Standing Ovation: ATG Entertainment Drives 100% Higher CTRs With Iterable

ATG Entertainment is one of the world’s leading live entertainment companies. As a global leader in live entertainment, ATG welcomes over 20 million customers annually across its 65 world-class venues spanning Broadway, the West End, and continental Europe.

The Status Quo: Live entertainment is inherently about the moment. Yet, for years, this global powerhouse was stuck running its massive operation on a decade-old CRM. Like too many brands, ATG was weighed down by a rigid, outdated system that could only churn out batch-and-blast campaigns.

The Revelation: In today’s world, customers expect experiences that are as seamless and dynamic as the shows they pay to see. ATG was launching a new mobile app and expanding its global footprint (US, UK, and Europe), but their legacy platform couldn’t keep up. It couldn’t handle the multi-channel, multi-territory complexity, nor the mass personalization needed to move beyond generic messaging.

They faced a critical choice: Bolt AI onto a legacy system and speed up broken processes, or fundamentally rethink their engagement model.

Sticking with the old way wasn’t just inefficient; it was costing them revenue and customer loyalty.

• Operational Burnout: The team was focused on simply replicating old processes, facing major platform migration risks and complex operational hurdles like IP warming, data quality issues, and training staff on new systems across multiple territories and time zones.
• The Personalization Gap: Their platform couldn’t deliver comprehensive customer journeys based on purchase behavior, nor could it support multi-channel engagement like push notifications and WhatsApp. This limited their ability to create the truly personalized, real-time moments that drive ticket sales.

Missed Revenue Potential: Every generic send was a missed opportunity. Batch-and-blast campaigns carry a 96% lower Revenue Per Send compared to 1:1 triggered campaigns.

ATG Entertainment was ready to embrace the future of real-time engagement. They chose Iterable to facilitate the move from rigid schedules to moments-based marketing. In just six months, ATG transformed their engagement by:

• Unlocking Mass Personalization: Implementing Handlebars logic, Catalogs, and predictive modeling to create tailored messages that their old system made impossible.
• Building Dynamic Journeys: Designing sophisticated customer journeys tailored to booking windows and upsell opportunities, providing both informational and revenue-driving touchpoints.
• Going Truly Cross-Channel: Successfully adding WhatsApp and push notifications alongside email, creating a seamless strategy across three major territories (US, UK, and continental Europe) from a single platform.
• A Collaborative Holiday Strategy: Partnering closely with Iterable’s Deliverability team, ATG moved beyond broad outreach to execute a sophisticated, data-driven strategy for their first Black Friday on the platform. By leveraging Iterable’s advanced segmentation to target high-engagement audiences and optimizing inbox placement, ATG ensured its most impactful messages reached the right customers during the most critical time of the year.

This collaborative, data-driven approach allowed ATG to move from generic outreach to a high-performance strategy that yielded immediate gains:

• UK Engagement: Saw a 100% increase in click-through rates with personalized newsletters compared to batch-and-blast.
• US Engagement: Achieved a 50% increase in click-through rates during initial testing.
• Revenue Impact: One dynamic newsletter test generated $36,000 in incremental ticket sales compared to its manual predecessor, demonstrating the power of sending smarter, not just sending more.
• Exceptional Black Friday Performance: The partnership with Iterable’s Deliverability experts led to a significant lift in performance across holiday campaigns, securing a successful peak season:
  • In the US, the number of emails sent doubled (11m) compared to the previous year.
  • In the US, the average open rate increased from 38% to 54% year over year. 
  • In the US, the amount of incremental orders increased from 3,453 to 4,622.

By leveraging Iterable’s modern, AI-optimized platform, ATG Entertainment successfully launched its new UK and US app, established a scalable global CRM, and is now delivering intelligent, automated conversations that meet customers where they are.

The Takeaway: ATG’s journey proves that the future of marketing isn’t about sending more campaigns—it’s about ending them. It’s about creating meaningful, AI-driven moments that resonate.

Want to move beyond batch-and-blast? Iterable is the AI-powered communication platform that enables brands to ditch the outdated campaign calendar and move to real-time, adaptive, AI-driven engagement. Learn more at www.iterable.com.