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5.24.2005
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Volume Three
Issue Five
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Welcome to our May Monthly Update. This month's Client Feature highlights Long Island's Friends of the Arts and in the interview below Debbi Honorof, FOTA's Associate Executive Director for Marketing and Development, explains how e-mail has helped reveal some interesting information about their patrons. Many people ask what it takes to build an e-mail list and whether incentives are necessary. Read on, for an interseting case study.
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Client Feature: Friends of the Arts (Long Island)
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Picnicking outside FOTA Pavilion prior to a Summer Festival concert.
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PatronMail Client Since: July, 2004
Starting e-list size: 2,471
Current e-list size: 4,433
For more than 30 years, Friends of the Arts has been bringing musical performances to the people of Long Island.
Founded in 1972 to enrich the cultural life of Long Island, FOTA began by presenting community classical concerts to raise money to enhance local school music programs. The concerts were very popular and soon expanded to larger venues, ensembles and orchestras.
Over the years, FOTA's programs have grown to include an annual outdoor Beethoven Festival, a Long Island Summer Festival and a Jazz Festival, all of which take place at Planting Fields Arboretum in Oyster Bay. FOTA also hosts Concerts at Coe Hall, a Chamber music series held at a Gold Coast mansion on the grounds of Planting Fields and through ArtReach, they bring innovative arts-in-education programs to schools throughout Long Island.
In the Q & A that follows, Debbi Honorof, FOTA's Associate Executive Director for Marketing and Development, describes how e-mail is helping this multi-faceted organization to market such a wide range of events and activities.
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Q & A with Debbi Honorof, FOTA's Associate Executive Director for Marketing and Development
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Debbi Honorof, FOTA's Associate Executive Director for Marketing and Development
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To begin, Debbi, can you give us a brief explanation of your role and responsibilities at FOTA?
As Associate Executive Director for Marketing and Development, I am responsible for marketing our concerts and also for fundraising. This includes identifying and cultivating sponsors for our concerts, raising money for ArtReach, our arts-in-education program, and producing our special events, including an Opening Night Gala in June, which this year features Seal in concert.
As with many organizations, e-mail has become an integral part of your communication efforts. Can you describe why it is such a useful tool for FOTA in particular?
Because so many people use the Internet for researching concert information and purchasing tickets online, e-mail has become a very important part of our communications and marketing efforts. It has also meant that we have been able to reduce our print advertising expenditures significantly.
The ease of targeting our e-mails to specific groups (e.g. member, volunteer, educator or according to the type of music they like, e.g. jazz, folk, pop, etc.) is one of the significant benefits that we are taking advantage of with e-mail. Because we offer so many different programs and events, we send focused e-mails to the different groups, depending on which event we want to publicize and which ones the patrons are interested in. Right now, we do not send a regular e-newsletter, but it is definitely in our plans.
The design of our e-mails is also important. After attending a recent PatronMail seminar, I re-designed an e-mail that we were about to send which was intended to entice people to become FOTA members. I made sure all the important information went "above the fold" and I moved the item I wanted them to respond to, the "Become a Member" link, higher up on the page. We had a 52.4% open rate, 252 total click-thrus, and about 60 memberships that we can trace directly to the e-mail!
With such responsive recipients, much of your focus must be on increasing your e-mail list. What are your main e-list building tactics? Where and how do you collect names and addresses?
We are trying to build our list in a number of ways. On all our printed material, we encourage people to visit our website. Once on our website, it's easy for people to join our e-list. We have a lot of people coming to our website through artist websites, so it's important to collect their information so that we can market to them in the future.
At the suggestion of our Marketing Committee, we have asked our Board members to send an e-mail asking their customers, employees and constituents to visit our website and sign-up for our e-mail list (so that they can receive a discount coupon for our concerts). We have designed our sign-up form so that we can use promotional codes to measure which Board member the website visitors came from.
This summer, in addition to sending weekly e-mails about our concerts, we plan to try out some e-mail promotions and because most new patrons learn about our concerts from friends, we plan to develop an incentive program for referrals.
You recently had a very interesting discovery during one of your e-mail address collection drives. Would you share the story?
We have a lot of concert-goers that come at the last minute and buy their tickets with cash at the gate. This does not leave enough time to collect their e-mail addresses. So last summer, we decided to collect this information (names, addresses, e-mail addresses, and how they heard about the concert) by having volunteers hand out cards at the concert and ask people to fill them out. As an incentive we purchased a few hundred penlights to give to people when they handed the cards back. After the first two concerts we had used up all the penlights and didn't have time to order more. We kept handing out the cards anyway and guess what...we got just as many completed cards back! I guess people don't always need an incentive!
What effect will this discovery have on your future efforts at list-building, if any? What has this told you about your audience and patrons?
What we learned from this experience is that we have loyal patrons who want us to keep in touch with them. If you give people the opportunity to stay in touch they are happy to take it. And our stats show this...we consistently have high open rates (an average of 46%) justifying the return on investment of e-mail as a communication tool as well as proving that people really do want to hear from us!
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Click here to visit FOTA's website
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How Does Your E-Mail Look?
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It's tough to handle e-marketing in-house. If you're using Outlook, your mail probably looks like the first image - not exactly the kind of professional image you'd like to project.
In addition, you're probably having to handle opt-out requests and bounced e-mail in your inbox.
If you're feeling that you'd like to move up from your in-house method, but don't want to spend a fortune, we'd welcome the opportunity to demonstrate PatronMail to you.
With PatronMail you can:
* Create and Send professional looking e-mails without knowing HTML
* Track & Compare your results with other arts organizations
* Build your list automatically on your web site
* Comply with the CAN-SPAM law, and "remove" requests automatically
We invite you to schedule a free 15-minute phone demonstration to learn more about how cost-effective PatronMail could be for your organization.
And, if your list is under 1,000 names, ask us about our special "starter" pricing plan.
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Click here to request a PatronMail demonstration
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Please watch for our next Monthly Update, coming June 28, 2005.
Our mailing address is: 850 Seventh Avenue, New York, NY 10019
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