Loyalty rewards programs?

An extraordinary fascinating thought that certainly would provide good potential for encouraging additional sales by single ticket buyers.

I have considered the implications that surround a loyalty program with regard to a subscriber base who would easily hit targets, as well as the possibility of discouraging single ticket patrons involved in the program from subscribing.

However, what we have done is set up auto-constituencies that track the number of tickets purchased by a single ticket patron during the season (have not thought about it in multiple seasons though, hmmm), and use that to provide patrons at a certain level with a different incentive to encourage repeat purchases. It is however an internal program and is transparent to the patron, which may indeed be where the potential lies.

We have just today had a discussion about rolling something like this out. We are thinking about just doing it for one promoter (who's on board!) and having Tessitura offer discounts to people who have a set amount of previous shows by that promoter in their ticket history.

I haven't thought much further than that though so would be interested to hear anyone elses responses.

Siobhan

As the website manager, I've been frustrated by the lack of repeat classical series purchasers I see our website. A large amount of our single ticket business is done online, but packages (even as small as three-concerts) account for a very small chunk of our online business. We're starting to discuss how to bridge this gap. One though is to try and offer progressively better incentives as single ticket buyers purchase more events during the course of a season. The question is what to offer? Discounts for reaching event milestones (e.g. after purchasing third concert of the season all future events are 10% off, 5 events 15% off...)?, a buy-10-tickets-get-1-free punch-card type of incentive? No discounts, but tchotchkes at certain milestones? Would love to know any successes or stumbles others have had along these lines.

Thanks!

Also FYI, after discussing this with our website development company, I'm told the functionality is very straight forward, and these incentives could easily correlate to our online campaigns.

In looking ahead at the upcoming conference schedule, I see a couple of discussion sessions that I'm sure will provide a lively roundtable on this subject.  One is "Loyalty and Rewards Programs" and will be moderated by Don McKim of The State Theatre (New Jersey) and Kerry Reeve of the Tessitura Network.  The other is "Packaging and Upselling" to be moderated by Elizabeth Carlock of the Santa Barbara Center for the Performing Arts and James Quigley of the Tessitura Network.

We have implemented programs that have calculated a points style reward system that we tracked using rankings.  This works fairly well, but since it is calculated by an algorithm it can be inaccurate if multiple accounts exist for a subscriber, which can be an issue with web sales and in a consortium environment where duplicates are common.

We also have used association functionality to track a "Bring-A-Friend" referral program.  If you would like more details on either please let me know.

I'm not sure if this completely fits the subject but one thing that I've personally wanted to do online and in-house is to use the guise of a rewards program when buying multiple shows over a period of time within a season and essentially turn these patrons into "subscribers", maybe not literally within tessitura but treat them the same way. (we offer short season subscriptions currently)
This way we could also offer the option to stay on board next year with these same rewards and more which at that time we would set up as a subscription.

For us to do this it would basically be, on your third show purchase you get x percent off, and what ever applicable additional perks we give to short season ticket holders.

Has anyone tried something like that?

Has anyone made any progress with rewards or loyalty programs since this discussion was started?  We are exploring a partnership with a third party at present.  Be great to hear if anyone has.  Thanks

Wondering if anyone has had any success implementing a third-party loyalty program and what you did. We were thinking of storing the loyalty rewards card number, requesting that information on web, phone, in person; tracking sales through the card program and reporting to the third party for them to provide patron with correct rewards points.

Any suggestions welcome!