Can you give us some email marketing tips?

You’ve asked a very big question here, which I could enjoy spending hours answering! I will try and give you some brief key tips that can help you move forward with your email marketing.

The first thing that occurs to me, in reading your question, is that you are being very tactical with your email marketing and you could really benefit from taking a more strategic approach. This will take time, but you can work on it in the background while you simultaneously improve your current tactics to improve response rates on your e-flyers.

Here are some of the elements that would be included and considered in an email marketing strategy:

•    Data acquisition – setting targets and developing tactics for growing your email list. Storage and maintenance of data within the UEMA (Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act) is also an important element.

•    Deployment method – which email management system or solution you will use to deploy your emails. There are different models and pricing structures, so it is important to find the right solution for your situation.

•    Style/type of communication – are you going to send out e-flyers (as you currently do), e-newsletters (more on this further down) or use email for other purposes such as research, fundraising or customer service?

•    Email ‘publications’ – your regular email communications should be treated as publications, so you need to determine frequency, content, structure, design tone of voice, editorial policies etc.

•    Monitoring and tracking – measuring results and ensuring this data feeds into an improvement programme.

•    Inegration – how does your email programme integrate with all other elements of your online strategy, if you have one (website, social media, web analytics etc) and your offline promotion? How can you use synergy between them all to increase the effectiveness across the board?

Using e-flyers is valid, but there are further ways that you could use email as a tool to engage loyalty and community, and also to drive revenue. One example is to develop a regular e-newsletter, which offers really interesting, but digestible, editorial content. This can create a more loyal following and provides something of real value to readers. For example, include interviews with artists involved with your organisation, competitions to encourage response, opportunities for readers to ask questions and have them answered in the e-news, behind-the-scenes tidbits, handy tips for attending concerts, quirky facts about your art form etc. Ensure that the features are consistent each time, and provide short paragraph story intros that link to the more detailed content on your site.

That way you drive people to your website where you can engage them further, and you add to the richness of content on your website.

In terms of improving the effectiveness of your e-flyers, yes there are some important key elements to remember. Here are a few of them:

•    Timing – when is the best day and time to deploy your emails? Although there is no ‘one size fits all’ standard for this, there are some general principles that apply. Monday mornings are not good because people are focused on the week ahead and have a full email inbox. Likewise Friday afternoons don’t work well because people are headed off for their weekend. Tuesday and Wednesday mornings are known to be good for higher open rates. Are your audience members using their email at work or at home? This can impact on timing.

•    Subject line – this is hugely important, as it determines whether a reader will open your email or not. You have one chance at this and you need to stand out in a busy inbox. Here is a great article that gives you 15 tips on writing effective subject lines - http://lyrishq.lyris.com/index.php/Email-Marketing/Email-Subject-Lines-1...

•    Content – is it just a repeat of your print brochure or ads, or are you offering the people on your email list something of real value? It is an act of faith nowadays for a person to share their email address with you. Treat it with the respect it deserves and make sure you deliver communication that is relevant to them and gives them some benefit to being on your list. For example, perhaps they get advance notice of on-sales, a value-add, a chance to be in a competition etc. At the very least, change the language from being ‘mass media promotional’ to being tailored to the loyal group of people who have joined your email list.

•    Call to action – this is always important and the most direct route you can give the reader to buying a ticket, the better. If you can, ensure that they land on a web page that acknowledges and welcomes them.

To make really good decisions on any of the above, and to be able to test and measure effectively, it is really important that you are receiving adequate statistics after deploying each email. You won’t get these if you are using Outlook or any other personal email client to deploy your email (which you shouldn’t be doing for a range of reasons). Open rates, clickthrough rates, bounce rates and unsubscribe rates are key indicators for the success of your email campaigns. For example, open rates that decrease gradually over time can be indicative that your email content is not delivering on your subject line promises. This is the best “research” you can buy in terms of seeing how people respond.

Hi Iain

Thanks for your advice. That is a really good point to remind ourselves of - that the email lands in someone's personal space. (I wish telemarkters would remember that about our homes!!) And also to remember the origins of email - one-to-one communication. Thanks for highlighting that very important point.

Vicki

Vicki Allpress Hill Connecting audiences to the arts va@vickiallpress.com

Hi Jackie

Thank you for asking this question - this is a particular area of interest of mine,

As you said, I have partly answered it elsewhere on this forum, but happy to give it some more focus and attention.

Eugene Carr, who is based in New York and promotes an arts-specific email marketing solution, released a book a while back called 'Wired for Culture' and there was an interesting statistic about arts patrons' responses to email from arts organisations - "51% of arts patrons claim that they read opt-in arts email as carefully as they read email from their friends".

I was really taken with this and it made me realise what an opportunity we have with email in the arts.

I have quite a strong opinion about email newsletters. I see them as very distinct from other forms of email promotion. I see an e-newsletter as a "publication" in its own right, and as such it should be seen in an editorial, not an advertorial, context. I am happy to be challenged, but I am fairly determined on this one.

I also have had success with e-newsletters (by 'success' I mean good consistent open rates, clickthrough rates, sign-up rates and low opt-out rates) so I think I might be onto something.

Some of the things I would suggest:

• Give the e-newsletter a 'publication name', a personality, a tone of voice, and a set of regular features that are consistent and readers can come to expect.
• Do not repeat your promotional messages in the e-news. People get enough of them elsewhere. Your e-news should contain info of value.
• That value, in my experience, includes things like behind-the-scenes insights, getting to know the personalities of the key people in your organisation, promoting a sense of community and belonging, sharing early news and announcements, providing competitions and opportunities to win things.
• Readers love things like interviews, tidbits, quirky facts, insights into artists' lives etc - create these, add them to your website and then link to them from your e-news. That way you build rich content on your website as you go.
• Also, don't run entire stories in your e-news that makes the reader scroll down and down and down. Give them the short overview and enable them to scan all the content quickly, then with "read more" links drive them to your website where you can start to truly engage with them and convert them into ticket sales, memberships etc. That is, after all, the whole point.
• Remember that the tone of voice in your newsletter can be more light-hearted and cheeky than the corporate face of your website.

Just a few of my key recommendations... I see so many arts e-newsletters that are just lists of calendar links or repeated advertising "broadcasts". There may be a place for a regular "calendar email" but an "email newsletter" is not it.

Vicki

Vicki Allpress Hill Connecting audiences to the arts va@vickiallpress.com