Real Time Live: "Since joining FIXR, we've attracted more new customers than ever"

From booking events to opening beloved music shops, Real Time Music has been at the heart of Chesterfield's music scene for more than 30 years.

Around 15 years ago, Real Time Live was born – a purpose-built, 200-capacity live music venue in the town centre, hosting gigs every week, all year round.

We spoke with Reece Sanderson, General Manager at Real Time Live, about the venue, and the impact of switching to FIXR for their event ticketing, marketing and analytics.

What kind of events do you run?

As well as private functions and parties, we host gigs for original music, cover bands, and we’ve had a lot of tribute bands, which works well at a venue like ours.

In the last couple of years, we’ve tried to diversify. We have probably been renowned as a rock music venue for a long time, but we've been trying to explore some different things to get a feel for what people want.

The fact that we've got a venue open in this day and age is an absolute blessing. We're here week in, week out, and places are closing all the time. So, we're very grateful for what we've got.

Is Real Time Live well-known in Chesterfield?

It is, but it seems that almost every day somebody new finds us, whether it’s the music shop, venue or both.

In a way I've been part of the Real Time family for a good 15-20 years, regularly visiting the shop back when it was trading on Newbold road. I always felt looked after and it’s been a pleasure to get to know everyone that surrounds it… and now I work here!

Even though we have really well-attended shows and it's been around for many, many years, you still come across people who say it’s their first time here.

Since we joined FIXR about six months ago, we've attracted more new customers than ever.

In conjunction with the work we've done online to reach people, we're pulling more people in than we ever have in terms of new customers. It's going well.

Are there any features of the FIXR platform that you've found particularly useful?

We use the Message Centre a lot. That was a big plus point for us when we first spoke to FIXR.

Our demographic is majority 35 to 55 according to the data – so being able to email them directly [rather than relying on social ads] has been good for us.

It's easy to announce new events to all our followers, and to schedule them as well. I often work on the wrong side of the clock, so I'll schedule an announcement for a more suitable time.

We also use it to promote gigs that need a bit of push, or any that are doing particularly well that we want to highlight.

How was the process of switching platforms?

We had a subscriber pool of about 2600 people from our previous ticketing provider that we transferred across.

One of my major concerns about transferring to a new ticketing platform was whether we’d see an impact customer-wise; would people still go to our previous provider, and would the events be impacted as a result?

We didn't see a negative effect of switching whatsoever; in fact, we’ve actually seen improvement in sales.

Has anything else improved since making the switch to FIXR?

Trying to get analytics from our previous ticketing platform was sometimes difficult. I had to manually request it from them via email.

It’s much easier now because it just shows me on the dashboard how things have changed from the week before, whether that's financials or customer-based data.

We now get data that we can actually work with, as opposed to shooting in the dark.

Before FIXR, we had a website that was just a landing page that linked out to our previous ticketing provider. I wanted to spruce up the website anyway, so in conjunction with that revamp, we implemented the FIXR Ticket Shop.

First of all, it looks better, more professional.

Things need to be easy to make a sale, and you guys offer that with the Ticket Shop, Apple Pay, and the PayPal Pay in 3 option – people want to buy a higher volume of tickets, often for a group night out or a work’s party

I put a lot of pride into our events. I create a lot of the posters, we distribute flyers in the local area, and we put flyers in the shops – we really go for it. Then we do all the online stuff as well – and FIXR makes it easy to sell tickets.

I’d like to say we are doing our absolute best to promote our events, and so do the acts we work with – it’s always a team effort. Sadly not all shows get the attendance they deserve, but if we can confidently say we’ve done everything we can to promote it, I have no regrets.

On behalf of our shop, our tutors and venue, I want to say a massive thank you to everyone that has supported Real Time - we wouldn’t be here without you. We’re far from done – here’s to another 30 years of music!

Check out all of Real Time Live's upcoming events here

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