For the third edition of TEDxStanley Park, producer Roger Killen wanted to build greater awareness and coverage of his event. While last year’s event had a diverse range of speakers and sponsors, ticket sales and promotion needed improvement. SellClarity was brought in to assist with marketing strategy and automation, e-mail marketing and media exposure.
The Problem
• 2013 event only sold 100 tickets
• 2015 had 400 seats to fill
• E-mail was limited, with 100 people, most of whom had volunteered in 2013
The Solution
Through consultation and a close relationship with the marketing team, SellClarity applied a tactical strategy to resolve issues and support event growth.
Aggressive emphasis on collecting emails at every opportunity
• Popups
• Sign up buttons
• Adding visitors manually via ticket sales
• Added 200+ people on the day of the event, through sign-in prompt for access to the live stream
Advanced Segmentation
In order to make the email marketing campaign a success, the list was highly segmented into the follow groups:
- Ticket buyers
- Send more emails to encourage ticket sales
- Non ticket buyers
- User onboarding
- Leveraging referral sales
- Keeping them engaged after the event
After the event, TED still wanted to keep their users engaged. SellClarity developed a marketing strategy to accomplish this.
- Post Event
- Sent emails to keep buyer engaged and warm for next event
- Started aggressive email collection to ensure event would sell out
- Worked with social media manager to implement an email retargeting system in Facebook
Outcome
- Event tickets sold out
- E-mail subscription list grew to 1000+
- Media and digital buzz was generated
The marketing success of this event created a blueprint and strong foundation for 2016, the following year. In the fourth installment in 2016, returns to a larger venue, Queen Elizabeth Park. With the previous year’s marketing strategy to build from, this year’s event is set to sell 2, 500 tickets.