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Can you tell us a little bit about the background/history of the Sheldon Concert Hall?
The Sheldon Concert Hall is a historic building, built in 1912 as the home of the St. Louis Ethical Society. It remained the Ethical Society until the mid 1960's, and then the Sheldon Arts Foundation took it over in the late 1980s. That history really informs what we do today at the Sheldon, because the acoustics had to be built so that people could hear speakers and Ethical Society services without the help of microphones. This actually makes it the perfect spot for a concert hall, because the acoustics are known to be excellent - many people even say perfect! After the Ethical Society moved out of the building, the hall served as a gospel church a couple of different times over the next 20 years. It was on the brink of becoming a parking lot in the early ‘80s when a group of citizens and arts patrons came together to raise money to save it - they were successful!
The Sheldon Arts Foundation, a non-profit organization, runs the concert hall, and in 1998 we also added art galleries. We expanded into the building next door to us, which was a parking garage, and connected the two with a glass bridge, so that space now serves as our lobby area as well as over 6000 square feet of art gallery space. Now the Arts Foundation runs both the concert hall and the art gallery, and we present over 350 events a year: concerts and gallery exhibits, as well as community events, and we rent out our spaces for weddings and meetings and bar mitzvahs and that sort of thing, so it gets used pretty much every day.
Click here to see more photos of the Concert Hall.
What's the scope of the organization in terms of budget and activities, and what kind of audience do you serve?
The Sheldon's offerings are diverse. We present music: jazz, folk, classical, blues, world music; and our galleries touch on photography, jazz history, architecture, children's arts, and local St. Louis artists. We serve a wide range of arts patrons, anyone who has an interest in any type of music, any type of art, and we also know from studies that we've done that we serve people from every ZIP code in the St. Louis area as well as southern Illinois. We offer arts to the entire community, with a wide range of ages, ethnicities... anything you can imagine, it’s a really diverse group.
We host about 350 events a year, selling about 62,000 tickets total. Including gallery visitors, our attendance is about 137,000 per year. We have a $3 million operating budget and about $700,000 is earned in ticket sales.
How does e-marketing fit into your overall marketing strategy?
We use it to back up a lot of our print materials still, but when it comes to announcing a new concert, that's actually the first way we let people know about an event: we send it out in our e-newsletter. One thing that we've had really great success with and that we’re continuing to do is to offer presales to our new concerts to our e-mail list. For example, as soon as we announced a new concert we would send an e-mail right away, saying, "This will go on sale to the general public on June 10th, but since you're on our e-mail list, here's a special password for you so you can buy your tickets two days ahead of time."
We have found huge success with that - in fact, we've had concerts that have sold a quarter to a third of the total tickets just through the e-mail presale. We recently presented Stephen Stills of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. We offered a presale to our e-mail list (5,600 names at the time) and to our season subscribers (about 500 households). 27% of recipients opened the e-mail, and of those, 7.8% clicked through to order tickets (about 129 people). We ended up selling 264 tickets during the two-day presale, which accounted for about 40% of overall ticket sales (the concert of course sold out!).
Then, as the concert goes on sale officially, we of course send reminders and updates through the e-newsletter as well. If sometimes we have a concert that maybe isn’t selling as well, or that we think might be priced a little too high, then closer to the concert date we use our e-mail postcards to offer our e-mail list a ticket discount.
We had a concert this spring that when we sent the e-mail discount out we increased our ticket sales by about 15 to 18 percent. We have such a small hall (only 714 seats), even if we sell 70 or 80 tickets, that's a big chunk of our ticket buyers.
Tell us a bit about your e-mail list. What techniques have you used to encourage your patrons to sign up, and how often do you mail to them?
When we started out with e-mail marketing about a year and half ago, we had already been gathering names just to have in our database, and at the time, we had about 4,800 names. Since that time we've grown our list by about 1,000 names, so we're getting close to 6,000, which is a 25% increase.
We do a lot of things to grow our list. At several concerts, we did a promotion where if people signed up for our e-mail list they could have a chance to win free tickets, and of course anytime anyone buys a ticket from us we ask for their e-mail address and add that into the system.
As far as how many e-mails we send, we do a monthly scheduled e-mail, and then probably one to two times a month beyond that we'll send either a reminder or a concert announcement or a discount offer. When we're in a really busy concert time, we might send up to one per week, but we've tried to limit it to three or less per month.
Can you share one thing you've learned in your transition to e-mail marketing?
When I started at the concert hall, it was 1998, and the way we get information out to people has just changed so much since then. One thing that I was surprised to learn over time is that a lot more people, in a much wider range of ages than you would think, actually use e-mail.
We have a concert series that we gear towed senior citizens, it's on Tuesday mornings. It's been a really successful series for us, but we've been surprised at how many of those senior subscribers renewed their subscription with us online, and also get our e-mail newsletters and prefer to communicate with us by e-mail. We have collected e-mail addresses for approximately 20% of our senior audience.
Also, because e-mail is so affordable and because so many diverse people use it, don't limit yourself, don't try to segment too much or try to guess or deduce who you think is going to be interested in your information. If people don't want to read it and aren't interested in it, they can easily just delete it or toss it away.
How do you see your plan for the future?
So far, what we've been doing has been really successful, so we're definitely going to stick with the plan. But with everything changing online, with multimedia and things like that, we're making some changes to our Web site, including adding audio clips and maybe eventually video clips. We're just trying to integrate more, and provide an interactive experience between our audience and us, even when they're not here in our hall or in our galleries.
Visit the Sheldon Concert Hall's Web Site
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