Marketing with customer insight

Marketing without customer insight is a lot like shouting into a megaphone in the dark. You are not sure who is around to hear you but, worst of all, you do not know if they actually did hear you but chose to ignore you. It is the not knowing that is the real clincher, not only to your self-confidence but more importantly to your bottom line.
The Grove Theatre is a 780-seat venue in the heart of Dunstable that opened in 2007. It is a receiving house, has a balanced commercial programme and introduced an HD digital cinema screen in 2009. Our pilot film season had an average of about 40 people per show. In fact we once screened a film for one person.
This really tested what we thought we knew about film audiences. What we needed was an accurate insight into our audience behaviour, and for this box office data and a ticketing/CRM system is the most valuable marketing asset. In the depths of our system lay incredibly detailed and complex data which led to an understanding of who our customers were and what the audience purchase behaviour is within the venue. The power of this data to lead marketing is unprecedented as we discovered in 2012 after we launched our ‘Your Grove’ postcode offer (it offered two free tickets to those in our ‘LU’ postcode catchment who had never seen film in our venue or were new attenders to the venue). This was the starting point of an uplift in ticket sales alongside an enhanced Friends membership scheme, which not only offered a two for one on film tickets, but also an increased theatre-going discount on live theatre performances.

In the depths of our system lay incredibly detailed and complex data which led to an understanding of who our customers were

The result: since our pilot season in 2009 we had four film seasons before the ‘Your Grove’ offer. On average per season we sold 4,000 to 5,500 tickets with a house capped at 600. Following the release of the Your Grove cinema incentive, we sold 13,561 tickets. 25 per cent of these were via the ‘Your Grove’ scheme. Even offering 25 per cent of tickets during this season free, we almost tripled our income.
The reporting on these customers also opened new doors in our understanding of our audiences. For example, people with a postal and email address that have opted into both forms of communication showed us that almost 85 per cent of them booked online. Therefore we sent out an email about film and had a fantastic return from this. To further engage our audiences, we looked at those who predominately booked about a week before an event and ensured that we advertised our weekly screenings in the local press accordingly. Cinema by nature is booked at the last minute, with up to 35 per cent of people booking on the day of the screening, and therefore this data lends itself to this customer segmentation and marketing action.
Selective programming also helped transference. Previous film attenders who saw War Horse and The King’s Speech had a high crossover with theatre such as opera, so we used this data to market ‘high-end product’ for our run of Madame Butterfly and La Traviata and really drove these sales.
The key to internal venue audience development is at your finger tips. My biggest tip for audience development is to lead by your data, take calculated risks, link your programming teams with your marketing team and be brave.

Claire McFauld is Sales and Marketing Manager of the Grove Theatre.
www.grovetheatre.co.uk