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It's the end of the year and our office is hopping, so I'm guessing that many of you are still around doing all the things you've not had a chance to do during the regular season! We are too...
I'm also going to make some downtime for myself over the holidays and will be back posting after the New Year.
I want to wish everyone a wonderful holiday season.
I often think that I talk about the fundamentals of e-mail marketing too often. I say the same thing over and over. I do it because it seems to me that not enough people are really getting the basics right. E-mail marketing isn't really that hard, but I often cringe at what I see in my own inbox.
I sometimes wonder if it's just the non-profit world that is lagging behind. Apparently not.
My friend and colleague Stephanie Miller, VP of Strategic Services for Return Path, was at the Email Insider Summit, a corporate e-mail marketing event last week, and on her blog she summarizes her observations.
And when I read her post, I recognized that a lot of what I've been saying holds true in the corporate world. Here are a few of her key points:
1. Relevancy - you must make your messages targeted and relevant to the person receiving them.
2. Segmentation – one size doesn't fit all. The idea of an e-mail "blast" to your whole list is quick and easy, but you'll burn out your list pronto.
3. Sender Reputation Matters: That is to say, whoever is sending out your mail (e.g., PatronMail) has a "reputation" among the ISPs. And the better your vendor's e-mail reputation, the better your mail will be delivered and not caught in spam filters. That's why we've been proudly been part of the Sender Score Certified program since 1994, and our inbox delivery is typically between 95% and 98% in a world in which the industry benchmark is around 80%.
If you're interested, I encourage you to read her full post here: http://www.returnpath.net/blog/2007/12/top-five-email-insider-summit.php
Last night I had dinner with a friend who could only be described as an "early adopter" of new technology and the use of it. Okay, this is a guy who built his own computers in the 1980's and has about four computers running at once in his apartment today.
I often pay attention to how he uses the Web and new technology as a bellwether for what consumers may be doing years into the future. I consider myself an early adopter, but he's definitely way out ahead of me.
So we got to talking about the fact that he's now installed a TV-tuner card on one of his computers. This is akin to having Tivo attached to your computer. He's able to watch live TV from his computer as well as record shows onto it. He can then drag those shows into his iPod-like device and watch when he's not at home.
As we were talking about all the nifty software he's using to record the shows, and automatically erase the commercials, I said, "Well, how much live TV to you actually watch these days?"
He gleefully said, "Are you kidding? NONE! I make it a point to never watch live TV anymore."
What he was saying was, "Why should I watch live TV, when I can watch what I want, when I want it, at any time of day?" Think about it. Aside from having bragging rights that you saw the latest episode of "Grey's Anatomy" at the instant it ran for the first time, why would you want to plan your life around when NBC wants you to watch the show, rather than staring it at 9:48, when it's convenient to you? Of course, this was the promise of DVRs and TIVO.
But these devices merely "time-shift." You still look at a line-up of shows and pick what you want to record based on the time it's playing.
However, we are rapidly approaching a world in which virtually all video content is already digitized. (Aside from news and sports, there's almost nothing that's truly live.) So rather than going to my DVR and selecting the time and the show name, in the future I'll just do a search and say, "I want to watch the latest episode of Grey's Anatomy.” The computer will figure out when it's running and will record it for you. While this is true for those of us that already have DVRs now, most of us still think of television as a time-oriented medium. "What time is that show on?" is still part of our mindset.
What I'm saying is the the next generation of television watchers (maybe the children of the iPod generation) won't even think about the time that a show is running. That's irrelevant. All they will consider is what they want to watch.
We're not there yet. But soon enough we will be in a world in which there is no need to watch live TV because it's merely relic of another era in which television schedules ruled your life and your calendar.
I can still hear it in my ear. "I make it a point NEVER to watch live TV." Fascinating.
Yesterday brought the news that one of the most influential writers about arts marketing had died. Danny Newman, author of Subscribe Now! has been credited with single-handedly creating the arts industry's
obsession with subscriptions. His book, written in 1977, has been a bible for arts marketers since then.
This article from the Chicago Tribune is worth reading.
I think we all owe Mr. Newman a great debt in helping advance the industry. However, I'm not convinced his legacy will hold up in the digital marketing world. In my view, his ideas are quickly becoming outdated.
Quoting from the Trib article:
"Everywhere he went, he talked up the subscription concept. His evangelical rants against 'the slothful, fickle single-ticket buyer' versus 'the saintly season subscriber' became enshrined in legend."
My issue with this concept is that I believe that while subscriptions are fantastic for cultural intuitions they are only fantastic for a segment of consumers. For the institution, you get your money early, you get your tickets sold in advance, and you get some idea of how full the house will be.
However, for the consumer, subscriptions satisfy only a particular kind of personality. Planners and people who value the idea of locking themselves into a schedule love subscriptions. But for folks like me - my lifestyle neither lends itself to a subscription, nor do I want to make those plans that far in advance. To me, a subscription represents only the possibility of having to call and exchange my tickets later. And for many others younger than me, the idea of shelling out hundreds of bucks eight months in advance is just a form of insanity.
The good news is that in today's world, you can love the single ticket buyer as you love the subscriber! You can establish an e-mail relationship with that person at a fraction of the cost of what it took in 1977. And by the end of the season, you may just have sold as many or more tickets to that single ticket buyer as you did to the subscriber.
Single ticket buyers are not slothful - they are just consumers with different needs. It's up to the arts organizations to meet their needs (with flex passes, "make your own series," etc.) rather than to continually force us them behave in a way they don't want to.
So, as we say goodbye to Danny Newman, let's recall his legacy by extolling the virtues of subscriptions. But let's also remember that subscriptions aren't for everyone, and that today single ticket buyers can be marketed to cost-effectively and treated with as much love as subscribers.
