On target

As one of the largest concert halls in the South West with up to 2,075 seats, Colston Hall is very intensively programmed with a concert almost every night in season. This totals over 400 events per year across our three venues. We present genres across the spectrum including rock and pop, classical, comedy and world and folk music. The ‘one night only’ aspect of the business means we have a high proportion of first-time attenders (60% new to 40% repeat in 2010) and a huge customer database of over 300,000 which makes targeting potential repeat attenders very difficult. Do we focus on new ‘active’ attenders to the detriment of lapsed? Who classes as a regular attender in a venue with such a high turnover of shows? Creating a segmentation strategy felt like a struggle with no obvious entry point.

One of Colston Hall’s main objectives is better targeting – increasing the return on investment of our marketing spend, in particular our season brochure. Returns on the brochure have been low and we were keen to see whether Purple Seven’s segmentation system ‘Balanced Database’ could work in a diverse concert venue like ours. Balanced Database pulls information straight from our box office system and separates customer data depending on recency and frequency – the system relies on the principle that the more recently you come to a venue and the more often you come, the more likely you are to come again. Based on the recency/frequency data, Colston Hall’s database is split into six segments including ‘first timers’, ‘stales’ and the ultimate attender type, ‘VIPs’. Strategies are developed based on keeping the number of customers in these segments balanced, for example planning to top up a pool of new attenders with a targeted leaflet drop, or re-igniting stale attenders with a test drive programme. We’re also looking forward to further refining our activity by adding in other mailing list variables such as artform attendance history, which will make our communications even more targeted and cost effective.

The results of our first mailing comparison are impressive: our October brochure gained a 12% response when using the Balanced Database to target ‘active’ attenders, compared to Colston Hall’s usual targeting method which gained only 3%. For the marketing team, the Balanced Database principles of recency and frequency seem logical and the system makes it easy to visualise our database, rather than it being a big ‘scary’ entity without an obvious starting point. It’s solved the issue of who classes as a regular attender (they’ve been to two or more shows in the past) and will allow us to get a balance between targeting sure-fire attenders and those who haven’t been for a while.

Initial finding suggest that the Balanced Database will improve not only the return on marketing investment but also the way in which we develop and decide upon our marketing strategies going forward. And bringing such data driven insight into high level marketing planning can only be a good thing.