Background
The challenge
The NEC Group welcomes over four million visitors to its venues and hosts over 900 events each year. Since the opening of the NEC in 1976, the NEC Group has been at the forefront of the live events industry, with a passion for event excellence. Their people and brands connect each part of the live experience through venues, content, services and data - and by utilising their extensive portfolio, the NEC group helps organisers to create the perfect event.
Within its portfolio are three high profile and consumer facing brands:
- The Ticket Factory
- Genting Arena
- Arena Birmingham
Hosting over 150 events annually in both arenas means the group needs to focus on meeting the demands of their event promoters and ensure tickets sell out in a timely manner. The NEC Group's previous system, was very restrictive in creating automated multi-stage campaigns and a single customer view could not be attained to support their CRM strategy.
We have finally been able to achieve our goal: to send personalised communications whilst also ensuring the right customers are notified of events, at the right time.
The Apteco solution
The NEC Group license the Apteco marketing software via their chosen Apteco approved partner CACI. Sitting on top of the single customer view (SCV), developed and hosted by CACI, Apteco FastStats® and Apteco PeopleStage™ are at the heart of the NEC Group's CRM strategy and marketing communications activities.
Apteco FastStats® and Apteco PeopleStage™ supported the CRM objectives for the NEC Group by working with event promoters to bring understanding to complex customer journeys in order to implement relevant, timely and personalised communications that delivered incremental revenue, by selling more tickets, faster
The robust and sustainable platform ensures email communications are smarter, more timely and targeted, which in turn results in higher engagement. The ability to automate complicated customer journeys coming on sale, has also increased.
The impact on the business
Explore some examples of how companies currently benefit from the Apteco marketing software.
Average open rates up from 27% to 48%
The single customer view designed and hosted by the NEC Group's partner CACI, was integrated with the Apteco software and their Email Service Provider, which meant that all customer interactions with the NEC Group could be incorporated and this produced highly targeted prospect selections utilising data held in Apteco FastStats®.
Additional £350k revenue generated
The most efficient aspect of using Apteco FastStats®, for the NEC Group was the ability to score every single customer on the database with a likelihood to buy for the Top 30 events on sale in a specific week with little or no effort after the initial set-up. Analysing previous ticket buyers and examining which customer segments best fit this event.
Extra tour dates booked
Positive feedback from promoters has resulted in extra tour dates for Take That, The Killers, Lady Gaga and Neil Diamond.
Freed up 15% CRM team time
Automated journeys have freed up around 15% of the CRM team time to focus more on analysis and campaign evaluation.
Using the Apteco marketing software has enabled us to reach a point in our marketing strategy that could not have been realised before. We are smarter in our contact strategy and developing journeys has freed up the data teams to complete more campaign analysis, allowing them to make refinements to selections through better targeting and evaluation.