Let’s walk before we run

Heather Maitland investigates how we are getting on with our e-mailing campaigns

Last autumn, my colleague, Beth Aplin, joined 13 venues’ email lists to see what happened. Although she was playing the role of a dance enthusiast, just five venues sent her relevant emails at an appropriate frequency. She got nothing at all from five venues and one venue sent her an average of two emails a week about everything from kids’ shows to musicals.
We hear a lot about the excellent results achieved by some of our colleagues but many of us aren’t getting the basics of email marketing right.

The research is clear and consistent. Email marketing works because it is low cost, easy to do and is customisable. Unfortunately, much of what we send out is ineffective because we ignore that third essential factor. Like any form of permission marketing, email must be ‘anticipated, personal and relevant’…

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Profiling on-line ticket buyers

Each year since 2001, ts.com has sent out email questionnaires to people who purchased tickets from client organisations who want to participate in the research. In 2004, we joined forces to explore in more detail customers’ attitudes to the online purchasing process, ecommerce and new technology. 18 organisations participated in the project resulting in 6,931 responses to the email survey and a useful profile of on-line customers.

Does online purchasing attract new audiences?

5% of all respondents to the email questionnaire were first time attenders at the relevant organisation. But if you have undertaken self-completion questionnaire research in your organisation, you will have noticed that certain types of customer are more likely to respond: in particular, they tend to be older and to be more frequent purchasers. The Swan Theatre in High Wycombe and Newbury Racecourse volunteered to help us test if this was true for email questionnaires. During the two week research period, all their online customers were asked to respond to a short questionnaire at the end of the ticket buying process. They also asked three core questions of their telephone and counter customers. In both venues, this showed that new and infrequent customers were significantly under-represented among respondents to the email questionnaire.

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