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Barbican audiences increasingly loyal as a result of CRM strategy
Award winning website generates 62 per cent of all event sales
E-strategy yields strong results - £100k revenue from 1 e-shot
The Barbican Centre enters its 25th anniversary year with some encouraging news about the loyalty of its audiences and results to its marketing strategy.
Four years ago, the Barbican's average monthly audience was made up of 70 per cent new customers to 30 per cent repeat attenders. After making improvements to data capture and coding, developing new tools to interpret and understand data and setting up new initiatives to ensure customers had a meaningful customer journey from their first contact with the Centre, the Barbican's monthly mix has now shifted to 58 per cent repeat attenders to 42 per cent new customers for its core arts activity. There has also been a 270 per cent increase in subscription revenue earned via the membership scheme with an uplift of 166 per cent in patrons joining the membership scheme in the past three years.
Chris Denton, Head of Marketing, said:
'Historically, the originality and diversity of our programme meant that we were great at attracting new audiences, as we still are. But, we did not have the tools or strategy in place to be able to retain them and encourage them to re-attend. We set about developing a CRM and brand development strategy which sought to clarify the Barbican proposition to new and existing audiences and enable us to deliver our communications in a timely, efficient and highly effective way. We also launched a New Audience Strategy which laid out a clear 'journey' for our new audiences by offering a tightly controlled sequence of marketing propositions and which encouraged them to start a lifelong relationship with us. I am delighted with the successes of that strategy as the latest results demonstrate.'
New website
Part of the marketing strategy also included the development of a new website which, since going live in 2005, has won a clutch of prestigious awards, including Best Tourism Website of the Year 2006 (Visit London), a Webby for an education project linked to the site and several commercial sector awards including Best Website for the Meetings Industry Marketing Awards. The site has seen a 210 per cent increase in hits over the past twelve months and online sales now average around 62 per cent of all business each month.
E-strategy
Numbers joining the Barbican's e-list have recently topped 100,000 and the Centre will shortly commence work on testing a new programme of triggered email marketing influenced by patron behaviour and response to a planned sequence of marketing activity. The Centre's ability to directly track revenue generated from e-mails sent to its lists has shown some record breaking results recently with over £110,000 generated from a recent season launch e-shot to its classical music audience base. Chris Denton said 'the impact of e-marketing on the way we communicate with customers has been immense. Our ability to target communications and be much more responsive to the needs of customers is a real asset, as is our ability to dramatically cut costs of print based communications.'
The Barbican has also recently developed an in-house production team to exploit the potential of podcast materials to enhance marketing communications and has seen some encouraging levels of downloads of material produced to help communicate the core messages about events.
For further details, please contact Chris Denton on 020 7382 7092 or e-mail cdenton@barbican.org.uk
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