Making the most of your monetization tools for your ZenVideo OTT site

Whether your fans are buying gifts to surprise their family and friends, or taking advantage of a promotion to hunker down at home with some new content, our tools offer a variety of ways to bring in new customers. This is a guide to help you make the most of them and ensure a smooth experience for everyone. 

In this article

• How do I set up promos?
• How do I set up targeted campaigns?
• How do I set up my promotions?
• How do I export my mailing list?
• How do I import to a mailing program?
• How do I let my audience purchase gifts?
• How do I set up coupons for my TVOD products?
• How do I program live events?
• How do I offer temporary price drops?

How do I set up promos?

Promos are a great way to boost sales around a particular offering. Customers who enter your ecosystem through a promo tend to stick around longer, so promos are also an investment in long-term customer loyalty. 

When you create a promo, you’ll have the option to choose whether it’s redeemable by new customers or if your existing customers can use it as well. Whatever option you choose, make sure you let your audience know. 

So remember, when marketing your promos, you’ll want to make sure your audience knows that Promos are available for the web checkout only (i.e., not redeemable via apps) and are generally available for every seller. If a customer forgets to add a promo while checking out and contacts you to ask for the promotional credit, you can add the promo directly to their account. 

You’ll also need to include in your communications whether or not existing customers are eligible for the promotion as well, or whether it’s only available for new customers. You decide this when you’re creating your promo. 

To know more about promos, read our best practices. 

How do I set up targeted campaigns?

When setting up promotions for the holidays or any particular season, consider creating a holiday promotion targeted to a specific set of followers. In our experience, a great option is to target your mailing list followers who haven’t subscribed yet. By targeting them, you'll have the opportunity to convert your followers to customers without damaging any existing relationships you have with your customers who may be paying more for access to the same content. 

Here are our recommendations as well as step-by-step instructions on how to set up a targeted promotion:

How do I set up my promotion?

If you run a TVOD business, you can choose to create a coupon that is only available for the duration of your campaign or create a product that bundles some of your videos together at a special rate. 


If you run an SVOD business, you can create promo codes that can offer a discount from a single monthly payment all the way up to 12 monthly payments. You can also create annual promotion codes for a max of 1 year. You can even set the code to expire at a specific date so you don’t have to worry about manually turning it off! Here are some additional promo best practices you can leverage based on our highest-performing promos.

How do I export my mailing list?

Once you’ve decided on the promotion you want to make, you’ll want to be able to locate your Followers—that is, those fans who are already following your content but have not yet signed up—and export their email addresses for outreach.

ZenVideo OTT allows you to capture emails of customers who follow you on your mailing list. These are customers who are marked as such on your customer page:



You can export these customer emails to your Mailing list by using the following steps:

1. To access the Customers page from your admin, navigate to Customers > All Customers.
   
   
   
2. Next, click on New Filter:
   
   
3. This will open the following modal:
   
   
4. Then, enter a title and click on Have not purchased - These are all those people who are signed up for your mailing list, but haven't purchased anything yet. 
   

5. Select Create. 

When you save filters, they will be listed on the left side of your Customers page. Click on this filter and then you can click on Email CSV. A copy of the filtered customer emails will be sent to your email in a few minutes.

How do I import to a mailing program?

Once you have the CSV, you'll be able to import your customers into Mailchimp or another CRM (you should be able to find out how to do this in the CRM's support materials). From there, you can add details of your campaign and send an introductory email detailing your promotion, as well as follow-up emails in the coming days reminding your followers to take advantage before time runs out!

Of course, you can always use these tools to target other subsets of your customers, such as unsubscribed customers, or even promote another product to customers who already have access to one! 

How do I let my audience purchase gifts?

The option to purchase a gift appears on your web checkout automatically, including the option to gift a purchase or rental if you have a TVOD product among your offerings. Promos and coupons cannot be applied to gift purchases—i.e., your viewer can’t use a promo code to purchase a gift subscription for someone else. 

Gifts can be given to new or existing customers. If a gift recipient is already an active subscriber of your service, the gift will be applied at their next billing date and will pause their payments for the number of months of the gift. The user will be next charged when their gift period expires and will continue to be billed at the frequency they chose when subscribing ie. monthly or annually. 

How do I set up coupons for my TVOD products?

If you have a TVOD (purchase or rental) product,  coupons will only work on purchases in USD. If you have other currencies enabled, customers purchasing from regions where their native currency is accepted will not be able to take advantage of a coupon. So if you’ll be offering a coupon, we recommend disabling international currencies from your product to reduce confusion for your international audience.

How do I program live events?

If you generate live content, read through the Selling-live-pay-per-view article for live events for a refresher. Some best practices to consider are:

• If you’re offering a product for a limited period of time, it’s best to mention the date it’s going to be taken down (as opposed to the duration of time during which it will be available). The inclusion of a concrete date helps reduce confusion for your customers.
• Take advantage of preview mode to ensure your settings are just right before going live to your viewers.
• If you will be notifying your viewers when the event starts, try going live several minutes before the start time to give the notification emails ample time to arrive to the recipients. You can display a "starting soon" intro slate in the player until the event starts.
• Leave the VOD version of your event available for at least 24 hours so that anyone who purchased but had technical difficulties will still have a chance to watch after the event ends.
• Consider temporarily raising the device limit. This is a protection to prevent the sharing of login credentials, but it can sometimes kick in when a well-intentioned viewer is trying to troubleshoot an issue on multiple browsers or devices. Ask Support or your Account Manager to help you if you’d like to raise it above the default of 3 devices.

How do I offer temporary price drops?

You no longer need to do temporary price drops for annual subscription-based offerings. You can leverage annual rate promotions instead! While price reductions are an option, you may want to consider using targeted campaigns as described above instead. A few things to consider about this approach:

• Ensure that your customers know that it is only available to new subscribers, as there's no way for them to change their subscription price once they've signed up.
  • To avoid frustration, you may want to consider applying the price drop to your existing web subscribers as well. You can read more on how to do so in this guide.
  • Please note, however, that this will not apply to subscribers who've signed up on your apps. So it's still easier to keep these initiatives for new subscribers only.
• If you’d like to enable the option for existing subscribers, you can create a monthly promo that will apply the same discount over 12 renewals so that your subscribers can switch to a monthly renewal and apply the discount. Just make sure the promo is available for existing subscribers!
• Remember that updates to your product price are not automatically reflected in your apps. If you do not coordinate a price change on your apps in advance, make sure your customers know they can only access the price change on the website (include this in your marketing copy!).
• Don't change the name of your product, as it causes a lot of confusion for international customers who see a different price at checkout as well as existing customers who will see the product they already purchased named for the promotion.
•  At whatever price a customer subscribes to is the price they will continue to renew on. Raising prices on a customer’s subscription can get tricky and requires their consent. Also, some app platforms don’t allow raising a customer’s renewal price.

For more ideas and tips, check out our blog post! These tips were from 2019, but the advice they offer is evergreen.