Success Story #4 - the Crocky Trail x Smeetz

Discover how the Crocky Trail scaled up within a very short turnaround and grew its online sales by taking full advantage of a data-driven ticketing solution allowing them to streamline their processes and integrate marketing actions.

‍The Crocky Trail

The Crocky Trail is an adventure park and adventure trail based in Chester, northwest England. It was founded by Edward Walley, a celebrated agricultural machinery inventor in the late 90’s. The Crocky Trail is a leading inventor of physical play games, rides and activities and boasts a portfolio of rides never seen anywhere else in the world before, such as The Superbowl, The UFO, The Giant See Saw and the now classic Titanic. 

Crocky Trail’s mission is to constantly invent innovative new play activities that children can enjoy whilst improving their balance, coordination, self-confidence, endurance, problem solving skills and understanding of science, in a free and liberating environment (ie, not requiring a 10-minute safety introduction lecture). Since 25 years, it has been enjoyed by children who are now grown up and bringing their own children.

‍Covid-19: a call for growth in online sales‍

In 2020 the Crocky Trail found itself faced with the challenge of having to take all of its ticket sales online. However, its existing website and booking systems just couldn't keep up with the scale of this increased demand, resulting in lots of lost sales. The Crocky Trail’s managers needed to start thinking of new strategies to aggressively grow their business.

“This is when we came across Smeetz, a young independent ticketing service supplier who helped us scale up with a very short turnaround and who were there to help us tailor the booking system to our precise needs, to help us streamline the process and improve on our customer experience and integrate the ticketing with our marketing processes." James Walley, owner of the Crocky Trail

The relationship between the Crocky Trail and Smeetz has resulted in record growth for them. Indeed, since they started to use an online booking system 6 years ago, their online sales grew by 800%

“before our online sales were only about 10% of our total revenue stream, now it reaches up to 80-90%.” Rob Kirkwood, Marketing Manager at the Crocky Trail

‍A time to focus on the customer experience‍

It is known that given the number of leisure activities available out there, if the booking process is too complicated the customer will simply book elsewhere. That is why the partnership with the ticketing provider becomes very important. 

“The partnership with the booking provider is essential as it is very easy to outgrow your existing comfortable booking system not realising that there are lots of abandoned carts, that there are lots of frozen pages and you do not get that feedback from the customer. They just decide to book somewhere else.” Rob Kirkwood, Marketing Manager at the Crocky Trail

Moving over to Smeetz, the Crocky Trail did not only increases online sales but also enjoyed the following benefits:

• a faster booking process, 
• an easier booking process, 
• better basket conversions, 
• an increased revenue, 
• a painless purchase of tickets 
  

All of that makes customers happy and smiling as they focus on having fun and do not turn up exasperated because they could not download their tickets. 

“Now customers find it a very slick process, a very quick process, payments are easy, changing and modifying bookings is easy.” Rob Kirkwood, Marketing Manager at the Crocky Trail 

Streamlining the processes with integrated marketing and analytics

How can you trust your ticketing solution if not providing you with actual data about your audience? You cannot. Smeetz back office allows the Crocky Trail to see in real time what the attendance figures are going to be 24 hours before making it easy to staff, to stock and to offer a fantastic product to the customers on the day they come.

In terms of marketing, being able to collect the data helps them to get to know their audience better and send targeted emails to clients. For example, the Crocky Trail now sends emails to its clients offering

• special deals,
• annual passes or, 
• gift vouchers for Christmas.‍

Customisation is the key

‍“The change over from our existing booking platform to working with Smeetz was a pleasure and everything was seamless, quick and efficient. This is a whole online complete system so it made a huge difference to business.” Rob Kirkwood, Marketing Manager at the Crocky Trail

Looking back at the start of this collaboration, we can definitely say that understanding the specific needs of the Crocky Trail and offering them tailored solutions sealed the relationship. In their quest to increase the customer experience, they look for a more personalised look and feel of the tickets for each of their offers.

“Down the line we are looking at more customisation, the look and feel of gift vouchers that people are asking for to make sure we have got good quality annual passes that people are looking for. Smeetz will develop those products with us as time goes on and from what I have seen so far it is excellent.”

In conclusion, Rob from the Crocky Trail says

“I do not think I would recommend Smeetz to any of my competitors because I do not want them to have a system as good as Smeetz.”