Overview

An event management company in California, profitable on their main summer event for years, faced declining net profits due to rising costs associated with selling tickets.

The Problem

This event was still popular: and therefore, the issue wasn’t necessarily demand. Too many tickets were simply being comped every year, preventing the event from increasing revenue to keep up with costs. And those tickets were only being comped because they were not able to be sold, despite the client’s best efforts.

What we found—and what we did next

Your existing customers are often the most cost effective means of increasing revenue. Screechy Cat Media worked with our client to integrate the Brevo CRM into their tech stack, importing contacts from various off and online sources, creating email lists and segments, and setting up marketing automation workflows. These workflows targeted three distinct audiences:

• Cart abandonment
• Lapsed/lost attendees
• Active year attendees

Cart abandonment messaging targeted users in email and on social media & contextually-relevant websites via a paired retargeting campaign; lapsed & lost attendees saw messages via the same channels, though the messaging was tailored to those who had not attended the event in some time.

We also utilized the event management company’s newly-aggregated CRM to create remarketing campaigns to run in social media and programmatic display tactics to retarget visitors to their website who declined to make a purchase. We developed lookalike audiences with this first-party data in paid social to reach brand new attendees that shared interests with current and previous attendees.

Results

Marketing helped to increase our client’s revenue per available ticket by 22% by significantly reducing the number of tickets still available by the start of the event. The cost per order on our client’s marketing efforts improved by 17% with the inclusion of first-party data for retargeting and lookalike purposes.

Our client’s average tickets per order increased for the first time in several years, with 1.4 tickets being added to the average order. All of this led to lower ticket costs to the tune of 52% YoY.

What this means for you

Marketing Automation can help improve ticket sales and net revenue by utilizing the data your event already has to increase tickets per order, capture potential lost sales, and find new customers via lookalike audience targeting. Once setup, marketing automation requires just a little oversight, improving operational efficiency while positioning sales messaging in front of the right audience at the right time.

Download this Event Marketing case study

You can download this Screechy Cat Media event marketing case study below. If you run a hospitality or tourism-based business and are looking for ways to help improve bookings, revenue, and efficiency, head over to our scheduler and set up a free, no obligation consultation.