Mastercard Rewards: Driving Theatre Loyalty
“Turning a simple giveaway into a digital product success story with a 44% uplift in sales.”
The Problem
As theatres reopened after the pandemic, the Society of London Theatre (SOLT) and Mastercard wanted to reignite audience engagement and reward loyal customers who had continued to support live performance.
With international tourism still down and theatre often perceived as a luxury experience, we needed a compelling way to increase repeat purchases on OfficialLondonTheatre.com, while ensuring that value stayed within SOLT’s ecosystem.
The challenge was to create a bespoke loyalty promotion offering up to £50,000 in exclusive Theatre Vouchers, delivered seamlessly through existing digital infrastructure, and all within tight budget and development constraints.
The Solution
Working closely with SOLT’s marketing team and our third-party developers, I led the practical delivery of a reward scheme that combined digital innovation with operational efficiency.
We identified the Theatre Tokens eGift platform as the best foundation for the promotion, but quickly uncovered limitations that meant we couldn’t simply “badge” the vouchers as standard Theatre Tokens. To overcome this, we ran a gap analysis and defined a new technical approach:
Created a new voucher type in the Eagle Eye AIR platform, specific to Official London Theatre.
Modified redemption APIs to handle bespoke voucher logic and expiry dates.
Developed a manual bulk-load and distribution process for efficient voucher delivery.
Implemented data protection flags at checkout, enabling users to opt in to the prize draw in compliance with GDPR.
Automated personalised digital vouchers, dynamically populated via Acoustic Campaign using HTML templates with individual voucher details.
This bespoke system allowed us to issue unique digital vouchers to thousands of winners securely, efficiently, and at scale.
From a commercial perspective, the campaign design created a “controlled gambling” reward mechanic, encouraging repeat transactions and boosting overall spend. Because the vouchers had expiry dates, any unredeemed value was reabsorbed into the business, delivering an additional financial benefit.
The Outcome
The campaign delivered a 44% increase in transactions and 15% more tickets sold in September 2021 compared with the same period in 2019.
Beyond immediate sales uplift, the project established a proof of concept for bespoke voucher promotions within the Theatre Tokens network. SOLT now has an adaptable digital mechanism for running future reward or partnership campaigns, and the ability to track voucher usage down to specific productions.
The initiative not only strengthened customer loyalty but also showcased how thoughtful digital product design can deliver measurable commercial impact — benefiting theatre audiences, producers, and sponsors alike.
