Viggle TV Reminders Get Users to Turn on TV and Tune In!

We first had the idea for TV Reminders about 18 months ago – we were watching the promotions of a few new Spring Shows, and remarking to ourselves two things:

1. 1. These look awesome (one was The Following on FOX, for example)!
   2. Now what?

We had never really thought about the life cycle around TV show promotions/marketing, but as we dug in, it became very clear that a lot of effort goes into driving audiences, but very little addressable technology exists in the market for broadcasters, TV producers, etc. So we built our Reminder Button to help solve the problem, and launched it to the market last Fall.

Over the past few months, we’ve been carefully tracking the results of our email reminders, including open rates (average above 30%), click-through rates (highly varied), and unsubscribe rates (well below 0.1% of users), and all the signs are, obviously, extremely positive and encouraging. But we still pondered the question: do audiences *really* watch the shows because of these reminders? Is this a case of causation, correlation, or none of the above?

Our data scientists methodically built a survey, divided up our users based on a set of criteria, and off we went. The earliest results came in late last week, and here are the key nuggets (so far):

• • 34 percent of respondents answered, “NextGuide reminders lead me to tune into a show that I otherwise would not have watched.”
  • 37 percent of respondents revealed that when a NextGuide Reminder is set for a show they often set additional reminders for other shows on the same network or website.
  • 47 percent of survey respondents reported that “NextGuide Reminders lead me to turn on the television when I would have been doing something else.”

Wow. These numbers blew us away – in an era when many say email is “dying” to then turn around and see that almost half our users turn on their TV because of an email we sent them? Wow.

We have a lot more data still to sift through, and are learning a lot already, some of which is a little surprising. For example, our Reminder recipients like Email, Push, and SMS for notification, but aren’t particularly interested in receiving a Tweet (#hmmm). Also, while we know everyone says they love binge-watching, some early results show that people prefer not to wait an entire season to catch up, but stay either current or near-current for their favorite shows.

We’ll share the full results here on the Viggle blog in the coming weeks!  In the meantime, please read yesterday’s press release about the efficiency of NextGuide TV Reminders.