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Understanding Audience Loyalty

Rachael Norris
Rachael Norris
  • Updated

Audience Loyalty is a key business objective for most organisations.

You might have initiatives to encourage customer loyalty, whilst also trying to reach new audiences. Before undertaking any new activity, you might want to start by first analysing where you are now.

In this article we’ll cover how to assess your audience loyalty by tracking the following metrics:

  • Percentage of first-time bookers in a year
  • Audience retention across multiple years
  • Audience reattendance within a year

Before you get started, make sure you're familiar with:

 

First-time customers

You can use the Customer List tool to give you the data to work out what percentage of your customers were new in 2022.

To achieve this, you will need to create a new Customer List with two Local Segments. One Local Segment will look at tickets purchased in 2022, and the other will look at tickets purchased in 2022 that were first visits.

 

How to create Customer Lists for use in calculating the percentage of new customers

In Insights & Mailings, create a new Customer List, then create two Purchasing Segments:

  • For customers who purchased tickets in 2022
  • For customers who purchased tickets in 2022 and it was their first time.

Follow the steps below to create your Customer List.

  1. Go to Insights & Mailings.
  2. Under Customer Lists, click New to create a new Customer List.
  3. Give your Customer List a name and description that will help you find it in future.
  4. Next, you will need to create two new Local Segments. Click the button named New Local Segment.
  5. Name your first Segment, ‘Tickets purchased in 2022’.
  6. Under Segment type choose Purchasing.
  7. Expand the Tickets wrapper and drag the Date Transaction Confirmed box into the Criteria Set. 
  8. Under Fixed date range, choose between 1 Jan 2022 to 31 December 2022.

    TIP: By default you'll be only including tickets which have not been returned. If you want to include all tickets, whether or not they've been returned, then you can choose to delete the box marked Returned. By checking the box marked Returned, you'd be only including tickets that have been returned.

  9. Click Next. A new screen will appear with Purchasing Statistics - you can choose to group your data by Order owner, Order facilitator or Household. In this example, we’re using Order owner.
  10. By default, the total number of items purchased should show minimum set to 1 and maximum as a blank box.

    TIP: You can leave the value boxes blank, but if you wish to limit this count based on value you can enter that here. You might use this to only look for tickets that had a value, excluding free tickets. If you add a limit here, you’ll need to remember to add this to the next segment as well.

  11. Click Save to create your Local Segment.
  12. Next, create your second New Local Segment.
  13. Name your second Segment, ‘Tickets purchased in 2022 which were a ‘first visit'.
  14. Under Segment type choose Purchasing.
  15. Expand the Tickets wrapper and drag Date Transaction Confirmed into the Criteria Set. 
  16. Under Fixed date range, choose between 1 Jan 2022 to 31 December 2022.
  17. Expand the Tickets Criteria and drag First Visit into the Criteria Set underneath where it has the AND condition. Make sure the box next to First Visit is checked. This will mean that this Local Segment will only show tickets that were sold last year AND were first time visits.
  18. Click Next. A new screen will appear with Purchasing Statistics - you can choose to group your data by Order owner, Order facilitator or Household. In this example, we’re using Order owner.
  19. By default, the total number of items purchased should show minimum set to 1 and maximum as a blank box.
  20. Click Save to create your Local Segment.

Watch this video to see the above steps in action. You can pause the video at any time.

 

Calculating the percentage of new customers

Add the ‘Tickets purchased in 2022’ Segment to the list, update the count and make a note of the number. This is your total number of customers in 2022.

Remove that Segment and add the ‘Tickets purchased in 2022 which were first visits’ Segment. Update the count and make a note of that number, too. This is the number of first-time visitors you had in 2022.

To work out the percentage of first-time customers over the year:

  • % first-time customers in 2022 = (number of first-time visitors / number of 2022 customers) x 100

 

How to make the most of first-time bookers

Here are a few ideas and suggestions for how you can ensure those hard-won first time bookers return. 

  • Send automated emails - you can thank customers for making their first booking.
  • Use Dynamic Content in Pre- and Post-Show emails you can tailor messaging specifically to first-time customers who might be less familiar with your venue/organisation.
  • Make a great first impression using Customer Groups to flag a first-time visitor to your Box Office or Front of House team.
  • Use the Post Show Analysis report to identify the Events which bring in the most first-time bookers, and create a targeted campaign to customers who have not booked again recommending something else that might interest them or create an offer or promo code.

 

Audience retention

If you’re wondering how often your existing bookers come back and visit again, you’ll want to calculate your retention rate. You can work this out by finding the percentage of customers who make repeat purchases in following years.

REMINDER: In this example, we’re skipping 2020 as it’s likely to show an anomaly. Depending on whether you started selling tickets again in 2021 or 2022 you might want to choose different dates.

Let's say you want to look at data from 2019, 2021 and 2022, you're going to need the following figures.

  • Number of customers who purchased in 2019
  • Number of customers who purchased in 2019 and then again in 2021
  • Number of customers who purchased in 2019 and again in 2022

 

How to create Customer Lists for use in calculating audience retention

In Insights & Mailings, create a new Customer List, then create three Purchasing Segments looking for customers who bought something in the previous three years:

  • Purchased in 2019
  • Purchased in 2021
  • Purchased in 2022

Follow the steps below to create your Customer List.

  1. Go to Insights & Mailings.
  2. Under Customer Lists, click new to create a new Customer List.
  3. Give your Customer List a name and description that will help you find it in future.
  4. Press Next to go to the Main filter.
  5. To create a new Local Segment, click the button named New Local Segment.
  6. Name your first Segment, ‘Purchases in 2019’.
  7. Under Segment type choose Purchasing.
  8. Expand the Order Items wrapper and drag the Date Transaction Confirmed box into the Criteria Set. 
  9. Under Fixed date range, choose between 1 Jan 2019 to 31 December 2019.

Repeat the steps to create Segments for 2021 and 2022.

Watch this video to see the steps above in action.

 

Calculating the retention rate

Add the Purchased in 2019 Segment to the list, update the count and make a note of the number.

Next, you want to get the number of customers who also purchased in 2021. Add the Purchased in 2021 Segment into your Customer List, making sure to use the AND metric between the two Segments. Run a count and record the number.

Lastly, you want to get the number of customers who purchased in 2019 and 2022. Remove the Purchased in 2021 Segment and add the Purchased in 2022 Segment alongside the Purchased in 2019 Segment using the AND metric. Run a count and record the number.

This is an example of the data you should now have:

Purchased in 2019 1356
Purchased in 2019 and 2021 215
Purchased in 2019 and 2022 167

 

Once you have the number of customers for each count, you can work out the percentage retained each year as follows:

  • % retained in 2021 = (number of 2019 & 2021 customers / number of 2019 customers) x 100
  • % retained in 2022 = (number of 2019 & 2022 customers / number of 2019 customers) x 100

In our example this would now be:

  Count Calculation
Purchased in 2019 1356  
Purchased in 2019 and 2021 215 16%
Purchased in 2019 and 2022 167 12%

 

How to use your retention data

Once you have identified customers who have and haven’t booked again, here are a couple of ideas for next steps:

 

Reattendance Analysis

How do you identify frequent bookers and find ways to encourage them to continue coming back? A great way to do this is to take a look at last year's bookers and find out how many of them visited multiple times. 

To do that, you just need the Reattendance Analysis report.

 

How to run the Reattendance Analysis report

  1. Go to Insights & Mailings > Report Explorer.
  2. Under All reports, you’ll see the Reattendance Analysis report (the blue toolbox shows that it's a Standard Report).
  3. Select the green + button next to the Reattendance Analysis report.
  4. Select the green play button next to By Instance Start Date as your Criteria Set.
  5. Here you can select from the drop down which time period you’d like this report to run. In this example we’re going to use last year.
  6. Select Run as… and choose your preferred choice of file type.

 

Understanding the Reattendance Analysis report

When you have run the report, you should see:

  • A table detailing the number of visits your customers made from one through to ten or more, 
  • One pie chart detailing the percentage of customers who visited once, twice or 3+ times.

mceclip1.png

 

How to use your reattendance data

Here are some suggestions for ways to encourage your regular bookers to keep visiting:

  • Set up Multibuy Offers to encourage customers to book multiple shows at once
  • Cross-sell at the point of sale to encourage customers to buy more or inform them of future events
  • Use Post-Show emails to advertise upcoming shows soon after customers attend

 

Further Reading

If you want to continue learning about Audience Loyalty, we recommend taking a look at the following articles and resources: