What if every patron was a segment of one?

There are people in your database you want to see again.

The first-timer who hasn't made a second visit. The once-before buyer you haven't seen this season. The regular attender whose relationship with you is starting to go stale.

You probably already know who many of them are. The harder part is knowing what to invite them to next, and finding the time to do that in a way that feels relevant to each person.

That's the challenge we built TRG Recommendations Engine to help solve.

Watch back: First Look at TRG Recommendations Engine

In our recent live session, TRG's Christina Hill and Stuart Nicolle took us inside Recommendations Engine and the thinking behind it.

Watch back to explore:

• Why getting the next visit matters, and what we know about the relationship between recency, frequency and retention.
• How Recommendations Engine works, using what you already know about a patron's attendance to make their next invitation more relevant.
• What we're learning so far, including early results from organizations using Recommendations Engine with first-time, once-before, stale and lapsed audiences.

From segments to individuals

Segmentation is an important part of understanding your audience. It tells us where someone is in their relationship with you and helps us decide what we want them to do next. But there is a practical limit to what you can actually deliver in any given week.

You might have thousands of first-timers you want to bring back. They're at the same stage of the relationship, but they're not all interested in the same thing. Recommendations Engine helps close that gap.

It looks at what an individual has attended before and identifies the upcoming events they're most likely to respond to. That means two people in the same audience segment can receive the same campaign, but see completely different recommendations.

The strategy remains the same: who are we trying to move, and what behavior are we trying to change?

Recommendations Engine makes it possible to get much more personal about the invitation.

What results are we seeing so far?

We're testing Recommendations Engine with organizations across different audiences and use cases. Early results are encouraging.

• At New York City Ballet, first-time buyers receiving Recommendations Engine emails converted at 2.6%, compared with 1.7% in the control group, a 53% lift. The test generated approximately $19,000 in incremental revenue.

• At New York City Center, campaigns targeting once-before, stale and lapsed audiences generated approximately $82,000 in incremental revenue between December and April.

• At 54 Below, stale patron booking rates increased by 33%. Across several audience segments, Recommendations Engine generated approximately $100,000 in incremental revenue during its first year.

For us, the important measure isn't whether an email gets more clicks. It's whether more people come back.

More relevant invitations, without more manual work

The opportunity with Recommendations Engine isn't just to send more email. It's to make the communications you're already sending work harder.

Recommendations Engine can help teams act on first-time, once-before, stale and lapsed audiences without manually building individual campaigns and recommendations for thousands of people.

Your team still decides who you want to reach, what you want to say and what relationship you're trying to build. Recommendations Engine helps make the invitation itself more relevant to the person receiving it.

Who do you want to come back?

That's a good place to start.

Look at the relationships in your audience today. Where are people dropping away? Where could one more visit make a difference? And what gets in the way of your team acting on that opportunity consistently?

Recommendations Engine is one way we're helping organizations turn that audience knowledge into action, at a scale that hasn't previously been practical.

Want to explore what this could look like for your audience?