How I used the marketing funnel to 2X subscribers for WWE Network
Marketing funnels are dead. Outdated. A relic. There’s no shortage of that sentiment from many current growth marketing leaders. I don’t believe that, and here’s why:
In the world of streaming services, sustaining and accelerating growth is the name of the game. I worked at WWE for 7 years, and can say confidently that at WWE, no one wants to hear about your challenges or problems, they want to see massive wins on a consistent basis, or you’re out of there.
As the Director of User Acquisition for WWE Network, I encountered a common challenge for any new product, especially a streaming service: a growth trajectory that had slowed.
In this article, I’ll share the transformative journey of how we broke through constraints, revolutionizing our approach to user acquisition by using a framework that has been around for over 100 years, and achieved incredible results.
The Challenge:
When I joined the WWE Network team, my first goal was to understand acquisition strategy and dig into our subscriber data.
Our approach to acquisition was to optimize CPA by each individual marketing channel. Optimizing marketing spend by each channel in a silo is a huge mistake – it ignores the reality of how marketing works.
People rarely interact with one channel and then make a purchase. You interact with multiple channels over time, whether they’re paid, earned or owned, before you make the purchase decision and buy.
Marketing channels layer on each other and provide a halo effect. If you measure display ad campaigns effectiveness by last-click CPA, it will look terrible.
If you consider the blended CPA, understanding that display supplements and augments your other marketing channels, you’ll see that its “true CPA” is actually several orders of magnitude lower than last click.
I knew the focus on CPA by marketing channel was hurting our ability to attract new subscribers and broaden the top of the marketing funnel. We needed a strategy to acquire net-new subscribers to WWE Network without inflating costs.
We needed a portfolio acquisition approach – the evaluation of our marketing efforts as a whole, not in isolation.
The Discovery:
Digging into user data revealed a surprising trend – a significant portion of “new” sign-ups were actually individuals engaging in what I termed “pogo sticking.” Subscribers would sign up for a specific Pay-Per-View (PPV), cancel, and return two or three months later.
This discovery became the cornerstone of our realization that a bottom-of-funnel (BOFU) marketing approach was not only wasteful because we were spending budget on people who were going to sign up anyway, but it was also insufficient because the percentage of sign ups that were net new to our business was very low.
The Nurture Strategy:
Armed with data showcasing the pogo sticking phenomenon, I advocated for a shift towards top-of-funnel (TOFU) and middle-of-funnel (MOFU) marketing to get more net new subscribers in the top of the funnel.
We selected a content strategy that was guided by the AIDA model.
The AIDA marketing framework is a classic model that outlines the stages a consumer goes through when making a purchasing decision. It’s been around for well over 100 years, and it works.
AIDA stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action, representing a sequence of steps a user takes as they progress along the buyer’s journey from awareness to purchase.
Attention:
First, you have to attract your target audience’s attention and let them know you exist, and that they have a problem you can solve.
Interest:
Once attention is captured, we next want to generate interest. You want to give information that keeps the target engaged. This could include highlighting unique selling points, showcasing benefits, or sharing relevant and interesting content. The goal is to deepen the audience’s interest in the product or service.
Desire:
After capturing attention and building interest, your focus then shifts to creating a desire for the product or service. This involves showcasing how the offering meets the audience’s needs and desires.
Testimonials, case studies, and demos can effectively generate desire. The goal is to make the audience feel that the product or service is something they absolutely have to have because it perfectly solves their problem.
Action:
The final stage is to prompt the audience to take action. This could be making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, requesting more information, or any other desired action. Calls-to-action (CTAs) are crucial in this stage, providing clear instructions on what steps the audience should take next.
The AIDA model recognizes that any buying process is more often than not a series of steps, not an instantaneous decision.
The Nurture Strategy
The Nurture Strategy aimed to engage new and lapsed fans via non-WWE platforms, and nurture them through the buyer’s journey by messaging them appropriately at each step of the AIDA framework.
Our execution hinged on a partnership with Fandom, a website with entertainment wikis, including one for WWE. We crafted an article explaining the background of each match at SummerSlam, catering to new and lapsed fans.
My hypothesis for why new or lapsed fans weren’t subscribing to the streaming service focused on the fact that WWE is storyline-driven. I thought the biggest barrier for someone who hasn’t been following WWE was understanding what was going on.
Why was Roman Reigns battling Brock Lesnar? Why was AJ Styles facing Samoa Joe? You couldn’t necessarily learn all you needed to know about the matches by watching the latest episode of Monday Night Raw, so I wanted to explain what was going on to fans who weren’t familiar with current storylines, and generate awareness at the top of the funnel.
I want to take a moment to call out that Fandom was truly wonderful to work with, and in particular Alex Gleitman and Brian Linder, who were instrumental in this plan.
Once the viewer hit the article page, we were able to show them ads that encouraged them to return to the article as it was updated with new sections about new matches, increasing their interest in watching SummerSlam.
We retargeted article readers with ads for several weeks, with CTAs first being to return to the article and read the updates as a “soft sell”. As we got closer to the event, CTAs became more direct and purchase driven.
Once we hit one week before the event, we changed our CTA language to urge viewers to sign up for WWE Network and watch the event. By that point, many users had been reading the Fandom article and engaging with our brand for 4 weeks, being nurtured to increase their interest along the way.
The Results
The results we saw were nothing short of spectacular. We doubled SummerSlam subscribers YoY, with a third being completely new to WWE Network. With the help of our multi-touch attribution vendor, we saw that a halo effect occurred, with thousands of subscribers engaging with the nurture campaign and not signing up for SummerSlam, but coming back for PPVs in the following months.
Importantly, CPA was fantastic for this execution as well.
We repeated the nurture strategy for WrestleMania a few months later, and saw similar results, with YoY subscribers doubling and a huge percentage of them being net new.
What did we learn?
Segmentation and “The Buyer’s Journey” Matter: A structured, thoughtful journey from awareness to interest to desire warms up potential customers, priming them and increasing likelihood to convert.
Make sure your strategy, messaging and tactics align with who the audience is and where they are on the AIDA framework.
Content is King: Regularly updating the Fandom article increased brand exposure, event awareness, and product familiarity. Updating the article over time kept viewers coming back to Fandom, increasing their interest in SummerSlam and WrestleMania, making it easier to drive conversions once the time was right.
This success story exemplifies the power of a growth marketing mindset, emphasizing experimentation, data-driven decision-making, and a willingness to challenge the status quo.
By understanding our audience and implementing the nurture strategy, we not only achieved substantial growth but also set the stage for continued success.