The Canadian Opera Company
The Situation:
How do you improve your customer’s online experience with your brand when you don’t know who your online customers are? The Canadian Opera Company (COC) knew its website needed to change, but the organization was lacking information about its online customers. The company didn’t know where to begin.
What it did know was that the website didn’t support the COC’s overall business goals: to drive subscriptions and donations. The COC wanted a site that could meet its customers’ needs while extending the opera experience into an online environment.
The Solution:
Using the Digital Mosaic, as well as data gathered through audience feedback and interviews, Delvinia determined that there are two key COC customer groups sharing a few key characteristics: time-starved professionals interested in a more efficient online experience, and socially-inclined city dwellers looking for a more engaging, interactive online experience.
Despite being technologically savvy, less than 20% of the COC audience were transacting online.
With this in mind, Delvinia developed an overall digital strategy for the COC that would empower more customers to use the website to transact, to increase engagement through more interactive features, and to increase user satisfaction.
The website experience was redesigned to save time, make it easier to buy tickets and subscriptions, and to find information about performances. Layered on top of a sensible re-architecture and clean re-design were enhanced site components created in Flash to tell stories, encourage conversation, and deepen the relationship with the digital audience.
The Results:
Delvinia has touched and transformed every aspect of the COC’s digital presence. Since its relaunch in January 2009, we’ve seen great things happen:
- Online sales increased 30%, and COC.ca became the primary channel for single ticket purchase
- Website bounce rates decreased from 56% to 26% in the same period, proving that users are more engaged with content and can easily navigate toward their intended goals
- Email subscribers increased by 30%
- Clickthrough rates increased 10% overall
The Evolution:
The launch of the Canadian Opera Company’s new brand in early 2011 provided the perfect opportunity to refresh the website by incorporating strategic improvements rooted in an understanding of the digital behaviours of the COC’s audience and the key performance indicators built into the site in 2009.
Through the collection of more than two years of transactional data and behavioural insights from Delvinia’s proprietary AskingCanadians™ online research community, we were able to determine which features of the site were performing well.
Based on that data, we designed a new homepage with prominent links to purchase tickets and online subscriptions, as well as tabs directing visitors to information about upcoming operas, the blog and what’s happening behind the scenes. The site also integrates more content-rich imagery, designed to match the confidence of the new brand while illustrating the essence of operatic theatre.
Based on Delvinia’s knowledge of the opera customer, and through continued measurement analysis, we continue to provide COC customers with content and tools to engage and activate.