Price promotions
'We tend to use price promotions sparingly and for particular identified groups.
We, like many other contemporary dance companies, do not have a particularly loyal audience and we therefore find a lot of first-time attenders who then ultimately become lapsed attenders. We have had a reasonable amount of success when offering these two groups an incentive (ie [gpb]5 off a pair of the top two ticket prices). The income generated always exceeds the costs.
Although a significant proportion of our audience books during the week of the performances, we tend to find that last minute offers do not have a huge impact on numbers - email offers scoring very badly indeed.
In the past, we have also tried advance offers to particular groups ie students when touring to university cities - this has proved expensive, as dedicated print and distribution has been organised, and the return has been dismal.'