If five percent of users are coming to find restaurants near your theater and this information is buried deep in your site you are making your users work very hard.  Perhaps some gave up, didn’t find what they were searching and left frustrated.

Not suprisingly fans of New York City Opera for example, are very likely fans of the The Metropolitan Opera, The Royal Opera House, and the Santa Fe Opera.  No suprises there.  But they are also more likely to be fans of NPR, The New York Times, Susan Boyle, and Michael Phelps.  Gives a fuller picture, doesn't it?  

Let's try another.  Fans of Seattle's 5th Avenue Theatre are very likely fans of ACT - A Contemporary Theatre, INTIMAN Theatre, and the Seattle Repertory Theatre.  But they are also more likely to be fans of Starbucks, NPR, Glee and Kathy Griffin.   

Try it for your organization here.  

(Hat Tip to Thomas Cott for sharing this site.  I highly recommend his email clipping service You've Cott Mail.  It's a must read for any arts marketer.)

Further evidence that traditional advertising is loosing it's punch.  I see this as a call to examine your marketing budget allocations.   Here is my advice. Take  9% of your newspaper advertising budget away from the newspaper and invest it in improving your permission marketing. 

Permission marketing is delivering anticipated, relevant, and personal communications to people who care about you. For arts organizations’ this is primarily your email strategy.  If you spent $200,000 in the newspaper last year how about taking 9% of that, or $18,000 and strengthening your permission marketing.  Here are some ideas:

1.) Invest in making sure the email sign up on your site is clear and evident on every page.  Make sure it lists the benefits of signing up for your emails. Make sure to give users choices of what they want to receive.  Only collect basic information like email address and name.  You are just starting a relationship, not getting married. 

2.) Invest in resources to run a sophisticated email program.  Say you have an email list of 50,000.  If you can increase your open rate by just 3% you can sell over $30,000 in additional tickets a year (assumptions: 5% click through rate, 10% ecommerce conversion rate, $160 average transaction, sending 26 emails/ year).  Now this is not that difficult to do but requires expertise.  Who is running your email program?  An analytical marketer or a junior marketing assistant?  Invest in consulting or training for this assistant or spend the 9% of newspaper dollars on a salary line to hire an email rock star.
 
3.) Hire a designer and/ or a usability expert to rebuild your email templates.  While you are at it hire a writer to examine your email voice.  Are your emails visually compelling and easy to read or are they institutional and text-laden?  Do your constituents look forward to getting your emails?  Nancy Boy is a cosmetics company in San Francisco.  Join the Nancy Boy email list and in your inbox will pop funny, colorful and highly entertaining emails.  And you get 15% off for life just for signing up.  Stellar permission marketing. 

4.) Invest in an in-theater text message program where participants text in to a contest to win a backstage tour or other VIP experience.  Require an email address to enter the contest. Your mobile vendor (like Guide by Cell) can automatically send a text message to the winner five minutes after the performance run time with instructions to redeem their prize.  You get lots of new email addresses. 

5.)  Invest in in-theater email collection.  Insert a form on brightly-colored paper into every program that asks for an email address with a golf pencil taped to it. You can have a contest with a prize here too. Have ushers pick up the forms or collect them as patrons leave for intermission or at the end of the show.  Alvin Ailey does this brilliantly. 

9% in one year! The media world is changing fast.  And soon you are not going to be able to buy enough traditional media to reach your constituents. So spend the money now to build your permission marketing infrastructure.  Wait too long and your company may suffer the plight of the newspaper. 

With limited resources, writing and content is assigned to a junior level marketer who has the best intentions but lacks a compelling voice and/ or the empowerment to write openly.   Then the blog becomes a catch all for press releases, links to media coverage, and occasional artist posts.  They are often written in a marketing voice and the veil to hide the desire to sell tickets is very thin.  What is the result of all of this effort?  A very boring blog that no one reads and certainly does not sell tickets. 

I always use Steppenwolf's Blog as a great example of what an institutional blog should be.  The blog delivers interesting content written by contributors from the administrative staff and artistic side.  This post by playwright Tracy Letts about the 1% of theater-goers who misbehave is brilliant.  It's funny and personal and is not promoting a Steppenwolf production.  I would enjoy this even if I'd never heard of Steppenwolf.  

Any other great blogs institutional blogs out there?

Today, I called Bank of America to ask about my account and two minutes after I got off the phone there was an email in my in box asking me to fill out a short survey with my opinion of the call.

Clearly these companies care about the customer experience and want to improve it.  The act of getting asked for my opinion shows that these companies clearly value it. 

Are you doing this?  Why not?

Create a simple survey in Survey Monkey or Zoho.  After a subscriber or single ticket buyer calls in to your box office or ticket services office (and you have their email on file) send an email asking for feedback.

Worst case, they delete it.  Best case, you get some valuable customer feedback.

As a consumer, I love being able to pick where I am going to sit both when I am planning an airplane trip and planning a night at the theater.  As an arts marketer I know that building a flash-based SYOS tool on my website is expensive and resource-intensive.  So the question I've wondered is: "is investing in SYOS technology worth it?"

Recently I have been working with the Pacific Northwest Ballet to implement web analytic tools to help them measure and understand how users are interacting with their new website.  We recently completed a three-phase Google Analytics implementation. The first phase allowed for basic user tracking, the second for ecommerce tacking (adding dollars into the mix), and the third allows us to measure very specific user actions like video usage and using SYOS to purchase a ticket.  

Now my initial fear was that SYOS would allow users to spend less on their tickets since they could find seats that they were happy with in cheaper sections.  On the flip side, I hypothesized that maybe since users could see exactly where they can sit, they would spend more on tickets to ensure better seats.  And I am happy to report that the latter actually is what we are seeing.  We found that users who use SYOS consistently spend 50% more on their ticket purchases.  And this is not a one-time phenomenon.  We have been examining over seven weeks of data and no matter the time period this holds true.  Better yet, 87% of users use the SYOS tool rather than choosing by section.  

These findings are by no mean conclusive.  It would be great to say that with SYOS since users can see exactly where they will sit, they are willing to spend more on tickets to ensure better seats.  In that case every arts organization should go ahead and invest in the technology.  However there may be demographic or other outside factors at work here.  With web analytics you can see what is happening but never really know exactly why (that requires user surveys and focus groups).   Perhaps, and I am making this up, older web users are not comfortable with SYOS technology and older users spend less on tickets.  Or people with less money do not come to the theater very often and do not understand what "Select Your Own Seat" means and gravitate to the "Choose by Section" option.  

If you can throw out any other holes in these findings by all means please do.  Also, I would be interested to hear if any other organization has conducted this type of analysis and to hear your findings.  I will continue to look at this and will report back if we find any new insights.

Reasons for Friending or Following Companies Through Social Media 

Source: eMarketer Daily

This table serves as a good guide as we think about what to post on our Facebook Wall or Tweet to our followers.  Social media followers are among your most loyal fans.  What are you offering them? The number one reason according to this research is that fans are looking to "learn about specials and sales."   Are you offering special promotions or discount codes to your Facebook followers?  Why not?  If your organization is not discount driven perhaps you offer a small promotion or value added opportunity.  Certainly it is worth testing with a unique promotion code.  

The second reason people become a fan is to "learn about new products/features/services."  Are you posting the latest news and information about your programs on your wall?  Good reviews, feature stories, season announcements, lecture and education programs, galas etc.  Your Facebook fans want to know is going on at your organization and you need to be providing that level of information.  

The third item is fans are looking for funny and insightful bits.  Carnegie Hall has been posting quizzes where the first fan to respond wins tickets.  New York City Opera recently posted some funny old YouTube videos featuring opera and some entertaining opera quotes. 

The final item is that fans are looking to lean more about the company culture and become a real insider.  Is the tone of your posts institutional or personal?  Can your tone become more personal?  Can you show images from rehearsals?  Mention that the creative team for a new project is meeting at your offices for the first time?  

I think we all spend a lot of time thinking about what to post for our fans and this study is a helpful guide

For example, say you send your weekly or monthly newsletter that includes two items, the first about a new production announcing tickets are on sale and a second that includes a donation appeal.  In email 1.0 you can see through the analytics that your email achieved an 18% open rate and a 2% click through rate.  But with email 2.0 you can see the pages of your website each recipient visited and whether users purchased or not.  In the email program users are grouped into openers, clickers, browsers, and buyers.  From that you can set the system up to automatically send a triggered email to those who may have visited a production page but did not purchase, for example.  From there it can trigger a third email to send a few days later to those that visited the production page a second time but did not purchase but this time perhaps include an offer to entice them to close the sale.  For the donation item you can set it up to do the same.  If a user clicked through but did not donate you can trigger it to send another email with more information about the benefits of giving tied to the page they visited.  If they still don't give it can send an additional appeal and so on.  This is called email re-targeting.  

You can also set up cascades based on initial email sign ups.  So when a user signs up for your email list online they get an immediate welcome message.  Automatically a few days later they get a second message asking them to follow your organization on Facebook.   Perhaps a week later they get an offer to come to a performance if they have not yet purchased a ticket. 

I have found that the costs for these advanced tools are the same or even less on a per email basis than most email programs that arts organizations employ.  I am personally very excited about these technologies and think they offer a tremendous upside to arts organizations.  I am working with a few clients on beginning to use these tools and will report back. 

We sent out five versions of the email so recipients got a targeted message based on their relationship with the opera.  We employed subject line testing to determine the subject line with the best open rate before deploying to the larger list.   We used the word "video" in the subject line which we've learned increases open rates.   Graphically, on the top of the email we used a large image screen grab from the video with a “play” button superimposed on the image and worked with the development team to compose a short and pithy message bolding the key points.    You can view the email here. 

Most of the gifts that come from a campaign like this are under $200 which is why this is called "microgiving."  This type of fundraising was made famous by the Obama campaign that successfully employed it to bring in hundreds of thousands of new donors, many giving less than $100.  However many gave more than once.  According to the Minnesota Independent, 49% of Obama’s supporters’ initially donated less than $200 but by the end of that campaign cycle, 27% had contributed up to $999.  This type of giving is also a gateway to a potentially larger future relationship. 

Because the gifts are not typically large, organizations need to go into this type of campaign with realistic expectations for the results.  Frequency of messaging is important rather than a one off.  It seemed like Obama was sending a new video email every week.  While this may be extreme for most arts organizations every quarter is not out of the questions.  Patrons like to hear from an organizations leadership and a video is a great medium to communicate news of the latest happenings of your company. 

We are going to send a follow up email next week to those who did not give from the first email.  Fingers crossed that the donations keep coming in.

This is a lesson to all of us to test, test, and test again before deploying.  And if you are not 100% confident in how to use an advanced technique like personalizing an email, then just send the email without personalization.

The New York Post writes about the New York Times' exclusive advertising agreement with Brighton Beach Memoirs that didn't end so well here. 

The number of text messages transmitted in the United States grew by more than 80 percent over the 12 months ended in June as reported by the New York Times.

A must read from Neill Archer Roan who asks what if the past 50 years - when most of the nonprofit arts industry was born and evolved  - were the exception, not the rule, to human history.

A new study shows that 8% of Internet users account for 85% of all display ad clicks.

Thanks to Thomas Cott and Jeff Covello. 

So how does your company stack up?  Here is a quick look a sample of 22 orgs and their number of Facebook fans.  

as of 11/20/09  

I think both of these metrics are very important and would like to suggest an additional way to measure the effectiveness of your emails-- by tagging them with Google Analytics tracking code.  Tagging all of the links in your email allows you to see how these visitors behave once they click through to your site.  

You can obtain incredibly rich data such as how many dollars your emails are generating*, how these users behaved on your site compared to users from other sources, what these users purchased and innumerable other statistics.

Using this simple tool you can append tags on your email that your users will never notice.  There is a small learning curve to this but once you pick it up you can say things like "My last email generated $5,000 worth of sales." Hard numbers in dollars and cents, that's powerful insight into your email effectiveness.

*if you have ecommerce set up on your analytics account

Thank you to Jeff Covello for sharing this.

A website requires monthly maintenance and updates for it to work optimally and serve your business goals. Many organizations budget big bucks to build their websites but do not budget to maintain their site after it launches. No doubt money is tight in the arts right now and we need each dollar to sing. When setting your annual budgets you must budget a dollar figure for monthly website maintenance. Bugs appear, features break, business needs change, technology progresses...all of these require investment in your site. As the web becomes increasingly important and the primary marketing channel for your organization the need to maintain your investment is stronger than ever.  

I come across emails from arts organizations that are laden with text and my eyes glaze over.  I see full quotes from reviews and long explanations of programming. Emails are not brochures.   Your emails should be primarily driven by graphics.  The less text the better. Next time you write out an email try this exercise:  Cut the text you wrote in half and then cut it in half again.  This is not easy but I bet there is lots of fat you can trim and still tell your story.  Use an image or graphic to tell the story instead.  

The point of the email is to drive users to click through to where they can get more information.  Provide just enough information to entice them to click.  Think bullet points and short sentences, not paragraphs.  

Finally if you have a 20% open rate, to the other 80% of people your email is your subject line.  You can still get your message across to those 80% of people if your subject line tells the story.  "Season Opens tomorrow" "Student Tickets Now on Sale" etc.

Here are two great emails.  The subject line tells the story, they are image driven, have only the absolute necessary amount of text, and they have a strong call to action.

Have some great emails that meet the criteria above?  Please send them in and I will post them.

However, when it comes down to it, most users are coming to your site to do just a few things...buy a ticket, donate, check out the calendar etc.   So it is helpful to determine the primary three or four reasons users are coming to your site.  If you look at your analytics program you can probably determine that these three to four reasons drive about 80% of your site visits.   It is in these areas that you should devote the majority of your resources.  Yeah, it would be great to have a personalized media room for donors but how many donors are really going to come to the site to use it?

with thanks to Aaron Shapiro at HUGE.  

--If Facebook were a country it would be the world's 4th largest between the United States and Indonesia.
--80% of companies are using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees.

The music is a little over the top but the information makes it worth watching.

Buying attention through traditional media is becoming less and less effective.

Newspapers -- an arts org's primary source of reaching buyers just a few years ago -- are in rapid decline. Circulation is plummeting. Papers are cutting arts coverage and critics. Organizations can no longer rely on reviews since there are fewer critics to review shows. Major dailies are stopping the presses for good. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Rocky Mountain News and more are closed. With fewer readers, ads are much less powerful. I have personally experienced newspaper ads doing nothing to move the needle for ticket sales.

It is not just newspaper. All media is increasingly fragmented. Back when there were only three networks, advertisers used to buy a TV ad and reach tens of millions of people. When I Love Lucy was on prime time 72% of all American television sets tuned in. Now the top rated program, The American Idol Finale, attracts just 8% of people.

With the death of old media, interruption marketing (the act of paying a media outlet to interrupt readers, watchers, or listeners with your ad) is dying as well. Just 10 years ago a large advertiser could spend a few million dollars on TV, radio, and print to interrupt enough people to sell whatever product they were selling. I know of arts orgs that would buy some radio and a few ads in the New York Times and they'd be good to go. Interrupt enough people reading the papers with your message and your house would be full. But now the consumer is in control and is no longer required to read, watch, or listen to ads to get the content they want. Bottom line: it is harder and harder to BUY attention.

So what is the alternative? It's called "Permission Marketing," a term coined by marketer Seth Godin. "Delivering anticipated, relevant, and personal messages to people who want to hear from you." Or, put another way, "turning strangers into friends, friends into customers, and customers into sales people." And what is the first step in doing this? Collecting an email address.

Email collection MUST be a top priority of every cultural organization or you are going to be in big trouble very soon. You must begin building active personal relationships with your constituents and email is the best way to do this.

Email is by far the quickest and easiest way to sell tickets because you are speaking to people who already care about you. Think about it. Would you rather spend $10,000+ on a newspaper ad, radio buy, tv spot, etc. every time you have something to sell or send an email that maybe costs a few hundred dollars to your list of opted in people who care about you? Why are you paying the middle man? A middle man who has become less and less powerful and less able to deliver what you need.

So here is a rough plan of action for email collection:

On-line
Email sign up should be clear and a visual priority on every page of your website. Offer an incentive to join such as promotions and the latest news to all users. Make email sign up easy. Just a name and email address on the first screen. Have the site capture that info and then ask for more info like address, phone number, etc. on a second page. A good example is here from New York City Opera.

Some organizations have had success creating a splash page that asks users to sign up for the email list before they can move on with browsing their site. An example of that is here from Roundabout Theatre Company.

Have your privacy policy very accessible and even add the line "we will never share or sell your email address."

It almost goes without saying that for e-commerce you must require an email address with every order placed on your website.

Phone Buyers
For phone buyers, here is a simple solution. All customers who call the box office should be asked "would you like us to email you a receipt?" The majority of people will say yes and provide you with their email addresses.

Walk up Buyers
Your box office staff should be required to ask for an email address. You can have the staff ask "Would you like to join our email list to receive news and special offers?" If people are reluctant, have the staff say "we will never share or sell your email address."

In the Theater
In-theater collection is particularly important since you can collect the names of people other than those who purchased the ticket. Assume you only collected through the ticket buying process. At most, you'd collect 50% of the email addresses in the theater since only one person transacted for one or more tickets.

1.) Have large signs in the lobby asking patrons to join your email club listing the benefits (promotions, offers, etc). Set up a box to collect the forms and on the forms only make the name and email address required.

2.) Create an in-theater text message program where participants can text in to a contest that will give away a prize, a backstage tour or CD from the evening's performance. Require an email address to enter the contest. You can have a mobile vendor automatically send a text message to the winner five minutes after the performance run time with instructions to redeem their prize.

3.) Insert a form on brightly-colored paper into every program that asks for an email address with a golf pencil taped to it. You can have a contest with a prize here too. Have ushers pick up the forms or collect them as patrons leave for intermission or at the end of the show.

If your email list contains 10,000 people who care about you, how many tickets can you sell? How much money can you raise? What if your email list contains 100,000?

So go ahead, plan a meeting with your top management and make a plan to make this a top organizational (not just marketing) priority. Set annual targets for the size of the list and a plan for how you are going to get there. If you don't, your organization could be going the way of the newspaper...
 

So many organizations clutter their membership page with institutional text. This is the nicest way I've ever seen to handle this. Anyone have any others to share?

Something else I learned worth sharing: Did you know arts organizations can create a page on iTunes U where you can have far more control of how your podcasts and videos appear on iTunes. Thank you to Howard from the 92nd Street Y

...aggregate all critical reviews and share them to help people decide if they want to attend a performance

...survey ticket buyers after each performance and send them to a forum where they could comment on performances they've seen

...allow people to vote on future rep

...put all production designs on line for people to examine and comment upon

...have 100% flexible exchange policies

...video and share rehearsals and other behind-the-scenes footage

...promote all other arts organizations

...encourage all management and artistic leadership to blog

Is your organization doing any of these things?

Why not?