How a Unified Platform Helped C3 Presents Optimize SMS

If you love music, chances are you’ve been to a C3 Presents event. A subsidiary of Live Nation Entertainment, they produce 30 festivals and events throughout the year, like Austin City Limits Music Festival, Lollapalooza, Bonnaroo, and more. 

Their business revolves around a festival lifecycle where tickets are primarily purchased in phases: presale, pre-event, event, and post-event. C3 Presents sells most of their tickets on the first day of sales, but they also focus on selling more tickets faster during each phase.

SMS is C3 Presents’ highest-revenue channel, which drives more ticket sales than all their other marketing channels combined. With their large number of festival brands and more than 6 million subscribers, they needed a platform that could support their complex SMS marketing strategy, protect their main source of revenue, and prioritize the fan experience.

While they’ve been a longtime user of Intuit Mailchimp email, they only recently consolidated their SMS into the Mailchimp platform in May 2025. We sat down with Director of Strategy and Insights Eric Klein, Marketing Technology Manager Adam Lundeen, and Digital Strategy Manager Jun Yung to find out how they were able to use Mailchimp’s unified email and SMS platform to help them reach their goals.

The challenge: Unifying a disparate marketing system, decreasing cost, safeguarding their most important revenue driver, and creating a great fan experience

In C3 Presents’ previous email platform, and in other platforms they’ve considered moving to, 30 events meant they had 30 different accounts, and Eric says that it resulted in a series of problems. 

“It created overhead in terms of user management, and worsened the overall marketer experience in several ways—one of which was being able to easily share assets,” he says. They weren’t able to clone campaigns, instead building each one from scratch, and could only use campaigns in each account instead of using them across multiple ones. 

On top of those challenges, their email and SMS were on different platforms. Adam notes that  for marketers who manage multiple festival audiences, this complex and inefficient workflow created more work for the team. Marketers had to sign in to multiple accounts, plus an SMS platform just to give them a picture of how the events were performing, and something as simple as giving a marketer access to several audiences took more time. 

Not only was managing events inefficient, they wanted to improve the fan experience. In their previous platforms, fans had to sign up for SMS and email separately, which meant they collected significantly fewer email addresses. They needed a way to ensure they could send more detailed information through email, or links to announcements or presales if the fan preferred it. 

Additionally, they only used a single short code with their previous provider, and opting out of one event cancelled all event messages.

The single short code also presented a compliance risk. If anything happened to their SMS channel, they jeopardized ticket revenue during their essential sales windows. "I always felt nervous,” Eric says. “If there was any kind of problem with a carrier on that one code, it could have shut down all our communications for all festivals."

The tools: Strategic guidance, a unified platform, custom SMS short codes, events API, and Mailchimp forms

Adam shares that one of the main reasons they chose Mailchimp, and have stayed with Mailchimp, was that SMS and email for all 30 of their festival brands were consolidated under a single login, which removed the overhead of having multiple accounts.

Not only did Mailchimp provide the necessary features, but the detailed, personalized assistance from their Customer Success Manager was also vital. “It was absolutely critical in the process of making the decision to go with and stick with Mailchimp, 100%,” Adam says. “We've never had this kind of technical white glove assistance with a migration.” 

And it goes beyond just the migration. "Other SMS vendors seem to have a retention strategy based on long-term contracts that lock in a minimum annual spend, but Mailchimp’s strategy is based on trust, transparency, true partnership, and great service,” Eric says.

Mailchimp provides unique short codes for each festival, which helps the fan experience and safeguard against compliance issues. The codes improve the "HELP" and "STOP" experience, which apply to a single festival, instead of opting out of all lists or getting a help response from all lists. 

“On top of that, it reduced our risk,” Eric says. “If a carrier was to disable our single short code for any reason due to a single message before we have any chance to explain or justify, it could have shut down communications for all festivals at our most critical moments.”

The unified platform improves the usability for marketers as well, because they can move around between events in a single session. “With Mailchimp, we're now able to use the multi-audience and brand infrastructure and stay in the same account, share assets, get a simple monthly invoice, compare performance across audiences, etc.,” Eric says.

Accessing real-time data across SMS and email makes it easier to adjust their ad spend and marketing budgets. After a strong push for a presale or a lineup announcement, they can see how many signups they’re getting almost immediately. “It really just helps us see how strong our response is to a marketing push in general,” Jun says. 

It also helps him analyze audience responses across events, all at once. For instance, he can search for “lineup” and the results will show all the emails and SMS campaigns with that keyword, and he can find click rates, open rates, response rates, and more. 

To build their email list, C3 Presents used Mailchimp forms to create an SMS-first signup flow, allowing fans to enroll in SMS and email at the same time, which Jun notes has increased their email signups significantly. 

C3 Presents uses Mailchimp's events API to integrate fan purchasing data from their ticketing platforms, allowing for easier segmentation. This takes away the need to manually export and import ticketing data, ensuring it’s up to date.

The results: A safeguarded revenue stream, increased email signups, cost savings, and millions of messages sent

Bringing all their festival brands together with SMS and email, all under one login, has garnered significant increases in email signups and cost savings, while allowing them to send SMS messages at the large scale they need.

Their use of progressive forms made it easier for fans to sign up for email, which created a significant lift in their list size. And since they don’t have the overhead of 30 accounts and a separate SMS platform anymore, they’ve estimated a 40% cost savings.

Bringing the platforms together supports C3 Presents’ massive scale, helping deliver over 30 million time-sensitive SMS messages, as well as protects their most important revenue stream, thanks to unique short codes. 

The API integration is setting the foundation for Mailchimp to become their central CRM. They have a goal to use the API to automate personalized messages based on ticket purchases and wristband scans, Eric explains.

These results show that the combination of all their events plus email and SMS under one account is vital to their business. But something that can’t be measured is the value of their partnership with Mailchimp.  

"The trust is a pretty extreme value,” Eric says. “If other vendors come along and promise a slightly better price or new feature, I'm not interested. We need a vendor that takes problems seriously and is transparent."