Less is definitely more

Most theatres and other arts organisations look to their existing customer databases to sell the majority of their tickets for new events. The move to digital communications brings significant benefits in terms of cost and efficiency, but as a lower-cost option it does mean that more communications are sent out. The implication is that many customers are turned off and either unsubscribe or ignore such emails.

From working with venues over the last ten years on targeting for mailing lists, Purple Seven knows how important an enhanced understanding of an audience can be when deciding who to communicate with. Having a better understanding improves the relevance to the customer which translates into increased ticket sales for the venue. Fewer emails (and better ones) are very much the requirement.

Focusing on relevance means that the number of potential customers unsubscribing from future communications drops significantly

We have been working closely with the Ambassador Theatre Group (ATG) across its 39 venues in the UK and overseas. Pat Westwell, its Marketing Director, says: “Purple Seven has an insight in a wide variety of areas such as the capacity to productively analyse customer data by frequency, ticketing history, spend, transaction, purchase channel, membership, geodemographics, profile and buying patterns – all captured by our ticketing systems. Then there’s the ability to email a comprehensive survey to customers within minutes of the end of the show they’ve just attended. This all informs our future planning across the business.”

ATG recognises the importance of targeting its email campaigns. To increase the number of responses is not about how many people you send emails out to, but rather the level of customer understanding you have in the first place. However, customers who have only attended your venue once can complicate this. How do you ensure you are being relevant when you know very little about how a customer engages with the performing arts? In the words of Donald Rumsfeld, these are the “known unknowns”.

With this in mind, we worked with ATG on the launch of the West End musical ‘Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown’. One of the challenges was the timing of the opening: just before Christmas. How could we support them in delivering a high response rate from its database to deliver strong ticket sales? Pat explains: “The show was a limited run and it was essential that we had every marketing tool available to us to target very precise audience segments to maximise the response.”

First, we focused on ATG’s existing musical bookers for West End venues. We were able to pick out the customers that were most likely to book for a new musical based on their previous behaviour. This is normally where a venue’s understanding of its customer database would end, but we developed this understanding further by looking at what these customers were doing elsewhere. We achieved this by using our Arts Dimensions software which picked out key behaviours based on transactions outside ATG (without divulging any information on other venues). For example, selecting those customers who had mostly booked premium price seats or had booked well in advance of a show compared to impulse purchases, meant that we could follow ATG’s strategy to reach the right person with the right message at a price and timing that would suit them.

The proof of that insight was in the results. We halved the mailing list in terms of the number of emails sent and achieved the same level of ticket sales. When comparing it against a ‘control’ that emailed theatregoers who attended musicals, the response rate for the targeted customers in the Arts Dimensions trial was three times higher.

There was one more direct benefit of this approach – a ‘halo effect’. This email campaign delivered ticket sales for Women on the Verge, but it also drove up ticket sales for other ATG products. Looking into the future, this enriched ATG’s customer database by capturing more information about what customers do, notwithstanding the obvious commercial benefit to ATG.

Organisations need to be mindful of emailing the wrong people as it has implications for future campaigns. Focusing on relevance means that the number of potential customers unsubscribing from future communications drops significantly. We carried on testing the data to find the same results appearing: when we identified fewer customers to send an email to, we were either getting similar or better responses than the larger email campaigns.

ATG has a huge amount of customer data, but even with this very large data set there were significant benefits in terms of its relationship with customers and commercially. Deciding who to communicate with is hard when you need to achieve capacity targets. No company wants to miss out on ticket sales but the underlying issue is that you can overwhelm and disengage your best customers by ‘over emailing’ them. At Purple Seven we firmly believe that less is more. Being more knowledgeable about your customers – in terms of how they engage with you and elsewhere – means sending significantly fewer emails to achieve the desired ticket sales.

Hannah Mitchell is Senior Account Executive or Purple Seven.
www.purpleseven.co.uk

This article is one in a series of articles on the theme ‘Insight into Audiences’, sponsored and contributed by Purple Seven.

Arts Dimensions is a new data profiling service from Purple Seven. To find out more about your venue’s own Arts Dimensions, please contact Hannah Mitchell on 01926 203040 or [email protected]. All ticketed arts organisations can join the UK’s biggest arts data warehouse completely FREE of charge, and receive a FREE quarterly report on their customers in context with the UK picture of arts attenders. For more information contact [email protected].