Featured Arts Marketer: Bil Schroeder

Q & A with Bil Schroeder, Director of Marketing for the Studio Arena Theatre

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Featured Arts Marketer: Bil Schroeder

Bil Schroeder, Director of Marketing for Buffalo's Studio Arena Theatre, claims to be "what you might call a theatre management generalist". After receiving his MFA in Theatre Management & Promotion from Wayne State University in Detroit he worked as General Manager of Oklahoma Shakespearean Festival, Public Relations Manager at Alabama Shakespeare Festival, and Media Relations Director for Yale School of Drama/Yale Repertory Theatre.

As Buffalo's only fully professional theater, Studio Arena operates on a budget of $4.2 million annually and produces seven or eight plays per season, ranging from comedies, dramas and musicals to world-premieres.  The theater also offers year-round classes and educational programs through the 78-year old Studio Arena Theatre School.  For this year's season opener, Studio Arena produced the world-premiere of Ring of Fire: The Johnny Cash Musical Show, in its pre-Broadway tryout.

Studio Arena has only recently begun implementing large scale e-mail marketing strategies and in the Q & A that follows, Bil describes how this is making a big difference to their overall marketing success.

Q & A with Bil Schroeder, Director of Marketing for the Studio Arena Theatre

Studio Arena is one of the oldest resident theaters in the US. Tell us about your audience and what it is about Buffalo that has allowed (or perhaps caused) the theater to run successfully for so long.

Our demographics are very typical for theatre -- 65% female, college education or higher, earning $50,000 or above. The exception is that we skew just slightly younger than a lot of companies; our average age is about 47.  The founders of Studio Arena Theatre saw great opportunities in forming the first professional producing theatre in Buffalo in 1964.  Their visionary spirit caused a real excitement in the community, which brought financial support and the ability to mount world premieres and transfer productions to other theaters and Broadway. This, in turn, caused more excitement and built a large subscriber base, which fostered a sense of belonging. 

Now we are one of 16 theatre companies in town, and our audience's idea of what makes for exciting theatre has changed quite a bit over the last 41 years. For us, communication is incredibly important, and we try to incorporate tools into the theatre-going experience that allow for feedback.  We try to send the message that we're listening, and more importantly, show them that we're listening. Our audiences tend to express a sense of ownership in the company, as a result.


You only recently began using e-mail as a marketing tool. What were the most important factors that influenced your decision to jump in at this point, and what are your expectations/strategies for adding this new element to your marketing plan?

We'd been collecting e-mail addresses for years, when we decided to start sending out mini-campaigns through Outlook. Then the real education began!  Every effort was filled with hundreds of bounced e-mails, 72-hour delivery in most cases, duplications, jamming up the server, blacklisting.  It just did not work. 

In 2004 we began analyzing our data base, which included a demographic / psychographic append from an outside source.  Suddenly, our audience appeared wealthier and more techno savvy than we had suspected.  This lead to a progression /regression analysis of three seasons of buying habits, which showed us that we were great at attracting new single ticket buyers, but were having difficulty getting them back into the theatre. 

So, our data base is full of households who know our product, have plenty of disposable income, but need a more compelling invitation back to our theatre.  With the increased costs of printing and postage, we needed a solution that was not only more economical than direct mail, but could be deployed more discretely (for special discount offers), faster, and much more frequently. Fortunately for us, one of our trustees is a marketing genius who helped us conceptualize an "e-club concept." 

So there wasn't really any institutional resistance to adding e-mail to the mix? Was it easy to get your colleagues on board?

Initially there was some concern that I would replace all direct mail with e-mail, and that we'd flood our patrons with too many e-mail messages.  Neither happened.  It's true that mass e-mail is one more tool to add to your campaign to increase the number of impressions each potential consumer can receive.  Its flexibility and timeliness have converted most of the resistors.  Now, we're working on expanding our lists to serve theatre school students and donor / non-ticket-buyers.


Tell us what your "e-club" entails?

Our E-club offers discounted tickets and "insider information" to the patrons on our e-mail list. If a performance isn't selling well we create a special discount and promote it only to e-club members (all patrons who receive our e-mails).  We also offer information and juicy tidbits about the productions - stories that the news media doesn't pick-up - exclusively to the e-club members.  Essentially, our E-club acts as a ticket and information clearing house, and everyone wins.

It's been pretty successful, right? Tell us how your patrons are responding to your e-marketing efforts?

The effectiveness was first apparent when we were launching Ring of Fire, which up until two months before opening was a complete unknown as a show -- no one knew what to expect.  We began a series of e-mails where we shared "insider information" and sales jumped! We sent several e-mails which generated an increase in sales of about $1,500 to $2,000 per day for a period of about three days after each e-mail. 

So we put our inventory management skills to work, picking out performances that were underperforming at the box office and offering specials, like a free wine tasting along with a ticket discount or free parking. The inventory moved! Details about the show that we were not able to get the media interested in covering became exclusive information that our patrons could and did share.  E-mail was a significant factor, along with radio and print ads, in taking Ring of Fire from an unknown to a huge success.

As you may expect we have continued with this approach. For our second show of the season, Trying by Joanna McClelland Glass, we experienced jumps of about $1,000 per day for three days after each e-mail.  For our current production of A Christmas Story, our jumps have varied from $1,500 per day to $2,500 per day and have lasted for about four days. We normally average about 15% of total sales online but with A Christmas Story we are seeing about 25-30% of purchases happening online!

Where do you hope to be with your e-mail strategy in, say, one year from now?

In one year, I hope our e-mail strategy will be an integral part of all possible marketing goals and initiatives.  Because it is new to us, it tends to be the last component added onto each marketing campaign, which is a shame.  With this kind of effectiveness, timeliness, and affordability it should move up the list of efforts and replace other, less effective and costly, components. 

Right now e-mail is communicating our message and driving traffic to our web site and box office.  I want more e-mail addresses, more effective messaging, more traffic, more sales, faster turnaround, more immediate response.  That's not really a strategy, is it? But the goal is "MORE."

Click here to visit the Studio Arena Theatre's Web site

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