when buying companion tickets, unused tickets roll over, no fee for tickets purchased in advance, benefits from other spending, and 20 percent discount on food-beverages. An online spin game June 1-8 gives Cinemark Movie Club members a chance to win free tickets, in a promotion to spur engagement.
There are actually three tiers, with Movie Club in the middle; the lowest Cinemark Movie Fan program is free though only offers benefits based on in-cinema spending by consumers.
Goals of such loyalty programs are to capture larger share of cinema spending (at the expense of other theaters), increase movie attendance and drive consumers to the Cinemark cell phone app, which enables a friction-less, paperless digital transactional experience. The rewards programs that collect regular cash payments follow the subscription model that the financial community loves; At $10/month, the Cinemark Movie Club locks in revenue of $120 million annually for the theater circuit.
“In our email communication, we have combined the powers of a sophisticated consumer data platform and a flexible email service provider to enhance our digital communication,” Cinemark chief marketing officer Wanda Gierhart Fearing wrote in a byliner article In MarTechOutlook. “This has resulted in thousands of versions of each message, based on multiple levels of personalization, including film genre, theater location and day and time preferences, which increases overall engagement while motivating visits to our theaters and purchase on our website and app.”
In addition to improving customer experience, moviegoer activity information from loyalty programs help “optimize operating hours and showtime schedules through utilization of enhanced data management and analytics,” says a May 6 Cinemark investor presentation.
There’s an overall regulatory crackdown on info sharing, which undercuts middlemen such as Facebook using consumer data to sell advertising or vendors compiling mailing lists for third parties. Consumer data that’s in-house, such as the Cinemark loyalty program, however, is exempt, and thus more valuable as third-party sources dry up.
The Cinemark Movie Club website says that its “members save over $100 on average in 1 year” and provides a link to a calculator to estimate financial benefit. Some pricing is based on customers’ zip code, since ticket prices vary by region.
Membership can be canceled at any time and “unused credits are good for six months after cancellation.” Allowing unused benefits to be claimed later seems a great goodwill gesture for consumers irritated by abruptly loss of benefits with other loyalty programs.
The other big-three cinema circuits have their own loyalty programs, though they cost about double the cash monthly subscription fee. AMC Entertainment’s “Stubs A-List, which debuted in 2018, charges $19.95 a month or more, depending on location, to let patrons see up to three movies a week,” says a Ryan Faughnder story in the Los Angeles Times. “Regal Unlimited’s plan, which lets people go to as many screenings as they want, starts at $18 a month. AMC Chief Executive Adam Aron said in February 2020 that the company had between 900,000 and 1 million A-List subscribers.”
Looking back at history, the independent discounted ticketing services MoviePass was a cinema sensation in 2017-18. The publicly traded upstart had no ticket-buying deals with movie theaters, so its cost-of-product was high. MoviePass economics were not sustainable so it cratered (the name has been revived again).
Headquartered in Plano, Texas, Cinemark is a multinational with 520 theaters (5,849 screens) in 42 states domestically, and 15 countries in South and Central America. Parent Cinemark Holdings trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker CNK.
Cinemark theaters are renowned for outperforming rivals in share of boxoffice and in 2021 that figure was 7 percentage points higher than the industry norm, which is a wide margin. Cinemark consistently outperforms the cinema industry on other metrics too and is an innovator in booking video streaming movies though it is coming off two years of losses due to the pandemic.
Related content:
Leave a Reply