Customer loyalty and retention is a hot topic regardless of industry, but for arts, festivals and theatres, where funding it is getting squeezed day by day - it is critical to retain customers when you can. There are two strands to retention in this sense - how do we keep customers coming back (e.g., drive repeat purchases) and how to we draw back lapsed customers (e.g., customers that used to buy and no longer do)?
Keep Customers Coming Back for More
In order to enticing customers to become repeat customers, we need to do two things:
- Encourage cross purchasing or higher value purchasing during the purchase journey and,
- Create post-purchase targeted, behaviour driven campaigns that attract them back for more.
Talk to Them When They are Buying
When is the best time to increase the value of your customer’s basket? Right when they are on your site of course! With Ticketsolve this is dead easy; recommendations based on the purchase, or add ons such as drinks or meals are all automatically presented to customers during the purchase process. This type of cross selling and upselling right during the customer journey is a great way to promote more of the things your customers want.
Encourage Customers to Come Back For More
If you use Ticketsolve, then you know you the system helps to collect vital patron data that you can use to create targeted post purchase campaigns. These messages can be used to draw customers back for more - and can be tailored to each segment of your audience.
For example, using our Mailchimp integration, you can set up an automated post purchase email. This means, that as soon as a customer purchases a ticket, kicks off an automatic Mailchimp trigger for a “post purchase” email to be sent. This email should thank them for their purchase of course, and it can also include other show recommendations, cross purchase options (concessions, merch etc.), etc. Importantly, you can set this to trigger automatically with the Ticketsolve integration - so it couldn’t be easier.
Then using your Ticketsolve data, you can track your post purchase campaigns from opens to click throughs to purchase, so you can see how you are doing. This gives you a chance to tweak your campaign, segment your audience if you need to and try again. You might even consider A/B testing earlier to get a feel for what works best.
Still, even with the best recommendations in the world, some customers will lapse. Using data, we can look at re-engaging these customers.
Show Lapsed Customers The Love
Purchase Frequency
First, we need to determine what the average time is between purchases. Now this may be tricky depending on the buying patterns of your patrons. Do they tend to buy for the season or do they buy more ad hoc? Do you see a spike in purchasing right after a show for other shows?
Average purchase frequency can give you a sense of when a customer is "lapsed". So if it is 11 months between purchases for your patrons, those who fall outside of these parameters can get a targeted message. You may want to also consider splitting the groups here further.
Repeat customers may have a shorter time frame between purchases, than new customers. Are there any repeat customers who then become lapsed? In this way you can now determine, with data, specific times to send messages.
RFM Analysis
Now what about recency, frequency and monetary analysis of customers? This is really interesting information to understand total number of purchases and the total lifetime purchases per customer. This gives an even deeper view into lapsed customers and their behaviours.
Perhaps you have customers who buy infrequently, but buy a lot - they are not necessarily lapsed, but just purchase differently. Still other patrons bought a lot once, but haven't bought since. Each of these types of patrons can be identified and targeted (especially easy to do if you have Ticketsolve :) and with our MailChimp integration you start working on winning those lapsed customers back.
What Messages to Use?
While even a simple, "We've Missed You" campaign is useful, using other data such as previous purchase history or timing can let you target your message more effectively. Current recommendations based on previous purchases or perhaps discounts or even complimentary items are excellent ways to welcome back lapsed customers.
While this is only one strand to customer retention and lapsed customers, using data to create targeted campaigns and segmenting your lapsed customers can help you zero in on those customers with targeted messages and campaigns.
We will be taking a closer look at remarketing which can also help with your win back campaigns.
Looking forward to seeing everyone at AMA on Wednesday!
