“Using Campaign Creator™ from Tickets.com, we were able to sell approximately 21 percent of total ticket inventory to an event seven months in advance with no other advertising for the performance.”

Nancy Hermann
Director of Marketing
Tulsa Performing Arts Center

Profile

The Tulsa Performing Arts Center (TPAC) occupies a half city block in Tulsa’s historic district and includes the 2,365-seat Chapman Music Hall, the 430-fixed-seat John H. Williams Theatre and two flexible-seat venues, the Liddy Doenges and Charles E. Norman Theatres. The center is owned and operated by the City of Tulsa and hosts performances by local, national, and international talent.

The Challenge

Since the 2006 launch of TPAC’s MyTicketOffice.com website, its ticketing portal that sells tickets to several surrounding Oklahoma performing arts venues, TPAC has seen explosive growth in online ticket sales. As a result, the center wanted to be more proactive in its online marketing efforts and gain a better understanding of its patrons’ behavior in order to better market ticket offers and on-sale information.

The Solution

More specifically, TPAC wanted an email tool that was easy to learn, required little support, provided detailed analytics, and allowed the center to control its own emails. Tickets.com suggested its Campaign Creator™ product, a comprehensive e-Communication platform for venue marketing.

Key Successes

With the implementation of Campaign Creator, TPAC began its online marketing efforts by growing the center’s email database. Targeting patrons directly from the TPAC website, the center encouraged patrons to sign up for its Encore News Bulletin, TPAC updates, and Internet-only specials. These opt-in subscribers were automatically added to the center’s database through Campaign Creator’s subscriber management tool and thus included in TPAC’s email marketing campaigns.

Campaign Creator enabled TPAC to better manage its email names by allowing an unlimited number of segmented email target lists. With this capability, TPAC was able to send dynamic and targeted content for increased revenue opportunities such as electronic alerts for rush ticket availability.

“In this market, people buy tickets for live sports and entertainment at the last minute. They often assume we’re sold out, but with Campaign Creator, we can let people know that there are still tickets available up to the day of the event,” said Nancy Hermann, director of marketing for Tulsa Performing Arts Center.

Additional Benefits

The center also took advantage of Campaign Creator’s report wizard tool to measure the effectiveness of email campaigns. With the wizard tool, the center quickly accessed real-time email analytics, which provided email behavioral data that better prepared TPAC to build future campaigns. Using the wizard tool, for example, the center determined that an average of 16 percent of its email recipients were opening the email blasts, achieving as high as a 21.6 percent open rate and a 6.46 percent click through rate. The wizard tool also provided information on bounces, and allowed the center to compare email campaigns.

These successful email campaigns converted email subscribers into buyers. In a recent campaign promoting pre-sales for an upcoming performance of “Rent,” TPAC sold over a fifth of total available tickets to the event without the need to advertise.

TPAC also realized other benefits from using Campaign Creator. The easy-to-learn platform drove more people to the website, where they had the option of buying tickets online for performances other than those promoted in the email. Consequently, the ticket staff’s workload was reduced.

Overall, the implementation of Campaign Creator opened broader, more measurable interactive marketing capabilities to TPAC such as:

• Announcements of on-sales for major events and access to password protected pre-sales
• Promotions for slower-selling events and last-minute ticket offers and sales
• Advanced venue visit planning, including parking or local merchant day-of-show promotions
• Blog creation and management
• Collection of email subscriber information via survey distribution

For more information, please contact our sales department:

Toll Free – (888) 397-3400
International – +1 (608) 437-3568
www.tickets.com
sales@tickets.com

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