How AdHoc Presents Grew Their Audience by 93%

Ric Leichtung co-founded AdHoc Presents with a mission: to give a platform to overlooked musical artists and underserved communities. AdHoc began as a music publication, evolved into a concert promoter that produces events in New York City, Detroit, and Raleigh, and now they even operate their own creative marketing agency.

In the beginning, AdHoc used Mailchimp to inform their readers about upcoming concerts and generate traffic to their website. Once they started promoting concerts, they also used Eventbrite to sell tickets and get the word out. But it wasn’t until Marketing Manager Morgan Schaffner joined the team in 2017 that AdHoc took advantage of Mailchimp’s Eventbrite integration and started using their audience data to target people in strategic new ways.

The challenge: Growing outside their own backyard

From the very beginning, AdHoc understood the importance of providing exciting, relevant content to their audience. And as they started exploring ways to expand their business, they knew they needed to find a way to facilitate growth while keeping their community-first ethos intact.

“As we began to see the opportunity for growth, AdHoc's survival hinged on an unwavering commitment to servicing our community, constant experimentation, rigorous comparative analysis, and how well we used the few tools that we had access to,” Morgan explained. “We started testing new ideas, especially on the marketing front. Analyzing all the results. Trying to develop strategies that can be applied to other places and workflows that can be tried and true.”

The tools: Mailchimp tags and Eventbrite integration

In order for AdHoc to grow their business and strengthen the connection with their community, they needed tools that would allow them to keep track of all their contact and purchase data in one convenient location. By utilizing tags and Mailchimp’s Eventbrite integration, they were able to do just that.

“The Eventbrite integration in Mailchimp has been huge for us,” says Morgan. “Anyone who buys a ticket to an AdHoc show and opts in to our emails is automatically added to our Mailchimp account. It saves us countless hours of work every week. And not only is that information getting pulled into our system, it's tagged in really strategic ways with genres and past show information.”

AdHoc organizes audiences by location, then uses Eventbrite data and Mailchimp tags to help them keep track of fans of specific genres and folks who have purchased tickets to see an artist in the past. Tags allow AdHoc to bring identifying information they've already established in Eventbrite directly into the Mailchimp Marketing CRM, saving them a lot of time and making it easy to target segments of their audience. That way, they can keep people informed about the stuff that matters most to them. “Mailchimp’s Eventbrite integration helps us send personalized messages to our audience seamlessly.”

Once AdHoc connected the Eventbrite integration to Mailchimp and started using Marketing CRM tools, they found that sending targeted emails to fans of specific artists or genres became a whole lot easier. Their open and click rates improved steadily over the course of a year and a half, and since contact information was automatically synced from Eventbrite to Mailchimp as folks bought tickets, their audience grew quickly, too. In fact, 95% of their New York audience, 96% of their Michigan audience, and 99% of their North Carolina audience came directly from Mailchimp’s Eventbrite integration.

“Mailchimp lets us really dig deep when it comes to tag-based segmentation, testing new email templates, and reaching our audience in strategic ways,” Morgan says. “Mailchimp is not just a tool. It's a teacher. It's a launchpad for any business owner. All we needed was common sense and an invested interest to learn.”