The Melbourne Festival offers two types of packages that differ from traditional subscriptions in that they don’t require the same number of seats per performance. At one time, these were complicated to sell, both in the box office and online. Now, Tessitura’s pricing rules make these packages easy to sell through any channel.

David Geoffrey Hall, Head of Marketing at the Festival, discussed the solution to their challenge.

Non-traditional package structure

We offer our audience two package options:

1.  Purchase Adult A Reserve tickets for 3+ productions in one booking and receive 15% off your tickets.

2. Purchase Adult A Reserve tickets for 3+ matinee productions in one booking and pay only $40 per ticket.

Previously, to achieve this on the web, we had to use a pre-cart customisation – it was complicated, required a lot of time to set up and test, and was not flexible if situations changed internally. It worked, but from the moment we implemented it we had been looking for ways to strip it back out. Orders in the client required box office staff to be totally across package inclusions/exclusions in a program that regularly features over 100 different events.

Pricing rules

We now accomplish our package offering through two pricing rule sets, both Product Volume and Price Type Change mode.

1. (15% off if purchasing 3+ productions in one booking) 
   Quite simply, this rule is applied to our Web MOS and looks for 3 or more performances from our eligible performances list, in the appropriate zone and with the Adult price type, and changes the price to the 3+ Discount Package price. We have messaging rules added in at the cart level and in the application to prompt that price has changed.

2. ($40 per ticket when purchasing 3+ matinee productions) 
   Very similar to the above, but with a different set of performances, zones, and price type. The rule changes the price to the Matinee Package price type and has messaging attached. We mix this with a specific MOS so when someone lands in TNEW they only see the eligible matinee performances in the calendar/event listing, to prevent them adding tickets to a performance which is not eligible for the matinee package discount.

Messaging rules

We added in some additional messaging-only rules to assist the customer journey. For example, with our matinee package, we have a message rule that looks for the Premium price type, and displays a messaging saying the Matinee Package discount will only apply to A Reserve tickets.

Saving time

This has saved us an immeasurable amount of time – testing was simple, the functionality was ready to go in TNEW, the messaging made it easier for customers to understand, and we didn’t have to worry about the hard-coded customisation any more. It simply worked! Our box office staff no longer had to manually change price types and assess which performances were eligible for the discount on the fly: it all happens in the order window.

Tracking success

The new Google Tag Manager implementation in TNEW has saved us a lot of time (and money: requesting pixel placement). We feed all e-commerce data into Google Analytics to assist with reporting, and that in turn feeds into Adwords to show us how our campaigns are going.