Lunchtime Speaker: Curtain Up! Audience Engagement Strategies from Stage to Seat

In an increasingly digital world, theater lives or dies by its ability to give its audience a visceral and memorable experience that is quintessentially analog. Hear from Shonali Burke, one of the country’s leading growth strategists, on how theaters small and large in the DC Metro area have successfully engaged, retained, and converted audiences through a blend of storytelling, analytics and, ultimately, human connection.

Shonali Burke, Growth Strategist

Notes:

Discussion

• What is your biggest challenge when it comes to engaging audiences
  • Challenge: advocate fatigue and repeat communication, a contact list running its course
  • Challenge: helping people understand the issues, limited attention span
  • Challenge: mental and physical limitations
  • How do we get our audiences to pay attention long enough to move them through the pipeline/funnel

Arena stage

• Filling space outside of the theaters
• Communicating with people during the pandemic
  • Email works if it’s good
    • Zero in what makes your content really special
    • Segment your audiences to tailor your communications
      • Who has come to see your content more than once?
      • If they were a repeat attendee, can you give them a deal to get their loyalty and get them to come again?
    • Balancing needing ample communications, but also avoiding email fatigue
    • Putting people on different email cycles to keep things fresh
    • Combining direct mail with email to add emphasis and impact to communications
  • Different marketing strategies
    • FY23/24 ‘Leap of Faith’
      • 6 dedicated emails and 1 postcard over 5 weeks, A-list segmentation 
      • Extra single tickets as an incentive
      • Resulted in 5% of full package (full season subscribers) revenue target (not including A-list revenue)
    • FY 23/24 Renewal Campaign
      • Highly targeted segmentation
      • Spotlight on individual shows, piggybacking off hooks
      • 14 dedicated emails, print trifold, A-list segmentation
      • 167% avg total open rate, 57% avg unique open rate, 5% avg engagement rate, 11% avg conversion rate
    • Compared to last year
      • Didn’t do the leap of faith campaign
      • Only 2 season announcements
      • Hit 8% of full-package revenue goal
    • FY 23/24
      • 82% of full-package goal
      • 45% of overall year sub-revenue goal
  • We are all trying to find the story that works so that people pay attention and take action
    • Numbers and metrics help us do that!
    • The data helps you find the story that works and is most impactful
      • And for the right audience
    • Lots of little nuggets are data: including qualitative information like personal anecdotes!
    • Analytics software is hugely important here – let your data help you
  • Email metrics of note:
    • Opt-out rate: .08%
    • Open rate: 52.92%
      • Don’t let industry benchmarks let you get complacent
    • Click-through rate: 6.42%
    • List growth: 16-18% YOY
      • List cleaning and data maintenance is important here
      • Re-engagement campaigns can be helpful here
        • Offer incentives to come back, but if people don’t want to hear from you, let them go.

Theater Alliance

• Navigating crisis
  • Theater Alliance was kicked out of their performance space unexpectedly, with all of their stuff locked inside
  • In response to this, Theater Alliance owned the story
    • Documented the experience, kept their audience in the loop, informed the media of the issue
    • Once the story was out there, Theater Alliance completely owned the narrative and made sure that the narrative reflected your story
    • Intentionally didn’t make this a money ploy in language, but helped facilitate donation from other context clues on the page
  • Sales skyrocketed in response to this, with higher proportions of more expensive tickets being sold and fewer comp tickets being used

Use your brand to your advantage

• Have fun on social media 
• Integrate owned and shared media
  • Arena Stage launched a blog that helped build their brand and also create a platform for behind-the-scenes content
• Additional event opportunities
  • Fortune teller Fridays
    • Ties into themes from Ride the Cyclone
  • Valentine’s Day ‘Anti-Prom’
    • Ties into character narratives for Ride the Cyclone
• Let others tell your story
  • Let your audiences, performers, and characters, help with your storytelling
• Analytics ROCK.
  • Look at your A/B testing results – and try A/B testing!
  • Find what DOESN’T work, but don’t be afraid to try!
  • Correlate activity to outcome
    • What are our communications, what are we doing on social, and how is it correlating to web viewership, sales, etc.
• Isn’t this all a lot of work?
  • Yes…but it’s worth it
    • We are doing this work to make a difference.
    • Whatever work you’re doing, you’re doing it because you want to make an impact and have life-changing effects.
    • It’s worth the elbow grease and attention to detail, and does translate to results.

Questions

• What resources did it take to put together the communication campaigns that the Arena Stage did?
  
  • A lot of it is staffing!
    • Added a dedicated email marketing manager
    • Added a dedicated social media staff person
    • Added an in-house design position and worked with freelance designers
    • And included lots of overlap for these positions so that staff could all support each other
  • Helping to make things easy
    • Canva as a general resource for design assets
    • An email CRM that was user-friendly and had the capabilities needed
• Gifts and incentives work!
  • You want to understand the relationships you’re building with your audience.
  • Influencers can be helpful too, but be intentional about who you build an influencer relationship with
  • Expand your contacts – this also includes photographers and other people who can connect to your work.
• There’s no going back to pre-pandemic engagement
  • It may happen in certain situations, but it will not be consistent
  • Set your own baseline for what kind of engagement you want to aim for
  • We need to reset our perception and understanding of what people want, what feels accessible, and what engagement we can expect
• What is your favorite analytical piece of data that has opened up data possibilities
  • Revenue tracking was huge – it helped legitimize marketing efforts and also show rewards for the work
  • Right story, right place, told to the right people
• Fear of getting over the hump with leadership – how do you show them the vision?
  • Start really small with leadership – a test that allows you to get some new data and helps show the proof to leadership.
    • From there, build the proof and continue to push.
    • Use other organizations that have done what you want to do and use that as a jumping-off point
      • Especially if they’re a similar competitor
    • You will then verify