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Cross-Reference Customer Data to Gain Deeper Insights Into Your Customers

Cedar Fair Entertainment Company

About

Cedar Fair is one of the largest regional amusement resort operators in the world, owning several parks and hotel properties throughout North America. Some of their best known properties include Cedar Point, Kings Island, and Knott’s Berry Farm. Cedar Fair’s goal is to make people happy by providing fun, immersive, and memorable experiences to its guests.

 

The Challenge

Each year, Cedar Fair hosts nearly 27 million visitors across all of its properties, making communication between the brand and its guests a primary focus. From teens spending the day with their friends at a park to families with young kids and grandma and grandpa.

Cedar Fair parks run the gamut of ages and number of visitors. All those guests create a lot of data for Cedar Fair, but synchronization is a challenge given all the different scenarios:

  • Most of the visitors to the park have at least one device they are connecting to the park wifi while onsite.
  • Visitors also may have purchased tickets from their desktop computer at home or work, but are now in the park with a hand-held device.
  • Parents may have purchased their teen’s tickets but the teens are visiting without their parents in the park.

Very quickly, the data points increase exponentially, and tying behavior to customer profiles can be exceedingly difficult.

The Solution

To learn more about their guests and create a better pre-park, in-park, and post-park experience, Cedar Fair works hard to de-anonymize data, which in turn improves Cedar Fair’s bottom line. One area of focus is the in-park wifi. Cedar Fair wants guests to have to register for it only one time, forever.

Cedar Fair Entertainment

Daryle Powers

Vice President of CRM at Cedar Fair Entertainment Company

“The Reason why we use Webbula is what we’ve found is that those email addresses [used to sign up for wifi] can be incorrect. There’s a lot of ‘fat fingering’ going on. Webbula is able to automatically correct many of the incorrectly formatted email addresses. This makes guests who would normally be anonymous to us, now known, and gives us a way to reach back out them and get them into a regular communication stream.”

Post email cleansing, the legitimate addresses Cedar Fair receives has made it increasingly more efficient to data farm on their channels. So much so that in one year Cedar Fair has increased its marketable population by 1.5 million people. To Daryle and his team at Cedar Fair, the importance of email is here to stay, especially when factoring in timeliness and data collection:

“We can identify the target audience, either through our CRM data or in prospecting with our partner, and we can get an email out the door within two hours to drive the visitor volume to a specific park.”

As for what’s next for the Cedar Fair data and its email programs, Daryle says, “I’m very staunch on monitoring our deliverability and putting in engagement thresholds when we need them. We will continue to measure and make changes as the data dictates.”

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