Marketing in the arts sector comes with real challenges. How do you turn first-time visitors into regulars? How do you reach audiences who have never heard of your organisation? How do you re-engage people who used to come regularly but haven't shown up in a season or two? And how do you optimise attendance for every event in your programme?
Ticketmatic can play a role in each of these areas. This article gives an overview of the marketing capabilities the software offers and how to put them to work.
The data ticketmatic tracks for you
Ticketmatic carefully tracks ticketing data and purchase behaviour across three data sources:
One important note: the ticket buyer is not always the person who attends. Tickets are regularly purchased for someone else. Through the ticketmatic app, buyers can securely forward tickets to the actual attendees, who receive them directly in their own accounts. This gives you an increasingly accurate picture of who is actually in the room.
All of this data is first-party data, collected by you, from your audience, based on real behaviour. In an era of disappearing cookies and tightening privacy regulations, that is invaluable.
Mapping your audience
Interactive dashboards and geographic insights
Ticketmatic's interactive dashboards are a good starting point for getting to know your audience. They give you a visual overview through charts and maps: bar charts show purchasing behaviour by genre, sales channel or period, demographic charts break down your audience by age, language and gender, and a geographic heatmap shows where your visitors live. That heatmap highlights concentrations of visitors on a map, from hyperlocal to international, so you can see at a glance where your audience comes from and where growth potential still exists.
Segmenting with filters and selections
Ticketmatic's filters let you build and refine audience selections. By combining multiple filters, or excluding certain criteria, you get exactly the group you want to reach. Frequently used filter combinations can be saved as a selection that automatically updates as new data comes in.
You can segment based on:
- Demographic data (postcode, language, age)
- Purchase behaviour (which events, how often, through which channel)
- Engagement (newsletter clicks, opens, opt-in status)
- Loyalty (first purchase, number of visits, total order value)
- Genre preferences (e.g. experimental, classical, punk rock, dance theatre) and relationship types (e.g. VIPs, students, subscribers, supporting members)
The visitor lifecycle
Tailoring your messages to the right person at the right moment increases their relevance and impact. In ticketmatic, you define the lifecycle stages that matter for your organisation and when a visitor belongs to each one. You assign appropriate labels, which you can then use to segment and communicate in a targeted way. For example:
- New visitor: first purchase, needs a warm welcome and a reason to return
- Returning visitor: buys occasionally, potential to deepen the relationship
- Loyal visitor: attends regularly, a candidate for early access or loyalty offers
- Dormant visitor: was active, but absent for one or more seasons
- Lapsed visitor: no activity for a long time, reactivation requires a different approach
Birthdays and milestone moments
Ticketmatic also lets you segment based on specific moments, such as birthdays or the anniversary of a first visit. These moments lend themselves well to communication that feels relevant and well-timed rather than arbitrary.
Communicating with your audience
The built-in email marketing tool
Ticketmatic includes its own email marketing tool, letting you send campaigns directly from the system to your segmented audience. No complex data connections, no export-import, no copy-pasting to an external platform: your selection and your mailing live in the same system.
Prefer to work with an external platform like Mailchimp or Brevo? That is possible too, and our team will help you set up the integration.
Order and service emails as a marketing moment
Every purchase automatically generates an order confirmation and, where applicable, a service email. These emails have a notably high open rate because recipients expect them. They offer room for a limited marketing element, such as a reminder about the show, an upsell to a package deal, or an invitation to look at an upcoming event. One important note: these are transactional emails, for which recipients have not given explicit marketing consent. Including too much marketing content turns the email into a marketing email, which under GDPR does require explicit opt-in.
Communication through the ticketmatic app
Through the ticketmatic app, you can reach visitors at targeted moments and even ask them questions: before, during or after a visit. Think practical information, an upsell to a drink or an arrangement, or an invitation to share feedback.
Driving sales and loyalty
Early access and priority periods
An early access window is a powerful way to reward loyalty. You give a specific segment (for example, everyone with more than three purchases in the past two years) the opportunity to buy tickets before the general sale opens. Loyal visitors feel recognised, and you secure your first wave of sales before the campaign pressure begins.
Discounts, vouchers and promo codes
Ticketmatic offers a comprehensive set of sales promotions:
Measuring impact
Dashboards
Ticketmatic provides dashboards per contact, order, event and individual ticket. They automatically adjust to the filters and selections you have set, giving you quick access to the numbers that matter to you. Think sales volumes per channel, new customers per event or transaction value per segment.
Linking campaign results to purchases
How many marketers send a campaign email and simply hope for the best? If you use the built-in email marketing tool, you can afterwards create a selection in ticketmatic of everyone who clicked a link in a campaign and then bought a ticket. This connects communication to behaviour, so you know what actually converts.
Reports and exports
Alongside the dashboards, standard reports are available that combine data from different tables: contacts, orders, events and tickets. A dedicated report with email metrics exists specifically for the email marketing tool. Want to analyse the data further? In addition to exports, our Studio team can build custom integrations with tools such as Power BI or Google Data Studio.
Ticketmatic as part of your ecosystem
Integration with your website
Ticketmatic integrates directly with your website so visitors can click through to purchase without friction. This lowers the barrier, increases the likelihood of conversion, and ensures that all purchase data flows automatically into ticketmatic.
Branding and visual identity
The look and feel of your ticketing experience is a marketing choice in itself. In ticketmatic, you manage the branding of your online sales environment, your ticket layouts and your order and service emails. Layouts can be dynamic: for example, you can vary the colour or design of tickets based on the genre of the show.
Integrations with external tools
Already working with specific tools, or do other teams in your organisation have their own systems? Ticketmatic connects with a wide range of external systems:
- Mailing platforms (Mailchimp, CM, Brevo, ...)
- Reporting and BI tools (Power BI, Google Data Studio)
- External CRM
- Financial tools such as accounting software
- Planning tools
Our team will guide you through setting up those connections.
Going further with ticketmatic Studio
Everything covered in this article is available within the standard ticketmatic platform. But for organisations with more specific ambitions, there is an additional layer on top: ticketmatic Studio.
Studio makes it possible to build custom functionality directly into the ticketmatic environment. Think of a personalised self-service environment where visitors manage their own tickets, vouchers and purchase history, a loyalty programme with tailored points and benefits, advanced integrations with external systems, or dashboards and reports fully aligned with the internal workings of the organisation.
A real-world example: Self-service: putting your audience in control. Den Atelier and Theater 't Mozaïek gave their visitors a personal online environment, saving themselves work while strengthening their audience relationships at the same time.
The possibilities are virtually unlimited. Our team is happy to help you find the solution that works for your organisation.
The bigger picture
Ticketmatic combines insight and action in one platform. On one hand, it gives you a detailed picture of your audience: who comes, how often, across which genres, and at what stage of the lifecycle they find themselves. On the other hand, you have the tools to act on those insights, including a built-in email marketing tool, configurable discounts, vouchers and priority periods, dashboards and a mobile app.
Organisations that put these tools to work can pursue their marketing goals with greater focus and measure what actually drives results. This makes ticketmatic not just the system you use to sell tickets, but the platform you use to build your audience.
Curious how ticketmatic can strengthen your specific marketing operation? Get in touch with our team.
Already a ticketmatic customer and keen to learn more about the marketing features? Reach out to your contact in the Customer Success team — we are happy to organise a marketing training session for your team.
What marketers say
"I find building a selection of visitors in ticketmatic incredibly easy. And if something is ever missing, I just ask, and a new filter gets added. That way I can reach exactly the visitors I want to reach. When it comes to segmentation, you really are very flexible with ticketmatic."
Rio van der Oest, Marketer, Het Nationale Theater, The Hague
Read the full Het Nationale Theater case study
"I am very happy with the ordering process in ticketmatic. I sometimes visit other theatres and cinemas and I am not always impressed by what I see there. Then I think: we really have this sorted."
Karlijn Gerritsen, Head of Marketing, Verkadefabriek, 's-Hertogenbosch
Read the full Verkadefabriek case study
"We are very satisfied with the app. It runs well. We also use it to give extra visibility to our partners."
Bert Vanlaere, Marketing Director, Concertgebouw Brugge, Bruges
Read the full Concertgebouw Brugge case study
"I think it is great that ticketmatic fulfils so many different needs. Customer relations, marketing data, the sales flow: everything within the same platform."
Sébastien Collet, Marketing and Communications Coordinator, den Atelier, Luxembourg
Read the full den Atelier case study
