Ask Me Anything: Candidates for Subscription

Great question! An important one too. Steven wrote a while back about the importance of Shopping in Your Own Closet when it comes to increasing engagement and loyalty. The best place to find new subscribers is definitely going to be within the same closet—your current single ticket buyers.

Before you can begin to identify who are most qualified, you have to identify qualifying factors. This usually takes some dedicated time to analyze the trends in your ticketing database, but the answers generally reveal themselves pretty quickly.

To start, identify your current subscribers who had single ticket buying behavior before they bought a subscription. Then isolate their transactional information to just their pre-subscription behavior. Ask yourselves the following questions:

• How many performances did they attend before they subscribed?
• How many times a year, on average, did they attend before they subscribed?
• What was their household spend on tickets per year before they subscribed?
• How early were they buying their tickets before the performance before they subscribed?
• How long had they been coming before they subscribed?

Once you have that information, you’ve unlocked an invaluable resource for identifying patrons with similar behavior, and thus, the most qualified subscription candidates.

JCA Arts Marketing collaborates with cultural organizations to increase revenue, boost attendance and membership, and grow patron loyalty. We provide consulting and software services to hundreds of cultural institutions across multiple genres, including dance, museums, opera, performing arts centers, symphony, and theatre. We can help you achieve your marketing goals.