CASE STUDY
Busch Gardens Tampa Bay Increases Interactivity and Engagement with Liveclicker
About SeaWorld and Busch Gardens SeaWorld Parks & Entertainment™ is a leading theme park and entertainment company providing experiences that matter and inspiring guests to protect animals and the wild wonders of our world. The company is one of the world’s foremost zoological organizations and a global leader in animal welfare, training, husbandry, and veterinary care.
The company owns or licenses a portfolio of recognized brands including SeaWorld, Busch Gardens® and Sea Rescue®. Over its more than 50-year history, the company has built a diversified portfolio of 12 destination and regional theme parks that are grouped in key markets across the United States. The company’s theme parks feature a diverse array of rides, shows and other attractions with broad demographic appeal which deliver memorable experiences and a strong value proposition for its guests.
An Email Challenge Busch Gardens Tampa Bay began working with Liveclicker in 2017 and utilizes several of the company’s advanced experience elements, including LiveTimer, LiveSlides, LiveImages and LiveReveal. Specifically, the theme park company was looking for a better way to promote its annual Food & Wine Festival, which is one of the company’s biggest events. More specifically, Busch Gardens needed an effective way to communicate complex information in a fun, interactive, and engaging way.
It was such a challenge because the festival spans many weeks and features 18 different concerts from world-class artists and entertainers. Traditional email marketing approaches made it difficult to convey
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so much information, or give guests interactive options to learn more about a particular concert or purchase tickets. As a result, Busch Gardens suspected it wasn’t generating as much interest in the festival as it hoped.
LiveCalendar Improves Relevance – and Results
Fortunately, Liveclicker’s RealTime Email platform and advanced experience elements gave Busch Gardens an effective edge in its email marketing efforts.
Busch Gardens created a new series of emails using Liveclicker’s LiveCalendar element. The email helped generate more attention for all concerts, while enabling recipients to add a particular concert to their personal calendar. LiveCalendar was easily integrated into Busch Gardens’ email templates and supported the need for scalability – key in helping the company offer this functionality for each of the 18 concerts.
The official campaign kicked off with a first email that announced the entire concert lineup with a call-to-action (CTA) for recipients to add their favorites directly to their calendars. The calendar notification included information about the artists, general festival information, a link to buy tickets, and upgrade options to reserve concert seating. From there, follow-up emails – 7 total – promoted each specific concert and offered the “add to calendar” option to let guests add these events to their own calendar.
For Busch Gardens, Liveclicker and the LiveCalendar element were the perfect fit. This innovative tool enabled them to improve the way they promoted the full concert offering and easily let recipients choose the artists that they were most interested in. The modular design of the email allowed Busch Gardens to utilize the elements again and again throughout the entire event. Additionally, Busch Gardens was able to retarget guests who added a particular artist to their calendar with more personalized information, such as a weekly concert reminder along with a CTA to purchase their seats and get their Festival Sampler.
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Success of the overall campaign was measured based on the number of guests who added an artist to their calendar and the revenue from both the initial campaign and the retargeting reminder emails. The LiveCalendar element contributed to a great user experience for Busch Gardens’ guests while communicating a long list of artists in a way that wasn’t overwhelming. The overall click-through rate beat the company’s average by more than 150 percent. In fact, this new email campaign was so successful, it became the “control” template for other SeaWorld parks and companies to promote similar events.
• Click-through rate beat Busch Gardens’ average by 150%
• The LiveCalendar element contributed to a much more engaging user experience
• This campaign became the new template for other parks to replicate for similar events
“We wanted to incorporate About RealTime Email more interactivity into our email Leading brands choose Liveclicker’s RealTime campaigns, not only to increase Email solution to drive message engagement, personalization and relevance, conversions and sales. The intuitive platform but also to make our emails as leverages real-time data from multiple sources so that marketers can deliver truly personalized fun and engaging as possible. content, simply and at scale. Liveclicker’s Liveclicker’s features were exactly flexible integration architecture, rich partner what we needed and very easy ecosystem and extensive email expertise help clients execute highly relevant email marketing to integrate. All of our regional programs that respond to each recipient’s marketing teams now use constantly changing personal context. Liveclicker, including the Busch Gardens Tampa team, and we’ve been extremely happy clients.”
– Ana Warner, Senior Manager, CRM & Email
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