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CASE STUDY: MARKETING

Personalized Email Marketing for Events and Subscription Growth


How Arizona Theatre Company worked collaboratively to increase engagement through audience segmentation and personalized digital marketing

Phoenix & Tucson, Arizona
Arizona Theatre Company logo, showing stencilled white letters ATC on a black background

Arizona Theatre Company

Theatre
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SWITCHED FROM PATRONMANAGER IN 2024

Challenge

Arizona Theatre Company needed to deliver relevant messaging to audiences in two separate cities, while building stronger long-term audience relationships.

Solution

Using dynamic content, email automation, and audience segmentation, marketing and patron services teams worked together to create more personalized audience journeys and connected subscription campaigns.

Outcome

ATC achieved strong engagement and revenue growth through more targeted campaigns and connected audience data, including:

  • A Black Friday “Buy More, Save More” campaign that sold 944 tickets and generated nearly $70,000 -  over 5x higher than the previous year’s discount offer.

  • Six months on, a follow-up campaign is delivering targeted content to those repeat visitors, inviting them to subscribe to the new season with positive results.

  • A Meta ads campaign targeting lookalike audiences is successfully attracting new high-value patrons to the theatre.

A Black male performer leads an ensemble in thirties style dress, in an ad for Ain't Misbehaving at Arizona Theatre Company

Arizona Theatre Company is the only professional statewide theatre company in the US, producing performances in both Phoenix and Tucson. Operating across two cities more than 100 miles apart, the organization delivers productions and audience experiences across distinct markets while maintaining one connected operation behind the scenes.

Nicholas Kuhn, Marketing Manager at Arizona Theatre Company, explained how the team collaborates across sites to plan and deliver effective campaigns, using targeted email marketing for event ticket sales, closer audience relationships, and long-term subscription growth.

Building more relevant audience journeys using dynamic content in emails

For ATC, personalization began as a practical necessity. Productions open at different times in Phoenix and Tucson, meaning audience members in each city need different dates, messaging, and calls to action. 


Today, the team segments patrons based on city, purchase history, subscriber status, and engagement. This ensures that every audience member receives content that reflects both where they’re based across the state of Arizona, and where they are in their relationship with the organization.

That means subscriber communications are treated differently from promotional sales emails. While many campaigns focus on driving transactions from non-ticket holders, Arizona Theatre Company also creates tailored content specifically for subscribers to deepen loyalty and maintain engagement between productions. They might even share the same behind-the-scenes footage with both groups, but package it differently for each segment.
“The more specific our audience is and the more specific the language to that audience is, the better received the message is. We see higher open rates, higher click rates — everything."

Nicholas Kuhn

Marketing Manager
Screenshot of a Black Friday email sent by Arizona Theatre Company, encouraging patrons to save by booking for multiple events.

For Black Friday 2024, ATC ran a traditional discount offer and sold 168 tickets. A year later they decided to try something different.

The 2025 “Buy More, Save More” campaign rewarded audience members for purchasing tickets to multiple productions. A 5-email program ran from November 24 to December 12, checking customers’ purchase history before each email was sent. If the customer had purchased a ticket, they were removed from the program. If they had not purchased yet, the next email was sent to them.

The campaign sold 944 tickets and generated nearly $70,000 in revenue - almost 6x higher than the previous year. And beyond those immediate transactions, it created a new segment of regular attenders with potential to subscribe for the 2026-27 season.

Targeted email campaigns successfully promoted the launch of new season subscriptions in the spring, using purchase history and engagement data to personalize messaging even further. Rather than a standalone sales promotion, the Black Friday offer became the first step in a longer-term subscriber journey.
“People who purchased tickets to two, three, or four productions became the lowest-hanging fruit for subscription campaigns. We could say, ‘You already bought four of the five shows – why not become a subscriber?’"

Nicholas Kuhn

Marketing Manager

Cross-department collaboration helps campaigns succeed across two cities

Arizona Theatre Company’s marketing strategy depends as much on collaboration as it does on technology.

Marketing Manager Nicholas Kuhn works closely with Director of Patron Services, Juliet Martin, and Director of Marketing, Bitty Rosenberg, to plan campaigns, segment audiences, and align messaging across departments and locations.

Together, they ensure that audience members receive consistent, compelling communications, that they’re collectively meeting revenue goals, and that every member of their team can reinforce that personalized messaging.

“The three of us are the brain trust around how all of this works. We’re always very careful to loop in our patron services team, so when emails are going out and specific deals are launching, everyone understands what’s happening and how to support it.”

Their strategy is rooted in clean, connected audience data in their Spektrix CRM, and the ease with which that can drive email and digital communications through Dotdigital. From zipcode data to custom tags, this unified view makes it easy to segment, report, and highlight customer information. For a statewide organization operating across two cities, it’s the key to operating as one connected team.

Using audience data and lookalike advertising to improve campaign performance

After participating in a Spektrix-led Meta advertising workshop, the ATC team began testing high-value Spektrix lookalike audiences alongside its existing subscriber campaigns.

By starting with a list of their existing high spenders, they could identify “lookalike” audiences in Facebook and Instagram, and target their ads to people with similar interests and behaviors.

Early results have significantly outperformed expectations across every major metric.

“The Spektrix high-value lookalike audience is already outperforming all our other audience segments on Meta ads. The return on ad spend is through the roof.”

That work is built on the same connected audience data that powers ATC’s email marketing for events. Automated digital marketing programs deliver both ads and emails on cue, building brand recognition and nudging them towards conversion.

As soon as they buy a ticket, they’re excluded from both emails and ads – protecting the marketing budget, and maintaining patrons’ sense that they’re on a continual, personalized journey that’s reflected in everything they read and see.
A Facebook and Instagram ad for Ain' Misbehavin, the Fats Waller musical show, at Arizona Theatre Company.
“We're always taking into consideration the visual journey we want our prospective customers to take. As people are served our ads online and receive an email maybe a day or two later, they're seeing the same things. It creates a clear brand identity for us."

Nicholas Kuhn

Marketing Manager

Arizona Theatre Company’s story shows how email marketing for events can grow into a comprehensive marketing strategy.

The further we get along and the more native historical Spektrix data we have, the easier we find a lot of this to do.”
Nicholas Kuhn, Marketing Manager

With Spektrix and Dotdigital powering audience data, email marketing, and digital advertising from one shared foundation, ATC can deliver more relevant experiences for patrons, deliver against revenue goals, and build long-term resilience.

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