It’s no secret that the COVID-19 pandemic has taken a considerable and devastating toll on businesses worldwide. But it wasn’t just restaurants, retailers, and other for-profit businesses that bore the financial brunt of the pandemic. Many nonprofits, especially those in the arts, faced ruination at the hands of COVID and the digital-first shift it sparked.
One such nonprofit is the American Conservatory Theater (ACT), a producing theater in the Bay Area. A preeminent name in the performing arts world, ACT serves San Francisco and its surrounding communities not only through live performances, but also through conservatory classes and community programs meant to provide a creative outlet to children and adults alike.
However, as you can imagine, the inability to host large indoor gatherings during the pandemic essentially made ACT inoperational, depriving them of essential revenue, and depriving their audience of a beloved artistic outlet. Now, with the world slowly but surely returning to normal, ACT is back to serving its community through the arts, but still faces substantial challenges in the wake of COVID-19 disruption.
Chief among those challenges is the need to rebuild and grow their audience and donor base. They took a positive first step in achieving that goal by launching a new, more engaging website. But the launch alone wasn’t enough, because it brought with it the issue of getting new users to the site, and ultimately, to the Theater. To achieve that end, ACT knew they needed to bring in some support, try something new, and hopefully — find a partner that would make this business dream a reality. That partner was Lytics.
Why Lytics?
Beyond just growing website visibility, and expanding the reach of their email and social campaigns, ACT needed to create a more engaging online experience for its users. And that meant understanding their audience at a deeper level than was possible for them at the time. So, they began shopping around for a customer data platform (CDP) to help them better collect, segment, and take action on their customer data.
But ACT couldn’t just settle for just any CDP. As a nonprofit, they needed a platform that is flexible, and can understand/adjust to the ever-changing needs of the organization. Because they rely on ticketing software, which houses all of their customer data, any CDP they chose to implement would ultimately have to integrate back into that crucial system. Fortunately, it just so happens that Lytics checked all of those boxes.
The Theater was enticed by the prospect of using Lytics to quickly gather customer information to inform marketing initiatives and strategic decision-making. The Lytics platform also integrates seamlessly with their ticketing software, speeding up their time to value and making the onboarding process a breeze. Finally, ACT was beyond pleased with the level of support they received from Lytics, during and post-implementation. Even after Lytics’ CDP had been implemented on ACT’s site, their support staff stayed in close communication with ACT’s team, helping them to better leverage Lytics’ suite of tools and continually optimize their experience.
Enhanced personalization and efficacy with Lytics Experiences
ACT was excited about the prospect of implementing Lytics on their website and in their various marketing campaigns.
They decided to dive right in and employ Lytics in a variety of ways. On their website, ACT found a lot of value in Lytics Experiences (which enable you to deliver a specific message to a specific audience through web, ads, or email). In the case of the website, the Theater opted to use pop-ups to drive traffic to a multi-show ticket package. Here’s how that experiment looked:
ACT was putting on a production of a particular show. However, the cost of admission for that one show was comparable to a holiday subscription package that included tickets to three individual shows. So they put a pop-up on the page of the singular production touting the benefits of the holiday package. Suddenly, they were able to turn one-time theatergoers into regular attendees by re-directing them to the 3-show purchase page.
They also used email capture pop-ups to grow their emailable prospect list. The more emails they were able to collect from their website with Lytics, the more people they were able to email with theater updates, special offers, and tickets to new shows. Now, they had the opportunity to exponentially grow their usual audience and reach new students for their classes.
When it was time to deliver on a promise, the Lytics platform was able to provide the actionable insights that the theater organization was looking for to support their growth ambitions.
In fact, Jennifer Bielstein, Executive Director at American Conservatory Theater, shares that “in terms of a return on investment, [ACT] saw it pretty much immediately. Our marketing team was able to implement some offers and some targeted messaging, and we saw results right away within a day of putting that out there. It was quite exciting to watch.”
15% more online conversions within one month
The results of ACT’s initial trial run with Lytics were immediate and staggering. Pop-ups allowed them to have more control over their user experience, directing traffic to the pages that would generate more conversions. As a result, ACT saw a 15% increase in online conversions within the first month of implementing Lytics. Purchases of the aforementioned holiday packages in particular saw a noticeable bump thanks to the specific website callout.
Pop-ups also allowed ACT to more effectively promote the shows and classes that weren’t previously getting their share of attention. For instance, they recently joined a program called Bay Area Arts Together and wanted to feature it prominently on their homepage. Before Lytics, they had no way to do so because their homepage is configured to promote shows above all else. But with Lytics, they were able to have the announcement pop up right on the homepage and direct users to a page with more information, increasing engagement and driving traffic to a relevant page.
The impact on ACT’s marketing team was substantial as well. Their outreach campaigns had long suffered from a severe case of sameness, broadly targeting everyone in their existing audience with the same offer. Using customer insights gained from Lytics CDP, ACT was able to create highly customized user experiences both on the website and in their email marketing campaigns. They had the ability to capture the emails of people who had previously shown interest in their conservatory classes or education and community programs, but hadn’t signed up for either. And once they had those email lists more fully built out, ACT could continue pushing those users towards conversion with targeted outreach.
Ultimately, ACT found that Lytics enabled them to expand their reach and grow their audience, increase visibility on pertinent website pages, and gain a deeper understanding of their audience.
Samantha Lomax, Digital Engagement Manager at ACT, shared: “Lytics has really helped us understand our customers’ behavior, whether it was confirming what we kind of already knew about our patrons. Or it was confirming what we were doing with these new tools that Lytics provided, confirming that those tools were actually working or helping.”
What’s next
What’s next for ACT? In some respects, it’s a continuation of what’s been working. They’ll continue to leverage their growing wealth of behavioral data to better inform marketing outreach. And they’ll continue utilizing site pop-ups as a means of promoting their upcoming classes and productions.
But what they find most exciting is the opportunity to find new ways to utilize all the customer data that they’re now able to capture. Given the ROI they saw in their first month of employing Lytics, ACT is eager to get new campaigns up and running. With Lytics, the possibilities really are endless for ACT to reach a wider audience of thespians and theatergoers alike, and continue serving the community they love.
