Ticketek Increases Sales per Order by 49% Using Amazon Personalize

Ticketek has been operating for 40 years, selling 30 million tickets annually. In 2020, Ticketek worked with Snowflake, an AWS Partner, to build a new data warehouse in the cloud for centralized access to customer data. The company set out to maximize the value of its data by using it to highlight performances that people would most likely enjoy based on customer engagement behavior. “Having the right type of communication with our customers was really important for directing them to events that they would want to attend,” says Oakes.

To deliver this project, Ticketek teams met with AWS to move from strategy to implementation. Within 2 days, the company had a complete pipeline that preps and transforms Ticketek’s data and makes it available for use by the Amazon Personalize service. Three months later, Ticketek had a complete personalization solution that takes data from the Snowflake data warehouse and uses Amazon Personalize to generate batch recommendations showing the events that individual subscribers would most likely want to attend.

To implement recommendations in newsletters, AWS integrated Amazon Personalize with intuitive customer engagement solution capabilities from Braze, also an AWS Partner. With those two solutions working in tandem, Amazon Personalize deploys ML algorithms to analyze its customer data and gain insights into customer preferences. The company now implements Amazon Personalize recommendations into Braze newsletter emails sent to customers around the world. “Our Braze marketing solution and the data warehouse are mirrored in the different marketplaces that we’re in, which saves us time and money because we don’t need to build out our own infrastructure,” says Chris Johnston, General Manager at Ticketek.

Because Amazon Personalize targets customers more accurately, Ticketek is now giving a greater spotlight to smaller events. With the previous solution, the company primarily highlighted major events in its newsletters because they were more likely to sell out. However, more niche performances were often overlooked. Personalization changes that by matching fans with the events that excite them, no matter how small the events might be. Using Amazon Personalize, Ticketek has increased the diversity of its featured events by 5.2 times, creating opportunities for lesser-known artists to reach new audiences. And sales per email opened have jumped 49 percent with the new solution.

After building out the solution, Ticketek ran A/B tests to assess the performance of the previous newsletter against the personalized newsletter. The results made it clear that ML-powered personalization was a game changer. The click-through conversion rate, which tracks the percentage of people who buy a product after opening an ad or newsletter, shot up by 250 percent after the implementation of Amazon Personalize. “That means we’re actually getting the right products in front of people,” says Oakes. “That is the key to personalization.”

Ticketek delivered these results by using a combination of data technologies behind the scenes. At the end of each day, its Snowflake data warehouse uploads data into the cloud on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)—an object storage solution. From there, Ticketek feeds the data into Amazon Personalize, which generates batch recommendations for each subscriber. The company then uses the workflow between Amazon Personalize and Braze to pull personalized content directly into its newsletter campaigns.

The company aims to completely reframe what personalization can mean for an events business. “It’s about defining personalization,” says Oakes. “It’s not just about giving you targeted advertisements—once you’ve actually purchased an event, we want to engage with you consistently in the right way.” For example, the company wants to share traffic information, parking tips, and weather alerts that will help people safely and comfortably enjoy their event.

Now that Ticketek is recommending more events that people want to see, the company has increased the value of its newsletter for millions of people. Ticketek intends to keep finding ways to improve the customer experience by personalizing its website, mobile app, and text messages. “We want to use personalization throughout the customer journey to help people enjoy events,” says Oakes.

As Ticketek expands its operations into additional Asian markets, it hopes to help fans find performances and events that they’ll love through the power of personalization. “Working alongside AWS was like a shortcut to make sure that we got everybody together to accelerate problem solving,” says Johnston. “Now we’re ready for the next step.”