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Welcome to our May E-Marketer of the Month featuring Chris Stravinski Sharrow at the Milwaukee Ballet. Read on to find out how a novel campaign is helping build the profile of the ballet and its dancers...
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Featured E-Marketer: Chris Stravinski Sharrow, Marketing and Public Relations Director for the Milwaukee Ballet
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Chris Stravinski Sharrow, Marketing & PR Director for the Milwaukee Ballet
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Ranked as one of the top 10 ballet companies in the United States, the Milwaukee Ballet (founded in 1970) presents more than 40 performances to 70,000 people each year. Integral to the company is the Milwaukee Ballet School which has been one of the premier dance schools in the Midwest
for over 30 years and currently operates three satellite schools in the
five-county area.
With an annual operating budget of $5 million, the Ballet is made up of an artistic and administrative staff of 20 and 26 full time dancers working a 31 week season.
Chris
Stravinski Sharrow, the Ballet's Marketing and Public Relations Director joined the company just over a year ago following a career in arts marketing spanning almost 20 years. Having worked at the Florentine Opera Company, the Marcus Center for the Performing Arts and the Pabst Theater, Chris has brought significant experience and insight to her role with the Ballet.
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Q & A with Chris Stravinski Sharrow
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"I am a Dancer" campaign
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You've been pretty proactive about integrating e-mail and the web into your overall marketing strategy. Give us an overview of how e-marketing fits into your big picture?
E-marketing is the future for non-profits. It's so important for non-profits to make the leap to online ticket sales and marketing techniques because the return on investment is huge. If you're asking people to donate to your organization, you want to be able to show that you're watching the bottom line. E-marketing allows you to do that.
In all our advertising, we aggressively promote online ticket buying through discounts and benefits for online purchasers. For instance, we waive the handling fee to new and renewing subscribers who order online or we offer a 10%-20% discount to people who order single tickets online within a specific time period. E-marketing is the most effective way to instantly reach our customers with news and special offers and to track our return on investment.
This year you also offered subscription renewals online, right? How did that go?
This year we started online subscription renewals to add to our existing
online single ticket sales. In years past, we printed two separate
promotional packages: one for the season renewals and one for the
prospect mailing. The printing costs were enormous. So this year, we
e-mailed subscribers reminding them that their seats were up for
renewal and followed it up with a letter printed in-house reminding
them that renewal time was here. We had 166 accounts renew online (6%
of our existing subscribers) for over $68,000 in revenue (16% of our
revenue goal) - and the cost was minimal - just postage and stationery!
We then decided that we would print just one brochure to promote the
season to both existing and potential subscribers. We whittled the
mailing lists down to a total of 30,000 (about 20,000 less than prior
years) and we're seeing great results so far. In mid-May, after the
renewal period has ended, we'll send out another e-mail to our list
(11,000+) letting people know that great seats are available.
Your "time-sensitive" e-mails have proved pretty successful. Can you give us some examples?
One of our marketing initiatives is to partner with sponsors and other marketing collaborators who e-mail Milwaukee Ballet ticket offers to their own employees and customer bases. We offer pre-sale opportunities to sponsors for the best seats prior to public sale or a discount at the end of a sales cycle - creating an urgency to buy.
Fulfillment of these e-mail ticket offers is only available through our web site which allows us to train our customers to buy online. Of course, we're also building our e-mail list at the same time.
Before we had the ability to send mass e-mails to our own customers, we partnered with a theater (where we perform once per year) who e-mailed a "prior to public sale" e-mail offer for our modern dance series to 30,000 of their members. The offer was only good until midnight on the third day after the e-mail was sent. It was a triple success: We made over $7,000 in ticket sales, we captured the e-mail addresses of these new customers and our marketing costs were zero...zip...nada!
You've also launched a great campaign with your dancers. Can you describe the premise of the campaign and whom it is aimed at?
Drawing on our young, beautiful dancers to attract a younger demographic and pique the interest of our target audience (women, ages 35-64), we launched the "I Am a Dancer" Campaign in the summer of 2005.
The dancers were photographed in their everyday clothes with something that identified them personally (snowboard, canoe, guitar) as well as in full performance leap with the tagline: "I am a dancer....see me dance". Information on their likes and dislikes (favorite book, movie, etc) accompanied each image. The images were used in many different media including print ads, signage on our studio windows, magnets distributed throughout two college campuses, and on neighborhood billboards.
And how did the web fit into the campaign?
The campaign images are also featured on our website and the public is encouraged to e-mail the dancers through the marketing department. This program has just begun and we're already seeing a lot of activity from fans, young and old, who are e-mailing questions to the dancers through our website. The dancers get the usual fan mail from people they don't know and many have also reconnected with people they had worked with at other dance companies.
The more the dancers become familiar faces around the city, the more people will want to come to the ballet to see them perform. One dancer, who was featured on the billboards, has been approached constantly by people asking "Aren't you... -- we saw you on the billboard!"
We hope to turn the dancers into local celebrities (as they should be) and we're working on putting more dollars in the budget to expand the campaign this year. Of course, our website address was in large type on all the signage and ads.
How do you plan to further integrate e-marketing into your overall marketing strategy in the coming years?
Our Web site combined with our e-mail communications will be our primary focus in the next few years. It's the first time we've been able to track sales directly from a source (e-mail) and as mentioned, our return on investment has been enormous. There's nothing better than reporting to the board that we made $7,000 in sales from one e-mail to the right audience!
We are dedicating more dollars in the 2006-07 budget for web enhancements to support our e-mail capabilities and we've cut back on our print advertising and production budget expenditures. Next season, we will e-mail subscribers with an "early bird" incentive to renew online before we even print our first brochures!
Each person who gives us permission to e-mail them saves us money - so our plan is to continue to build our list and our e-communications!
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Announcing: June 5-8 half-day seminars with Eugene Carr, President, Patron Technology - Denver, St. Louis & Minneapolis
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SUPER CHARGE YOUR E-MARKETING
Tips, Techniques, Facts & Stats
Every Arts Marketer Needs to Know Now
Monday, June 5: Denver, Colorado
(Denver Museum of Nature & Science)
Tuesday, June 6: St. Louis, Missouri
(Repertory Theatre of St. Louis)
Thursday, June 8: Minneapolis, Minnesota
(Mixed Blood Theatre)
Top ten tips for effective e-marketing. You'll learn what works and why, and you'll have the facts and statistics to back it up. If you're looking to make a case for e-marketing to your board of directors, you must attend this seminar.
Afternoon Session 1:30pm to 5:00pm
Advanced E-marketing Skills and Techniques
You'll hear case studies and learn advanced techniques for improving your e-mail marketing and your Web site, and about the newest e-marketing techniques such as blogging and podcasting.
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Click here to learn more and/or to register
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If you have interesting and creative initiatives that you would like to have featured or know of an arts marketer that you would like to recommend for one of our upcoming editions, please contact info@patrontechnology.com.
Please watch for the next edition of our Arts Marketer of the Month, coming June 13, 2006.
Patron Technology
850 Seventh Avenue, Suite 801
New York, NY 10019
212-271-4328
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