Mastercard Rewards
Encouraging customer loyalty through the creation of a bespoke giveaway to win up-to £50,000 of exclusive Theatre Vouchers, when purchasing tickets through the OfficialLondonTheatre platform.
As the dust from the pandemic was settling Society of London Theatre’s (SOLT) marketing team & Mastercard wanted to create a loyalty scheme to reward our loyal theatre-goers who had continued to support the industry during Covid-19, and encourage further audience development. My role was to work out how we could practically deliver this with the tools at our disposal.
The promotion would be split into two distinct rewards mechanisms:
With Theatre traditionally being perceived as a high cost luxury product, and with a reduction in overseas tourism SOLT sought a way to encourage customer loyalty to OfficialLondonTheatre.com as productions returned to the stage.
Tickets purchased through Official London Theatre have one of the lowest booking fees in the West End, and with minimal inside commissions ensuring maximum yield to the producer for the sale.
Vouchers issued would need to expire December 2021 and cannot be used on selected promotions.
Vouchers issued would need to expire December 2021 and cannot be used on selected OfficialLondonTheatre.com promotions.
Gap Analysis
We quickly identified the Theatre Tokens eGift platform as the best candidate to deliver the voucher functionality.
However we only had scope to make limited changes via our third-party developers due to budget constraints.
A gap analysis revealed that:
Having an expiry date on the vouchers meant that we could not brand these vouchers as Theatre Tokens
We would have to create a new voucher type in the system and the Theatre Tokens redemption APIs would need to be modified to reflect this change
We would need to devise a manual bulk load process for the vouchers
SOLT needed to source a bulk despatch mechanism to distribute the vouchers
Defining The Benefits
Theatre Tokens is a SOLT owned brand so we are keeping value within our own business rather than paying for a third-party reward
Any increase in purchases to buy more 'chances to win' will result increase in spend on the platform equates to 'Bums on Seats' which benefits SOLT's members as well as the yield that they will get from the sales
Offering lottery based reward encourages repeat transactions to be in with a chance of winning (essentially a controlled gambling mechanic) leading to an increase in spend on the platform
Given our already competitive pricing model this promotion will help raise the profile of the brand and convert users from other brands
As the vouchers have an expiry date any breakage will be re-absorbed into the business at no cost to SOLT
The promotion directly benefits the profile of our primary sponsors Mastercard
The Mechanism & Implementation
Additional data protection flags were added to all checkout processes for the month of September to allow the user to opt in to the prize draw.
Winners were selected and the total count of eligible tickets for each email address determined by running excel pivot tables on transactional data
A new voucher type was created in our voucher issuing partner's platform Eagle Eye AIR which would be specific to Official London Theatre, these codes would form the basis of the Voucher
The correct number of units for each voucher value were then loaded and assigned to the corresponding winners
Our HTML email designer then created a HTML template that we could send through our mass mailer (Acoustic Campaign)
This would be populated via dynamic variables (Firstname, Lastname, Voucher Value, Voucher Number, PIN) turning the email into a personalised digital voucher bulk sent from our Email Service Provider
Outcomes
We achieved strong sales in September 2021 with an increase in transactions of 44% over the same period in 2019 with 15% more tickets sold over the same period. We now have a mechanism for running a bespoke vouchers for OfficialLondonTheatre.com which offers new opportunities for our partners.
This process has served as a successful proof of concept for bespoke voucher schemes within the Theatre Tokens network and has open future opportunities to increase ROI.
We are able to track where the vouchers are being used and on what products so we can directly attribute benefit from the scheme to specific SOLT member productions.
