How UP Entertainment optimized email campaign engagement and decreased churn with Twilio Segment

The big win

UP Entertainment was struggling with fragmented data siloed in different business units and tools. With no formalized attribution reporting or automation system, the team’s marketing campaigns and tactics suffered.

UP Entertainment built a best-of-breed technology stack with Twilio Segment for data collection, Looker for intelligence, and Mailchimp, Google Ads, and Facebook Ads for growth. Then, using Branch, they were able to develop a mobile attribution flow back to Twilio Segment. With this new martech stack, UP Entertainment can better understand how customers interact with different brands to drive an elevated email marketing strategy that resulted in a year-over-year decrease in churn.

Founded in 2004 in Georgia, UP Entertainment is a digital cable and tv network comprising UP TV, Aspire TV and UP Faith and Family. UP TV network offers uplifting, family-friendly programming that includes original movies, series, and specials. Aspire TV is a network that celebrates black culture and urban lifestyle, and UP Faith & Family is an entertainment streaming service that features family-faith-friendly shows on any device.

Lack on data confidence across brands

UP Entertainment’s goal was to build a more events-driven marketing organization with a clear technology strategy, but to do this the team needed to develop a technology architecture that would include: understanding attribution flow, tracking every customer touchpoint, and creating and automating actionable insights.

However, UP Entertainment was struggling with fragmented data siloed in different business units and tools. With no formalized attribution reporting or automation system to aid in understanding when to execute important marketing outreach and campaigns, the team’s tactics could not be optimized for different scenarios and the efficiency of campaign spending was not optimal. Finally, because they lacked a centralized reporting system internally, they felt dependent on vendors to provide insight into campaign performance. This resulted in misalignment between internal measurements and vendor-supplied data.

Building a best-of-breed technology stack to scale data strategies across brands

UP Entertainment’s technology team determined it needed to create a simplified marketing tech stack that would help drive strategy and operations. It would focus on three key areas: data, intelligence, and growth. For this new solution to work, the team would need to find a solution that integrated with its many tools to provide a consistent view of how customers engage with UP Entertainment across different touch points and business units.

“We are a subscription business that streams video on-demand. It is imperative for us to understand which ad, email, or text triggered an action or behavior for a customer to convert, sign-up for a free-trial, or become a repeat customer,” said Dre Barnes, Sr. Director of Innovation and Technology.

Ultimately, the team achieved this level of visibility by using Twilio Segment for data collection, Looker for business intelligence, and Mailchimp, Google Ads, and Facebook Ads for growth. Then, using Branch, it was able to develop a mobile attribution flow back to Twilio Segment. As Barnes noted, “This ensured that UP Entertainment was tracking every single touchpoint and, of course, trading and automating real actionable insights.”

Danny Ayoubi, Director of Data Science, added, “This really created a feedback loop. Our cycle of technology drives a strategy. That strategy then drives operations that utilize events along with the data, so everything feeds back into the analysis and decision process and refines our models over time.”

Optimizing email campaign engagement to decrease churn 

The results of this integration were exactly what UP Entertainment had been hoping for. It was able to track how its customers were interacting with its different brands to develop an events-driven email marketing strategy that resulted in a year-over-year decrease in churn.

By sending key events to its Amazon Redshift warehouse, UP Entertainment was able to use Looker to build specific target audiences, then filter that data back into Twilio Segment to build email campaigns in Mailchimp. These event-based email marketing campaigns increased open and click-through rates and decreased cost-per-acquisition, all while increasing subscriber growth.

None of UP Entertainment's success would have been possible without Twilio Segment at the center of data collection and Looker providing the visualization layer required to quickly access business-critical insights. 

“Using Twilio Segment and Looker contributes to our bottom line, and we are really, really happy with the results,” said Barnes.