This sheet explores the principle of automation and opportunities it presents for your marketing strategy relationship.
Your relationship strategy with your audiences involves numerous actions aimed at engaging and retaining them. However, your human resources are limited, and your teams must manage a wide variety of tasks. It therefore becomes relevant to automate part of your communication actions directed at the public.
Automation in relational marketing involves setting up automated communications tailored to the behavior and data of your audience members, complementing other communications carried out throughout the year. These relationship-building actions are designed as a whole and span the entire cycle of engagement with your audience. They help lighten the workload of your teams while strengthening the connection with your publics.
Referring to the different categories of emails described in the related overview (see the guide "What is the difference between emailing, newsletter, and transactional email?"), automation falls under the emailing category and, as such, requires personalized content.
Automation offers several key advantages for cultural venues:
1 - It enhances and enriches the relational content sent to audiences:
> Automated content reaches people based on pre-established, controlled criteria and cycles, eliminating the risk of oversights due to team workload.
> This creates a continuous and smooth relationship with the audience without constant manual intervention.
2 - It allows better management of time and resources:
> Automated content frees up time for teams to focus on non-repetitive tasks.
> Teams can thus concentrate their talent and effort on creating the remaining content.
3 - It optimizes the spectator experience:
> Through useful reminders before events-access conditions, on-site services-which can qualify as transactional emails.
> Via additional content that extends the experience after the event-such as interviews, playlists, etc.
> With personalized messages in case of audience disengagement-no recent purchase, no newsletter opens for several months, and so on.
Several elements are necessary for deploying an effective automation strategy, both conceptually and organizationally, as well as technically.
Organizational prerequisites:
Technical prerequisites:
Do not underestimate the importance of allocating human resources in the period following the responses to automated content: it is the post-product analysis that will determine the potential increase in spectator engagement rate downstream of the received support, thus the quality of the strategy.
Salomé Schönau
A relational scenario (also called an automated scenario or marketing automation scenario) is a message or sequence of messages automatically sent to the spectator following an action they take or an event concerning them - these are marketing triggers. Throughout the entire cycle of the relationship with the spectator, there are many occasions that warrant setting up automated messages to engage, nurture, or re-engage your audience.
Rights reserved: Diagram from matthieu-tranvan.fr illustrating the customer relationship lifecycle
Some examples of trigger marketing in performing arts:
> Around the event:
- Before:
- After:
> Loyalty and reactivation:
- Automated reminders:
The main limitations concerning automation are technical, notably due to the limited interoperability between ticketing tools, emailing platforms, and CRMs on which these approaches rely. You can only go as far as your tools allow you to connect their systems. It is therefore essential to verify if your current tools, or those you plan to acquire, are compatible with each other and to what extent. Use cases can serve as a very good method to evaluate this interoperability (see dedicated sheet).
Regarding the strategy itself, as mentioned in the sheet dedicated to emailing strategies, moderation must remain the guiding principle of your efforts, and you must strictly respect the capping set for your mailings to avoid over-soliciting your audience base and thus causing disengagement.
Finally, even if messages are automated, it is important to humanize them. Ideally, a real person should be the sender, embodying this relational channel and able to respond to spectators if needed.
You can also use a generic email, carefully signing it in an identifiable way, according to the level of proximity matching your positioning: "the ticket office team," "the theatre team," "Mary, Albert, and Alfonso," etc. We strongly advise against creating a fake profile for these sendings-as has been experienced-because spectators could feel betrayed if they found out.
Lastly, if a conversational agent (AI, chatbot) is responding, it is important that this be clearly stated. A committed cultural brand must reflect its mission and values authentically and coherently.
> Technical limitations:
- Difficulties arise if systems (ticketing, CRM, emailing) do not communicate with each other.
- It is important to verify software compatibility to ensure smooth data flow.
- Automation should be integrated into specifications when selecting new tools.
> Strategic points of attention:
- Avoid sending too many messages to prevent recipient fatigue.
- Design emails to be clear, concise, and relevant.
- Basic automations in some tools (e.g., ticketing) may limit personalization.
- Prefer advanced emailing solutions for better content customization.
The key is to first have in-house expertise to manage and automate the tools effectively. There needs to be a dedicated person overseeing the workflows, otherwise the automation will fail. So, the challenge of automation is less about the tool itself and more about the person who manages and drives the tools and automation processes.
Juliette Tissot-Vidal
Explorez le sujet en quatre grandes rubriques dédiées au spectacle vivant, depuis la compréhension des enjeux jusqu'au pilotage stratégique.
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