How the Civic Center Music Hall Re-Engaged 22,000 Lapsed Ticket Buyers and Influenced $77K in Revenue

Jason Chang
1 day ago
4 min read

A 22-day, multi-touch automation campaign reactivated dormant patrons, generated a click rate over 4X the performing arts benchmark, and required zero incremental ad spend.

Results at a Glance

METRIC	RESULT
Lapsed patrons targeted	22,669
Opens \| Open Rate (vs. 11% benchmark)	2,403 \| 10.6%
Clickthroughs \| CTR (vs. 0.9% benchmark)	848 \| 3.8%
Tickets purchased	1,066
Influenced revenue	$77,761
Incremental ad spend	$0

The Client

The Civic Center Music Hall is a multi-theatre performing arts complex serving as the home stage for seven resident companies. Their 2,477-seat Thelma Gaylord Theatre is the official Broadway touring venue for Oklahoma City. In addition, the Civic Center Music Hall also manages the nearby 1,420-seat Rose State College Performing Arts Center and provides ticketing services for the 281-seat Lyric Plaza Theatre.

CLIENT	Civic Center Music Hall
INDUSTRY	Performing Arts \| 3 Sites \| 5 Theatres \| 7 Resident Companies
LOCATION	Oklahoma City, OK
CLIENT SINCE	2016
SOLUTIONS	Paciolan Ticketing \| PAC Marketing (Marketing Automation, Digital Advertising)

The Challenge

Every performing arts center has that list of patrons that haven’t been to a show in years. The challenge has always been to find a way to get them active again and coming to the theatre. Micayla Baker, the Assistant Director of Marketing & Sales, had been chasing this problem.

For her first foray into solving the issue, she identified a list of 210,000 patrons who had not been to a show or opened an email in over a year. A couple of one-off email blasts resulted in low email open-rates of 2.8% and 3% well below their target of 11%. This low engagement wasn’t a surprise given the nature of the list. For Micayla, the goal is always to get people memorable arts experiences while driving theatre revenue. But in this case, the list was so dormant, she expected this to be a months-long endeavor to re-warm this group, not a revenue generator.

“My goal was to get people to re-engage with us. This was meant to be a longer journey to re-warm this cold pool of patrons. Revenue wasn’t the immediate goal.” Micayla Baker, Assistant Director of Marketing & Sales, Civic Center Music Hall

The Solution

After the earlier attempts to re-engage this cold pool of patrons, Micayla connected with Paciolan, their partner for ticketing and marketing automation services. She had a vision for a multi-touch campaign that would engage and warm the target list. The Paciolan Marketing Automation Strategist listened to her challenge and set out to design a solution.

The Paciolan recommendation: Don’t go after the entire list with a one-size-fits-all campaign. First, go after the audience that’s most likely to convert and see how that goes. Then revisit the long warm-up plan later after successfully proving out the concept with the warmest of the cold pool. The hypothesis was that there’s a group between active buyers and the cold pool that would be worth following up on first. That was a group of lapsed buyers that were still interested in the theatre and needed a push.

Micayla approved the strategy and Paciolan took the lead on segmentation and campaign flow creation. Meanwhile, Micayla took charge of the email content and design for each touchpoint in the campaign.

The segmentation criteria for this campaign included patrons who:

Purchased a ticket in the prior three seasons
Had not purchased a ticket in the current season
Had recent Civic Center Music Hall web activity

Paciolan built a list of 22,669 patrons and developed a 22-day, multi-touch automated Eloqua campaign. The creative design of the emails featured visually striking photography from past shows in an animated gif with a call-to-action that led to their events page and then to their Paciolan ticketing site. The campaign secured air cover by feeding the segment list into the Civic Center Music Hall’s existing evergreen digital advertising campaign run by Paciolan, enabling retargeting across paid social and display without any incremental media spend.

The Result

The first 48 hours produced a 19% open rate and a 5% click rate, soundly surpassing benchmarks for Paciolan’s performing arts clients, which hinted to Micayla that this one was going to be different from her past attempts.

Across the full 22 days of the campaign, the numbers held strong: 2,403 opens (10.6% right at benchmark), 848 clicks (3.8%, 4X the benchmark), 1,066 tickets purchased, and $77,761 in influenced revenue from a list patrons that hadn’t been seen in up to three years.

With a successful execution of Micayla’s vision of a re-engagement campaign completed, the Civic Center Music Hall is planning a second expanded campaign for later this year.