Expanding Reach Through More Channels

Whether they want tickets for the next Lady Gaga concert, the World Series, the Indianapolis 500, or Hamilton, people are quickly discovering that SeatGeek is the place to find the best selection and great bargains. This relative newcomer to the online ticket business has quickly grown to offer the largest inventory of live event tickets on the web, in addition offering differentiating services like best-bargain ratings and notifications when a fan’s favorite team or entertainer will be performing nearby.

3X Increase in revenue from email and push

Email and push have been the primary channels for interacting with customers. However, according to Ben Clark, Vice President of Customer Retention, the marketing team previously struggled to deliver consistent, relevant messaging across channels because their email and push tools ran on separate platforms. The old tools were cumbersome to use and offered limited functionality. Worse yet, they didn’t support the team’s AI driven, omni-channel marketing strategy, which includes reaching customers through SMS, in-app messaging, and social media.

77% Increase in 4Q17 sales attributable to ad hoc email using data feeds

We didn’t want an email application with mobile capabilities bolted on or vice versa. We wanted a platform that was architected to support the channels we use now as well as the ones we plan to use in the future. That requirement ruled out pretty much every solution except Iterable.

Ben Clark

Vice President of Customer Retention, SeatGeek

Tackling the Complexity of Selling Tickets for Live Events

It takes innovation and creativity to take market share from well-known, high-visibility incumbents that have been in the ticket business for decades. Increasing brand awareness, however, is just one of the challenges SeatGeek marketers face. Selling tickets for live events is complicated. At any given time, hundreds of thousands of events are happening and the majority of sales for any given event occur close to the event date.

Ben notes that the incredible diversity of the audience further complicates the marketing effort: “There’s a huge difference between the baseball customer and the person buying tickets for an indie concert. Plus there are intrinsic challenges in operationalizing, advertising, and messaging specifics for a product like ours. Without geotargeting, for example, our messaging may be irrelevant and we have calendar restrictions to consider. The bottom line is we have to be very precise about our messages and the channels we use.”

50% Increase of users reached by adding push

Taking a Consolidated, Personalized Approach

Since implementing Iterable two years ago, the marketing team have consolidated all types of email as well as push notifications onto the Iterable platform, including:

• Transactional messages triggered by purchases—for example, purchase confirmations and ticket deliveries— as well as routine transactional messages for such requests as password resets.
• A completely automated weekly newsletter with content personalized based on customer purchases, location, and website behavior combined with suggestions derived by SeatGeek’s recommendation engine.
• A welcome journey that builds engagement with customers who open an account with SeatGeek.

Driving Revenue Increases

“We’re very close to achieving our vision of maturity for email as a channel. We’re also making great progress with push and we’re using Iterable to experiment with artificial intelligence, SMS and in-app messaging to better understand what kind of metrics we can achieve in each channel. With that information, we can make a case to the business and justify spending in other channels,” Ben says.

Vice President of Customer Retention , SeatGeek

Since switching to Iterable, email-attributable growth has outpaced almost every other segment of our business, nearly tripling year over year.

Ben Clark