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Snow Machine Festival brings together music, snow, and adventure across two world-class mountain destinations — Queenstown, New Zealand each September, and Hakuba Valley, Japan each March. After taking festival operations fully in-house, the team needed a smarter way to manage marketing, grow their audience, and drive ticket sales across both events.
Before Audience Republic, Snow Machine's marketing stack was fragmented and time-consuming. Their CRM was shared across three brands, with audience lists tangled together — making personalised, targeted communications nearly impossible.
"We were using one CRM for three brands, and all of the audiences were getting mixed up. It was really messy." — Kate McRobie, Marketing Manager, Snow Machine Festival
On top of that, their ticketing platform had no integration with their marketing tools — forcing the team to manually export data and upload lists before every single campaign. Managing pre-sales, one of their most important performance indicators, was slow and cumbersome.
"Our pre-sale campaigns are such an important part of our marketing. We wanted to grow our sign-ups and make that process smoother and more automated." — Kate McRobie
Audience Republic gave Snow Machine the all-in-one event marketing platform they'd been missing. Ticketing integrations, gamified pre-sale campaigns, email and SMS tools, and detailed analytics — all in one place.
"Audience Republic integrates with our ticketing platform and gives us one place to manage everything — data, campaigns, and reporting. It was a perfect fit." — Kate McRobie
The event-first design of the platform meant Snow Machine could finally segment audiences properly, streamline workflows, and launch campaigns that turned fans into advocates.
Snow Machine launched gamified pre-sale campaigns for both the Queenstown and Hakuba events. Fans could sign up early, earn points, and share the festival with friends to climb a leaderboard — a mechanic that quickly turned sign-ups viral.
Alongside pre-sale campaigns, the team introduced:
The impact was significant. Between February and September, Snow Machine's database grew by 42% — adding 34,860 new subscribers and expanding from 80,194 to 115,054 contacts.
"Watching those pre-sale numbers grow was crazy. We got 15,000 sign-ups for Japan this year, and they've all now gone into our email list." — Kate McRobie
Across 14 campaigns — including two pre-sale, six full-database, and six upsell sends — Snow Machine achieved results well above industry benchmarks:
"We're consistently above the industry average now — significantly higher, actually — which shows us we're on the right track." — Kate McRobie
Combined with the momentum generated by gamified pre-sale campaigns, this performance has made email one of Snow Machine's most powerful revenue channels — converting audience excitement directly into ticket sales.
As Snow Machine continues to grow, the team is focused on deepening their use of Audience Republic — introducing more granular segmentation between their Japan and New Zealand audiences, building automated upgrade and win-back flows, and expanding year-round marketing activity.
"If you're considering Audience Republic, make sure you do the onboarding call. It really helped us get the most out of the platform and use it more efficiently." — Kate McRobie
