How Webtickets went from being a ticket seller to a cultural connector - and won by being smarter, not louder.
Webtickets is South Africa’s leading event ticketing platform – and for 17 years, it built its reputation on one thing: a direct, trusted relationship with its audience. As the market grew and audience expectations rose, Webtickets saw an opportunity to go further, moving beyond broadcast to build something more personal.
Partnering with Netcore, Webtickets rebuilt its engagement infrastructure in four phases – moving from a single national blast to province-level segmentation, automated cart recovery, send-time intelligence, and always-on WhatsApp support.
The results were decisive across every initiative.
Customer conversations handled in 3 months
Bot ticket resolution rate
WhatsApp read rate
What changed wasn’t just performance. Webtickets stopped broadcasting and started connecting – maintaining a living relationship with over a million South Africans between every event, every season, every send.
Founded in 2007 and headquartered in Cape Town, Webtickets is South Africa’s leading online event ticketing platform and far more than a place to buy tickets.
Built on a direct-to-audience model spanning music, sport, theatre, festivals, and lifestyle events across South Africa, Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe, Webtickets serves as the communications bridge between event organisers and the fans who love what they do.
With 1.5 million+ subscribers and 1.9 million monthly website visitors, it doesn’t just sell access to experiences – it shapes how South Africans discover and live them.
| Founded | 2007 |
|---|---|
| Headquarters | Cape Town, South Africa |
| Markets | South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Namibia |
| Subscriber Database | 1.5M+ active email subscribers |
| Monthly Website Traffic | 1.9M visitors |
| Netcore Products | CEE (Email), Journey Automation, STO, CPaaS (WhatsApp) |
South Africa’s live events market is growing fast – demand has more than doubled on Webtickets over the past two years, and a more competitive landscape has grown alongside it. Ticketmaster’s 2022 entry into the market, followed by its acquisition of Quicket in 2024, signaled that global scale was on the way. For a homegrown platform built on 17 years of direct audience relationships, the most natural path forward was to lean into what it does best: relevance over reach.
To do that at the scale the market now demanded, Webtickets’ marketing infrastructure needed to evolve. Their previous tool had served them well for broadcast email and gave them a solid foundation to build from. The next chapter called for capabilities beyond what that setup was designed to deliver:
Webtickets already had the audience, the trust, and the cultural relevance. The next step was adding an engagement engine built to make the most of all three.
THE PARTNERSHIP Choosing Depth Over Decibels
Webtickets needed more than a platform swap – they needed a partner that could operationalise relevance at scale. Netcore brought the right combination of capability across segmentation, automation, and conversational commerce, backed by a dedicated CSM team that made ambitious execution possible for a lean marketing function. The shared belief was simple: in a market where global giants compete on reach, a local champion wins on precision.
The rebuild was phased – each one closing a gap between the brand and its audience. Rather than a single platform migration, Netcore and Webtickets built capability in stages – each one closing a gap between the brand and its 1.5 million subscribers.
A Netcore-powered sign-up form embedded in the Webtickets website captures subscriber details and category interests from first contact. Richer data from day one means smarter segmentation from day one.
Across every initiative, the data told the same story: relevance, timing, and personalisation compound. Each layer of the engagement engine outperformed the last.
Total conversions driven
Email open rate
Conversion growth
A brand-new capability that became one of Webtickets’ most reliable revenue mechanisms – with a consistent 9% CTR to match.
Same campaign. Same audience. Same email. The only variable was timing – and it was worth 7x.
Customer conversations handled in 3 months
Bot ticket resolution rate
WhatsApp read rate
Ticket volume doubled – resolution quality didn’t drop. Support became scalable without scaling headcount.
Numbers tell the performance story. But something harder to quantify had also shifted in the Webtickets–audience relationship.
Beyond performance, Webtickets built a continuous engagement engine – capturing richer first-party data, launching faster without engineering dependency, and maintaining an always-on relationship with over a million South Africans between every event, every season, every send.
The appetite for live events in South Africa is growing faster than at any point in recent memory. Against that backdrop, the Webtickets story holds a clear lesson for the wider industry: in a market where global platforms compete on scale, the winning strategy for a local champion isn’t to out-spend them. It’s to out-know them.
Knowing your audience province by province. Behaviour by behaviour. Conversation by conversation. And having the technology and the partnership to act on that knowledge in real time – with the right message, on the right channel, at the right moment.
The partnership between Webtickets and Netcore continues to deepen. Limechat for WhatsApp is live and scaling. Future initiatives include expanding the on-site sign-up and interest-capture programme, deepening lifecycle journey automation, and exploring further personalisation using first-party behavioural data accumulated across the platform.
The brands that will shape South Africa’s cultural future won’t be the ones who shout loudest. They’ll be the ones who listen best.
Thomas Stavrides
Marketing Manager, Webtickets South Africa“The Netcore platform has become an indispensable part of our communications strategy and execution. It has enabled us to significantly enhance both the volume and quality of our content, while driving improved user engagement. We also greatly appreciate the support from Atharva and the broader Netcore team, who have consistently been professional, responsive, and attentive to our needs.”
