A new home.
The importance of a local strategy.
Yelmo Cines is one of the leading cinema chains in Spain, with more than 40 years of experience and 500 cinemas. Despite their success, Yelmo had to deal with seasonality of attendance and new competitors. For this reason, they needed a partner, and that’s where Good Rebels came in.
A complex context.
Today, cinemas have more competition than ever before: computers, mobiles and tablets have become small portable cinemas, and streaming platforms keep many film buffs at home for marathon binge-watching sessions.
That is why, in recent years, cinemas have focused on the added value they can bring to the audiences’ experience. In this context, Yelmo Cines proposed a challenge as stimulating as it is demanding: to break with the seasonality of attendance, one of the most deeply rooted problems in cinemas.
Understanding the Issue.
The calendar is crucial for cinemas. Big premieres are the magnets that attract audiences to cinemas and are concentrated, year after year, in the holiday periods. All those films that can’t seem to stop being talked about all year round are released at Christmas, Easter or during the summer months. The rest of the year, audiences drop considerably and the cinemas are dominated by empty seats.
To increase ticket sales during the off-peak period, we had to develop a strategy that would be attractive enough to the public to break this trend outside of the holiday periods, while maintaining Yelmo’s brand value and enhancing the value of the product it offers.
We caught the attention of customers with promotional codes that could be exchanged for tickets through a new eCommerce platform.
Lights, Camera, Conversion.
Our strategy was based on an engagement campaign to sell tickets, but not through Yelmo’s online sales channels, but through a completely independent eCommerce where customers could buy codes exchangeable for promoted tickets.
The first step, therefore, was to create the platform. We approached it as an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) with full functionality, since, as we said, it was not integrated into the company’s ERP or any of its other systems.
We developed the platform in WordPress, under an independent domain. In order to achieve a robust product which was scalable in sales and traffic, allowed multiple functionalities (such as the payment gateway or a complete and efficient client area), and was easily integrated with Google Analytics and SEO optimisation processes, we chose the WooCommerce extension as the e-commerce solution.
On the other hand, we designed a targeted campaign that would be circulated through Yelmo’s customer base, as well as advertising on social networks and Google Adwords. The messages were carefully segmented and personalised according to the audience, location and the stage of the funnel in which the customer was in. Hazte un cine, Become The Cinema, was born.
The Curtain Opens.
After a few weeks of preparation, we launched the campaign during the week of Black Friday 2019. When registering on the landing page we developed specifically for this campaign, users could buy up to ten codes for 4 euros each, which were redeemed for tickets to screenings at any of the Yelmo chain’s cinemas (except for the luxury ones) between 7 January and 26 March the following year. Most of the conversions were concentrated on Instagram, at that time the most booming and active social network in the country.
We tripled the number of codes Yelmo expected to sell and doubled the expected number of buyers.
Exceeding expectations.
The campaign was a resounding success and we far exceeded the client’s expectations: each user purchased an average of four coupons, instead of the three that Yelmo had set as a target.
With an innovative and creative action, combining digital product, e-commerce and technological solution, we strengthened brand awareness, improved user engagement, consolidated social networks as a channel for capturing leads and new customers, and added a new line of digital sales revenue for the brand. And, of course, we made hundreds of people fill Yelmo cinemas during those months.
