Structured Couponing Making a business case

Every chorus has these business needs Need for a ticket engine that includes, but is not overly dependent on, singers Need to expand the ticket sales window well beyond the final week or two before a performance Need to capture patron contact data Need to constantly expand our audience Need to balance the sometimes conflicting objectives of attendance and revenue, so that we attract the largest audience while generating the largest amount of revenue

How do you meet these needs? Pump lots of money and time into marketing and marketing research Or try what we tried … STRUCTURED COUPONING

Advantages of Structured Couponing Easy to control because the coupon must be redeemed online Always get full and accurate information because contact information is entered at least 50% of your audience Singers HATE being sales people and record-keepers; now they feel like they are giving something away, not asking for something The headache of keeping up with singer tickets, accounting for money, and hounding them goes away Gives you a way to objectively evaluate the effectiveness of your advertising

More advantages Money comes in weeks earlier, before the expenses are incurred Creates early buzz Improves your ability to predict attendance so you can do something to impact attendance, trim costs, etc. Shifts your primary relationship away from Singer  Audience to Organization  Audience. This is CRITICAL to your future success. It helps you capture new audiences who, in their initial exposure to you, are extremely price sensitive

Our Solution: Structured Couponing

Ancillary things we did RAISED the prices of tickets as we implemented this Issued paper coupons to the singers (as well as ing them)