How to generate return audiences

Image via risk.net

The Top 3 Mistakes Arts Organisations make in marketing are common across the entire industry, crossing geographical and genre borders. ​A new study paints a dismal picture of arts marketing in the UK, with 90% of transactions are for just one performance and most sales happen through the most expensive channels.

Part of the problem is ingrained attitudes and bad habits. There is still resistance in the arts to adopting a commercial mind set or encouraging staff to proactively cross-sell, upsell or ask for donations.  It’s also common for staff to miss opportunities to get complete information when people book tickets. Training and incentives can help overcome this but there has to be willingness to adjust the organisational culture as well. Those at the top need to actively promote behaviours that will maximise re-attendance, encourage donations and up the average spend per ticket.

Data literacy is another issue.  Audience development strategies will always under-perform if you don’t know how to use data to build meaningful relationships with customers. Understanding their behaviours means you can communicate with them in a more relevant way, design offers that reflect their interests and preferences and build strong, philanthropic relationships with them. Arts organisations need to invest in training to build up the skill sets for data-driven planning and decision making.

In 2015 an effective audience growth strategy rests on good data and the willingness of staff to use it proactively to engage with customers. If your customer information is poor or difficult to access, the whole exercise becomes rather pointless. The same is true of attitudes and behaviours that stop us from becoming commercially minded.  Organisational change is a big topic and arts organisations are clearly still adjusting to the realities of austerity. Yet in the short term there are practical operational fixes that can help you break out of the audience development doldrums.

Up selling, cross selling and asking for donations can all be done effectively and less expensively online, so thinking of your website as an extension of the box office team is important. Make sure it’s in-sync with any changes you’ve made to your sales strategies, and appraise it every 6 months for content and functionality. Whatever you do, don’t penalise customers for saving you money by purchasing tickets online. Get rid of fees and offer as much functionality as you can; for example, enabling online seat selection from an EasyJet-style grid.

Recognise that audience members are not all the same. We all speak respectfully about ‘the audience’ but it is not a homogenous mass; there are sub groups with different expectations, who attend for different reasons and behave in different ways. In an ideal world we would create a personalised marketing approach for each person. The more manageable approach is to split the audience into segments with shared interests and needs. That allows you to tailor your offers and communications to the preferences and behaviours of each group.

To improve retention and re-attendance, make sure you can create a customer segment on your system for people who attended last year but haven’t yet booked in the current season. Look at it often and analyse why you’re losing established audiences. Is the programming not quite suited to their tastes, or are they waiting for offers? Industry averages suggest that anyone lost in year two will cost ​five times more money to get back into your venue

Improving the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns will always be a challenge but the goal has to be a 100 per cent open rate. Take an iterative approach by measuring the open rates for different messages, segments and types of content used. Was the email targeted to the right segments? Did the subject line hit the right tone? Was the timing off? Testing requires an element of trial and error and the right systems should make this relatively painless.

Convincing customers to let you send them marketing messages at all can be tricky, but a willingness to ask is the starting point. Staff need to be trained to ask for email opt-in at every opportunity.

Creating a segment that identifies your non-contactables will make it easier to have a conversation with them and either convince them to say yes, or learn more about their objections.

Then it becomes a matter of how you ask. We need to jettison the old ‘sign up for our newsletter’ call to action, which suggests to many people a lot of generic content clogging up the inbox. Frame the question around benefits instead. ‘Be the first to find out who we’re casting, which artists we want to work with next, and the special offers for events we think you’ll love.’

Identifying your best customers, selling more tickets, winning donations, effectively targeting communications and achieving a profitable balance between sales channels are all eminently achievable goals. Arts organisations just need to ditch some bad habits.