Email marketing in some form is already prolific in arts organisations, because it is low cost, targeted and easy to track. With funding cuts looming and a general fall in corporate sponsorship, email is going to be increasingly important in trying to stretch marketing budgets further. At the same time, the digital ‘noise’ surrounding your audience continues to grow so there has never been a better time to re-examine your approach to make sure that your emails are converting into a visit or a ticket purchase. Here are some critical points to consider.
Strategy
Some initial desk research from organisations like Marketing Sherpa shows that over the past year the number of people subscribing to arts organisation e-newsletters has been falling, while the number of people unsubscribing has been slowly rising. In addition to volume vs attention-span issues, I believe this is in part due to the changing expectations of web users, who are increasingly demanding a more customised experience from the web, and the failure of email marketing to adapt.
This is a symptom of a general lack, or lack of understanding of, e-marketing strategy. Some of the Sumo team recently attended a talk by PR Smith organised by AMA who demonstrated the dramatic differences organisations experienced when they strategically approached their e-marketing from their audiences’ perspectives, rather than a vague idea of what they thought people wanted to know or simply what they wanted to tell people.
Your emails and website should work closely together: the website is a source of new subscribers to the newsletters and the newsletters are tools to drive traffic to the website. Don’t try and fill the newsletter with information; it is just a tool to channel users to the website, where you can then inform, persuade or inspire your audience, depending on your e-marketing strategy.
Newsletters and e-shots
Your tactics to achieve your strategy should include two distinct types of emails: brand building emails and sales messages. Sales messages should be bright, short, enticing shots: direct mail or advertising in an email format. In a perfect scenario, you would send such an e-shot at just the moment when a consumer is in a position to want the proposition on offer and they would click on the link and take you up on that offer. With careful targeting, this will sometimes happen: ‘Oh, look, there’s a Private View on Friday, let’s go’. In other instances you will instead miss the opportunity-consumer match and the recipient will switch off. Too many of these and the recipient will consider you are just selling ‘at’ them, and start to ignore, or unsubscribe from, your emails.
Therefore, you should support these sales mails with brand building news about the kind of projects you’re involved in, some background information, related news etc. depending on your brand; keeping your brand in the consumer’s mind. Using the above example, the next time that person is wondering what to do on a Friday night, they will look at your website first.
Stuart Nicholle of Purple Seven, also speaking at an AMA event, said that his research has shown that, on average, consumers will accept up to two sales messages in addition to each regular newsletter before they sense overkill. He demonstrated numerous examples of organisations mixing the two kinds of messages, thereby diluting their impact.
Segmentation
Relevance is the key factor in whether or not users will read your newsletter. There are myriad models for segmenting an arts audience, such as for the purposes of e-newsletters and there isn’t space to fit it in here.
In summary though, creating a more customised e-newsletter starts with asking your subscribers what interests them when they join your mailing list. You can then either send different newsletters to different groups, or some programmes will allow you to send the same newsletter but the priority of information is different depending on who is opening it.
If you are a free entry venue then this may be your best opportunity for learning about your audience and it’s general make-up since you aren’t able to gather booking office information.
Feeling special
Sumo’s own research has shown that website users are more likely to sign up for a newsletter if they will be getting special treatment; early or behind-the-scenes information or special offers, as part of their subscription. This might be part of a wider strategy of a Friends organisation or Members club. Either way, if you are able to provide this kind of information then do, and make sure that your audience, both existing and potential, are aware that this is an advantage of newsletter subscription.
Don’t miss an opportunity
Whether you get your subscribers through your website, a sign up booth or at your box office it is important to put special consideration in to the first email that people receive once they have opted in, unlike a standard monthly e-newsletter which can expect to be opened by 30 – 40 percent of recipients, the ratio of people opening this first email is much higher, yet it rarely gets the special treatment it deserves.
Most organisations send subscribers a plain text ‘thank you for subscribing’ email when they sign up, this will either be binned or, worse, sent to the spam folder, ensuring that future emails from you are also treated as spam by the email browser.
With a high opening ratio, the first email users receive from you should communicate information about your organisation, any key exhibitions, events or performances you are currently promoting and list the benefits of subscribing. This will remind subscribers of why they signed up and make them more likely to open an email the next time they receive one from you.
Frequency
There isn’t a hard rule for when is the best time to send out your newsletters, and the results would differ for different types of art organisations, so trial and error is the best strategy – try sending out your e-newsletter on different days and at different times and monitor the best response for your organisation.
Purple Seven’s research of a mixed audience found that most people (around 60%) wanted to receive a newsletter every month. Around 20% would rather have one more frequently and the same would rather receive it less often.
For promotional e-shots, there is probably a clearer optimum day / time for sending each one out. Carry out some research and find out when people make the relevant decisions – like their plans for half term or their nights out. Your box office data may tell you this in terms of when bookings are made. Then get your e-shot arriving in their in box just as they are really looking for the information you are sending.
Mail browsers
The first place that a subscriber will see your email is when it appears as a ‘from’ and ‘subject’ line in their inbox. People are more likely to open emails from a trusted or familiar source, so make sure that this says your organisation’s name. Also, keep the address constant over time so that email clients recognise it and don’t send the mail to ‘junk’ as spam.
The subject line is also to be definitive factor in reaching your audience. Our experience has shown that subject lines which ask the subscriber to take an action such as ‘YOUR LAST CHANCE TO SEE’ encouraged more people to open emails then more generic lines like ‘OCTOBER NEWSLETTER’. Special offers also work well to elicit opens, but beware of subject line ‘Special Offer’ which can trigger spam filters.
Most email browsers have a preview pane which displays either the top couple of inches or the left corner of each email as you select the title from your email list. Over 50% of people surveyed by Marketing Sherpa used this kind of configuration for their email, so considering how the your e-newsletter looks when cropped like this can greater improve the number of people opening your emails.
When a subscriber does open your email, it might not display as you intended straight away. Some email applications, particularly on handheld devices, block images so not everyone is going to see a graphic of your logo or that lovely image of your new gallery when they open your e-newsletter, therefore make sure that the text is equally compelling. Your email technical team should be able to advise you about HTML and text only mail versions and how to combine them.
The only way to be sure that everyone is seeing the email at its best is to test it. Some email marketing services like Campaign Monitor or Mail Chimp have built in tools for testing how your design will look. Alternatively you will need to set up accounts on websites like Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail and download different email applications on computer and phone to check how your emails will look to different subscribers.
Testing also lets you see if your email will trigger Spam filters. E-newsletters can be mistaken for spam for a lot of reasons, your email may contain words which are blacklisted, you might be sending e-newsletters too often or it might even be because you are using to much red text! If your emails are being catogorised as spam then try checking your content against this online guide.
Design
Before you get to the stage of checking how the email is displayed, there are also many angles to consider when designing your newsletter, to draw in the audience and keep their interest. These will be covered in a future article
In the meantime, I hope these pointers will help you to make a difference to your audience by reaching the people you want to reach with the messages they want to hear.