How deCoste Connected Ticketing and Marketing to Drive Audience Growth

One audience. Multiple systems. Countless manual tasks.

For the team at deCoste Performing Arts Centre, marketing wasn’t limited by creativity; it was limited by disconnected technology. Ticketing, customer data and marketing lived in separate systems, making it difficult to personalize communications, measure marketing performance and understand what was driving ticket sales.

By connecting Audience Republic with AudienceView, deCoste created a unified workflow that brings together customer data, ticketing and marketing. The result: more personalized audience engagement, greater operational efficiency and clear visibility into marketing’s impact on revenue.

“The part that sold our Executive Director was seeing the revenue from that particular email.”

— Jennifer MacLennan, Outreach & Fund Development Manager, deCoste Performing Arts Centre

Background

A Small Team Focused on Building Community

Located in Pictou, Nova Scotia, deCoste Performing Arts Centre serves as an important cultural hub for its community, presenting concerts, theatre, family programming, community events and rentals throughout the year.

Like many regional arts organizations, the team wears many hats. Jennifer MacLennan’s role spans outreach, fundraising and marketing, requiring her to balance audience engagement with day-to-day operational demands.

As programming expanded and audiences became more diverse, the organization wanted to build stronger relationships with patrons through more relevant, personalized communications. But disconnected systems and manual processes made that increasingly difficult.

The challenge

Disconnected Systems Limited Audience Engagement

Before implementing Audience Republic, deCoste managed ticketing and marketing through separate platforms.

While AudienceView housed patron and ticketing information, marketing campaigns were managed separately, requiring staff to manually export audience lists, upload contacts and reconcile reporting across multiple systems.

The process consumed valuable staff time and created unnecessary complexity.

More importantly, it limited the team’s ability to fully understand audience behaviour.

Without connected customer data, building personalized campaigns requires significant manual effort. Segmenting audiences, targeting communications, and understanding campaign performance often meant piecing together information from multiple sources.

Perhaps the greatest challenge was proving marketing’s business impact.

Open rates and click-throughs provided useful engagement metrics, but they didn’t answer the question leadership cared about most:

Did our marketing actually sell tickets?

“With Mailchimp previously, you literally had to create your list and upload it, and a lot of times we would run into issues between the two. They weren’t syncing as well as they should.”

The Solution

One Connected Platform leads to Connected Audiences

By adopting Audience Republic as AudienceView’s integrated marketing solution, deCoste brought together ticketing, customer data and marketing into a single connected workflow.

Instead of manually building lists for every campaign, audience segments are now created using live patron data, including purchase history, attendance, engagement, and customer attributes.

Marketing campaigns can be personalized based on real audience behaviour rather than static mailing lists, allowing the team to deliver more relevant communications throughout the customer journey.

Campaign creation has also become significantly more efficient.

Using Audience Republic’s drag-and-drop builder, staff can quickly create branded emails while automatically pulling event information—including dates, images and ticket links—directly from AudienceView.

Automated customer journeys, dynamic audience segments, and integrated SMS capabilities allow the organization to engage patrons at the right time without increasing manual workload.

Most importantly, because marketing and ticketing now operate together within the AudienceView ecosystem, every campaign can be measured against ticket revenue, providing leadership with a clear understanding of marketing performance.

The Results

Less Administration. More Audience Engagement.

By eliminating manual exports and disconnected workflows, deCoste has significantly reduced the administrative effort required to execute marketing campaigns.

Instead of spending time preparing audience lists and managing multiple systems, the team can focus on creating meaningful audience experiences.

“It saves so much time because everything is already there.”

Marketing That Delivers Measurable Business Impact

Connecting marketing directly to ticketing data has fundamentally changed how deCoste measures success.

Rather than relying solely on email metrics, the organization can now see exactly how campaigns contribute to ticket sales.

One holiday campaign alone generated nearly $11,000 in ticket revenue, giving the team—and leadership—clear evidence of marketing’s business impact.

Additional campaigns consistently generated between $1,000 and $3,000 in ticket sales, while targeted marketing helped support a 35% increase in membership sales following the launch of a new tiered membership program.

“The part that sold our Executive Director was seeing the revenue from that particular email. We didn’t have to cross-reference Mailchimp with ticket sales anymore.”

A More Connected View of Every Patron

Beyond campaign performance, Audience Republic has given deCoste a more complete understanding of its audience.

By bringing together customer profiles, ticket purchases, and engagement history, the team can create more relevant communications based on patron interests and behaviour.

Looking ahead, deCoste plans to expand its use of marketing automation with personalized welcome journeys, birthday campaigns, SMS messaging and additional audience segmentation—building stronger relationships while continuing to improve operational efficiency.

As AudienceView continues to evolve its Unified Event Commerce Platform, deCoste is well positioned to create increasingly connected audience experiences powered by a single, trusted source of customer data.

Building Stronger Audience Relationships

For arts organizations, audience engagement extends far beyond individual ticket sales. It is about creating meaningful relationships that encourage patrons to return, become members, support fundraising initiatives, and advocate for the organization within their communities.

By connecting ticketing, customer data and marketing through a unified platform, deCoste has moved beyond managing campaigns to building long-term audience relationships.

With a lean team and growing programming, the organization now has the tools to better understand its patrons, personalize every interaction, and confidently measure marketing’s contribution to organizational success.

For deCoste Performing Arts Centre, marketing is no longer disconnected from the customer journey—it’s an integrated part of it.

Summary: Before and After

Before	After
Ticketing and marketing operated separately	Ticketing, customer data and marketing work together in one connected platform
Manual audience exports and uploads	Live audience synchronization
Generic email campaigns	Personalized audience engagement
Limited visibility into campaign performance	Revenue attribution tied directly to marketing activity
Time spent managing systems	Time spent building audience relationships
Disconnected customer data	A complete view of every patron

Summary

THE CHALLENGE

• Ticketing and marketing operated in separate systems, creating manual work and disconnected customer data.
• Marketing campaigns required exporting, cleaning and uploading audience lists before every send.
• Limited visibility into campaign performance made it difficult to understand marketing’s contribution to ticket revenue.
• Staff needed a more efficient way to personalize communications while better understanding audience behaviour.

THE SOLUTION

• Connected ticketing, customer data and marketing through AudienceView and Audience Republic.
• Automated audience synchronization and segmentation using live patron data.
• Simplified campaign creation with integrated event content and reusable templates.
• Enabled personalized email and SMS marketing supported by automated customer journeys.
• Connected marketing performance directly to ticket revenue through integrated reporting.

THE RESULTS

• Reduced manual administration and simplified campaign management.
• Nearly $11,000 in ticket revenue generated from a single email campaign.
• Marketing campaigns consistently generate measurable ticket sales.
• 35% increase in membership sales following targeted marketing initiatives as part of membership promotions.
• Stronger audience segmentation and more personalized patron engagement.
• Clear visibility into marketing ROI, supporting better business decisions.

Additional metrics to strengthen the story

Growth in automated customer journeys

Number of audience segments created

Hours saved each week

Email engagement improvements

SMS engagement metrics

Marketing-attributed ticket revenue

Membership renewal rates

Repeat attendance

Patron lifetime value