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volume four
issue twelve
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Welcome to our final E-Marketer of the Month for 2006. This issue features Lisa Higgins Pechter of The Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival who discusses how e-marketing is changing the results for the small, seasonal organization.
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Featured E-Marketer: Lisa Higgins Pechter
Director of Marketing & PR, The Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival
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Lisa Higgins Pechter & The Bard
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In 1990 Lisa Higgins-Pechter became the Director of Marketing and Public Relations for the Performing & Fine Arts Department at DeSales University in Center Valley, Pennsylvania. As part of the professional outgrowth of the Department, she helped start The Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival which launched its first season in the summer of 1992. In 1997 Lisa left her role to stay home with her three daughters, returning in 2003 at the request of Rev. Gerard J. Schubert, O.S.F.S., the Festival's founder.
Since returning, Lisa has been part of a growing festival that has seen great increases in ticket sales while moving to expand their e-marketing efforts.
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Q & A with Lisa Higgins Pechter
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Tell us a bit about The Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival and its relationship with DeSales. How is the event structured and supported by the university?
Each summer, from June through August, The Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival (PSF) produces two Shakespearean plays, two non-Shakespearean plays and one children's play as well as a free outdoor Green Show - for a total of about 170 performances in ten weeks.
PSF was founded in 1991 as a professional theatre company and an independent not-for-profit on the campus of DeSales University. In addition to providing a diverse region with quality classical theatre, the Festival also provides internships for actors, technicians and administrators to work side by side with professionals. Most of the professional artists come from New York and Philadelphia, many with Tony, Obie, Barrymore (Philadelphia) and Emmy awards and nominations to their credit.
As host of the Festival, DeSales University contributes use of its theatre and production facilities, as well as campus housing for a visiting company of artists numbering over 100. Following a management transition in 2003, the university began to provide significant additional resources to the Festival, including web site hosting and management and improved benefits to the staff.
As
a summer festival, how do you schedule your e-mail campaigns? Do you
send e-mails year-round? If so what kind of information are you sending
in the "off-season"?
We have a variety of news and
information we convey to our patrons all year round to keep PSF on their screens (and
minds). In the fall, we send out news on our WillPower Tour,
a production we take on the road to middle schools and high schools in
Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware. For the holidays, we advertise
our gift packages (season tickets for the following summer) and during the winter months, we send out casting news.
During the summer while the Festival is in full swing, we try to respect our patrons and only send out
e-postcards once a week. The e-postcards feature one or two shows (we often have two shows running concurrently in two separate theatres) and a strong graphic (the show logo and/or a photo or
two) which originates in the ticket brochure and is used in subsequent print ads. The copy is tight and bright and often includes "Opens next week!" or "Closes this week" or "12 performances sold out!" as well as review snippets. All e-postcards include a "buy online" that
links directly to our Web site.
You've grown your e-mail list significantly in the last two years. How have you collected so many e-subscribers?
When you start from an e-list as small as ours, there's no place to go but up. When we first signed on with PatronMail, we had about 750 e-mail addresses from an existing patron database of over 23,000 households. Our e-list now includes 4,000.
We aim to collect e-mail addresses from every patron who places an order via phone, Web or mail. As the number of online ticket orders increases, those e-mail addresses are the easiest to capture. We are working to improve getting an e-mail address from every phone order, by making e-mail addresses a required field in the order process. We know we have to continue to develop a total plan to expand our e-mail lists.
Tell us about your increased ticket sales this summer. How did e-mail and the Web factor into the sales?
Since our new management team assumed leadership in the fall of 2003, and shifted marketing dollars back to reconnecting with our closest demographics (instead of tourists), ticket
sales have increased by 44% to nearly 30,000 patrons this past summer. Online orders increased 60% from 2005 to 2006 with the number of tickets sold online increasing from 1,285 to 2,008.
Happily, we've seen a direct correlation between online ticket orders and our weekly e-postcards. Throughout the summer, we generally average 1 to 5 online sales a day, but on the day the e-postcards are sent that jumps to 6 to 10. The Web has been useful as a vehicle for advertising too. Over the first two weeks of the season, we ran 40,000 impressions on a leading local newspaper's Web site. The ad featured the same images from our ticket brochure and a link to our Web site. There was an instantaneous jump in our online orders to the double digits. The first four days the ad ran, online orders were: 12, 11, 8 and 7. We ran another ad two weeks later in the season and again saw the same increases.
We've learned that is important to pay attention to timing everything - our
mailings, our ads and e-marketing - to coincide and reinforce each
other. We try to have as many impressions as possible targeted to our
regional market. It's great to hear people say: "Every time I turned
around, I saw something about the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival." Our highest weekly online sales this summer came at the end of July while we were playing Othello and My Fair Lady. We combined every medium to get the message out: an editorial feature in The Morning Call (the leading local newspaper) as well as an ad on their Web site; print ads in two other newspapers; an
e-postcard sent mid-week which
included rave review snips; and throughout the week, TV ads were on our local PBS station promoting Othello. The total online sales for the week were over 100!
We plan to shift
more money to Web advertising next summer, looking at Web sites that
match our demographic as well as those that target the younger
audiences that we want to reach. We want to continue to build the e-marketing component of our overall strategy, especially as we introduce programming inspired by our mission - to enrich, engage, inspire and entertain the widest possible audience.
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Wired for Culture: How E-mail is Revolutionizing Arts Marketing (Second Edition)
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Web Sites for Culture: Essential Principles for Great Arts Web Sites
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Sign-Up for Culture: The Arts Marketer's Guide to Building an Effective E-mail List
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- How arts patrons behave online and how to market to them
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$15 each from Patron Technology (click here to buy)
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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.
Watch for the next edition of our E-Marketer of the Month
coming January 9, 2007.
Patron Technology
850 Seventh Avenue, Suite 801 | New York, NY 10019 | 212-271-4328
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