Enjoying the Christmas rush

Venues around the UK are increasing their activity in the build up to the Christmas period, pulling out all the stops with their preparations for either a traditional panto, large-scale musical or other seasonal offering. Autumn is a pivotal time to drive customer relationships with both new and returning audiences.

A good experience at the Christmas show is exceptionally good at generating return visits from new customers

Consumers are hit from all angles with media messages, so it is no surprise that ticket sales increase each month in the lead-up to Christmas. But even if a venue is ahead of the game, and started preparing for its Christmas show in the summer, as we described in our previous article, there is more to be done.

Each organisation will hold a view as to how many tickets it will sell after the Christmas show opens. By examining the sales patterns of more than 50 venues across the UK, where each has had a big Christmas show in the last three years and also has a show on sale in 2014, we can see a national trend. The chart illustrates the proportions of sales that are made at each stage for these 50 venues.

The national trend suggests that a venue can expect to sell as many tickets to customers in November as it did in the whole period up to and including September. In fact the only period that generates more sales is after the show has opened, which accounts for 32% of all individual tickets (excluding agents and group bookers).

Key to the current and future success of venues and the shows themselves, is understanding exactly who books these tickets. Comparing the proportion of new bookers – those who have not previously bought tickets at the venue – with existing customers, by month, we can see that those most likely to make a booking during the lead up to September are the existing customers. These are likely to already have received communication from the venue, such as a season brochure, and be booking off the back of a good experience during the previous year.

The chart clearly shows that the trend for new customers is to purchase closer to the event. In March, just over 10% of bookers for the Christmas show were new. This is compared with November, when 37% are new bookers, and December when 45% of bookers are new.

In fact November and December account for 60% of all bookings from a venue’s new customers, and this is therefore the best time to make sure your communications to a wider audience are appealing to the right customers, the ‘untapped potential’. At this point it’s important to know your potential audience every bit as well – or even better – than your existing bookers. Purple Seven’s Arts Dimensions solution can provide insight on where to find your ‘untapped potential’. This insight means that, rather than relying on demographic profiling or “what we did last year,” an ‘above-the-line’ strategy can be accurately targeted at those most likely to book, removing the risk of aiming at the wrong audience and increasing the return on investment.

Given the high volume of new customers coming to venues over the Christmas period, it’s important to keep engaging with them after Christmas. How do you encourage them to keep coming? Think long term. On average one in ten new bookers will come back to your venue, but we tracked the behaviour of all the new bookers who attended a 2012 Christmas Show, and found that 38% of them made a booking at the same venue within the next ten months. That’s nearly four times what we’d normally expect. A good experience at the Christmas show is exceptionally good at generating return visits from new customers.

So at this point in the year, reaching out to the right new customers needs to be high up on the to-do list. This will ensure success at Christmas but will continue to help venues succeed in the New Year.

Hannah Mitchell is Client Services Manager for Purple Seven. This article is one of a series of articles on the theme ‘Insight into Audiences’, sponsored and contributed by Purple Seven.
www.purpleseven.co.uk

Purple Seven collects ticketing data for around 250 organisations, covering 70% of the UK’s ticket sales. All ticketed arts organisations can receive an interactive report on their Christmas show using Arts Dimensions. For more information please contact: [email protected].