With such diverse bills, spanning multiple genres and art forms, the team at Lindisfarne realized they needed a more intuitive marketing platform to capture, understand and use fan data to promote their event. This led to the organizers making the switch from MailChimp to Audience Republic, a CRM and marketing platform designed specifically for the needs of the live event industry.
"It’s been really interesting to compare Audience Republic against MailChimp. I would say it’s the next step – it’s a little bit more professional looking, the emails look a bit slicker, there’s just more premium features that work so much better on Audience Republic… But it’s not just a mailing tool, it’s everything that comes alongside it."
Given their target audience spans far and wide, Lindisfarne Festival knew they had to delve further into understanding their fans.
Using Audience Republic’s fan profiles within the CRM, they surfaced and combined multiple different data points to ensure they were both targeting, and personalizing their messages to the recipients.
“One of the things I really like about Audience Republic is the targeted marketing we can do – we can focus on age, gender, location, types of music, types of band, and we can really be specific, which makes it much more user friendly to build up engagement."
Aware they couldn’t just rely on historic data they had captured from previous events, Lindisfarne Festival used one of Audience Republic’s gamified data capture campaigns to reach new fans.
The competition had an immediate impact with many new contacts generated and previously unsubscribed contacts returning. It also boosted their organic social media channels with engagement and followers.
“We ran a competition for the ultimate Lindisfarne Festival experience. It was phenomenal the amount of people who took part and signed up. There were around 2,000 fans added to the database after the campaign was over, a few of them were previous unsubscribers who signed back up to get involved. We had also just launched a TikTok so it built up our TikTok audience. We've got 30,000 followers on Facebook and you could see where it was increasing, the same as on Instagram. It was a really good tool.”
Looking for a new way to sell more tickets, Lindisfarne Festival leveraged Audience Republic’s native event specific filtering capabilities to segment event attendees from last year that hadn’t yet purchased this year. They then adopted SMS as a method to reach these people with bespoke, personalized messages that offered special payment plans and discounts.
“We have been sending SMS messages to people who bought tickets last year and haven't yet repurchased for this year. And just said, you bought last year, here’s a special payment plan option, and a discount code. It's very much bespoke to those people and I think that's why it's having such an impact.”
