The Vixen
How The Vixen turned Hive into a 22x return on every marketing dollar
Table of Contents
MEET The Vixen
The Vixen is a live music venue in McHenry, Illinois, rebuilt from a historic movie theater by a coalition of community investors. Multi-genre programming year-round: rock, hip-hop, country, 80s parties, free comedy nights, and more.
Bobbi Baehne is the Director of Marketing at The Vixen. She handles email, SMS, ticketing, graphic design, customer service, just to name a few. The list is long. The team is small. In 2025, her Hive campaigns drove six-figure attributed ticket revenue at a 22x return on investment, roughly double the industry average.
The Vixen's investors are locals. Most had no background in marketing or entertainment. They came together because the venue mattered to their town, which means they care a lot and want to understand exactly what their investment is doing.
Bobbi's job isn't just to run great campaigns. It's to bring a room full of people along with her, speak their language, and show the math.
Hive makes that straightforward.
"When I send out an email, I can look at it 12, 24 hours later and know exactly how much money we made in ticket sales. The emails are generating significant revenue for that weekend's shows. And that makes it nice and easy to let the investors know this is a tool making us money."
When the Vixen's list grew past a pricing tier, Hive's reporting made the decision easy. Bobbi could tie the additional marketing spend directly to ticket sales.
"I'm excited we went up a tier because we're now reaching more people, generating more money. It's great to have tools that have really great data so that you can be that mediator of: yeah, we want that to happen, here's why it makes sense…"
Hive was already in place when Bobbi took over the marketing role overnight. She had no ramp-up time. She needed to run.
"Having worked with quite a few other platforms, it was really intuitive. There was not a huge learning curve. Besides that, I have to say Hive's customer service and help is like no other platform I've ever used."
The ticketing integration made the day-to-day fast.
"Connecting our events makes setting my email campaigns up so simple. I do four different email campaigns in one day. They are done in minutes."
Bobbi doesn't blast. She builds.
A consistent monthly newsletter, presale campaigns for priority shows, and a mid-month "recently announced" send for fans who missed the first wave. Past ticket buyers get targeted follow-ups when a relevant act comes back through.
SMS is reserved for the shows that need it with a strategic segmented list.
"I don't ever get a text that I don't open to see what it is. Getting into someone's phone, it's much more personal, but the open rate is so much greater. We don't overuse it but we keep our audiences warm."
This balance speaks for itself. The "Low Ticket Warning" SMS for Saliva hit 42.89% CTR. The "3 Days Out" send for Red Jumpsuit Apparatus hit 33.19% CTR.
The three-days-out approach is deliberate. Bobbi shifted the bulk of marketing effort to the final six weeks of a show's sales window after watching buying behavior change.
"People are really hesitant to buy anything too early. We'll sell some tickets when we announce and then we don't see anything forever. That three days out, if there's still tickets available, we can do that sense of urgency, which always seems to convert better. Hey, this is happening in three days. We've got limited tickets. Grab them."
Most venues know email works. Bobbi knows exactly how much, show by show.
That comes from a platform built for live events. Hive connects ticketing data to fan profiles and surfaces revenue attribution without extra work. For Bobbi, it's not a reporting feature. It's how she makes the case for every dollar she spends.
And a 23.7% open rate on a 16,000-person list isn't luck. That's fans opening emails because of the venue, not just the act.
This fall, The Vixen launches "Rock and Shop" a vendor market with live music before the holidays. Bobbi is using Hive's forms and landing pages for vendor registrations, the first time she's used the platform outside of fan marketing.
Deeper Meta integration is next. She's already pulling custom audience lists from Hive to target ticket buyers on Meta.
"We're really connecting the paid ads with a targeted email for that specific audience as well... trying to hit everybody in as many places that they may be spending their time so that they're seeing it all over and, hopefully, they're like, 'Okay, I got to do that now.'"
"It's such an inclusive tool and there's just so many tools built within it that support so much more of your marketing than just email. Plus the Customer service, you can't put a value on having a team of experts available to you. That has been priceless."
Bobbi Baehne
Director of Marketing