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Early Subscription Renewals

Sarah Herrera
$organization

Hi all,

We have a genre package subscriber base. Because of this, our business practice is currently to take in subscription orders UNSEATED, then seat orders after all renewing subscribers order by a defined deadline. This means that most subscribers pay for events, and do not know what seats they will have until several weeks later. 

We want improve our customer experience (and subscriber acquisition), and move to a subscription selling model that will allow for all of our subscribers (returning, new, flex, fixed seat) to be able to select their seats at the time of placing their subscription order. We are thinking of managing the genre package subscriber base needs first via a soft internal launch where they just tell us if they will be renewing their fixed seats before we do a tiered on-sale launch to everyone. Once we officially go on sale, then the genre package subscriber base can place their orders and/or make changes to their seats on hold that they communicated to us they want to keep. 

I am curious if anyone has implemented this type of model. What are the lessons learned?

Thanks!
Sarah

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  • $organization

    We seat new orders during our renewal campaign and it's helped tremendously with the volume of seats we have to handle once our renewal deadline has passed.

    We put seats on hold for upgrade requests for renewing subscribers, essentially roping off an area around where our renewing subscription seats are to use for upgrades. Anything that is open is available for new subscriptions to be sold into. The seats we don't make available are generally the locations where we wouldn't expect new subscribers to be seated in were we waiting until the end of the renewal period before we used to make new subs available. Does this make sense?

    Our renewing subscribers can either renew as is or renew with changes, and once our deadline has passed, we start our upgrade process. Once we've completed all upgrades, all of the subscription seats we put on hold get opened up for new subs sales (we refer to this as the open seating date.)

    You'll need to decide what you're willing to do with the process. In our case:

    • Any new subscription order that come in during the renewal period cannot request changes or upgrades. We recommend they call us at the open seating date to find out if there are better seats available they can move into.
    • Our renewing subscribers can pick from any open seats during the renewal period if there are seats that fit their preferences. They can still request an upgrade if they want to try for better locations. You will need to be more diligent with this as sometimes it doesn't get flagged for upgrade correctly and we miss their request.

    We first started using this model the year we had Hamilton on our season. All the new acquisitions were seated at the time of the order so we didn't have to deal with seating the volume of orders that came in. We skipped the following year because we expected a lot of subscribers to drop off and wanted to avoid gaping holes in our seats. We are now back to seating new orders from the start of the subscription campaign.

    I'd be happy to speak to you in detail about this or clarify the process.

    Karen

    _______________________________________________________

    Karen Diche

    Manager, Season Tickets

    Segerstrom Center for the Arts

    600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa, CA 92626

    T (714) 556-2122 x 4359   F (714) 755-7477   E KDiche@SCFTA.org

Reply
  • $organization

    We seat new orders during our renewal campaign and it's helped tremendously with the volume of seats we have to handle once our renewal deadline has passed.

    We put seats on hold for upgrade requests for renewing subscribers, essentially roping off an area around where our renewing subscription seats are to use for upgrades. Anything that is open is available for new subscriptions to be sold into. The seats we don't make available are generally the locations where we wouldn't expect new subscribers to be seated in were we waiting until the end of the renewal period before we used to make new subs available. Does this make sense?

    Our renewing subscribers can either renew as is or renew with changes, and once our deadline has passed, we start our upgrade process. Once we've completed all upgrades, all of the subscription seats we put on hold get opened up for new subs sales (we refer to this as the open seating date.)

    You'll need to decide what you're willing to do with the process. In our case:

    • Any new subscription order that come in during the renewal period cannot request changes or upgrades. We recommend they call us at the open seating date to find out if there are better seats available they can move into.
    • Our renewing subscribers can pick from any open seats during the renewal period if there are seats that fit their preferences. They can still request an upgrade if they want to try for better locations. You will need to be more diligent with this as sometimes it doesn't get flagged for upgrade correctly and we miss their request.

    We first started using this model the year we had Hamilton on our season. All the new acquisitions were seated at the time of the order so we didn't have to deal with seating the volume of orders that came in. We skipped the following year because we expected a lot of subscribers to drop off and wanted to avoid gaping holes in our seats. We are now back to seating new orders from the start of the subscription campaign.

    I'd be happy to speak to you in detail about this or clarify the process.

    Karen

    _______________________________________________________

    Karen Diche

    Manager, Season Tickets

    Segerstrom Center for the Arts

    600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa, CA 92626

    T (714) 556-2122 x 4359   F (714) 755-7477   E KDiche@SCFTA.org

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