The video teleconference was arranged after Taylor’s personal assistant Ellyn Kusmin spotted an e-mail from NASA scientist Dan Cook, head of Behavioral Health and Performance Space Medicine sent to Taylor’s website, like any fan.Read the Article
We discovered that while the overall frequency of checking e-mail has stayed about the same (just over 80% say they’re checking multiple times a day), the locations where people who check their e-mail has changed a lot! I’m going to pull out some very specific results to make a point.
Here’s benchmark data from 2008 for the question, “Where do you check your e-mail?”
8% said they check e-mail in bed
3% at the beachRead the Article
But out of those three fundraising requests, two of them arrived in envelopes without a return address and with no indication of who the sender was.
Why would I even open that letter?
I can tell from the postmark that it was sent by SOME nonprofit, because it has the non-profit postage rate on it, but there is nothing on this envelope that motivates me to bother ripping it open.
In Breaking the Fifth Wall, we talk about how the subject line is the most important part of your e-mail. It’s a marketing message! And even though roughly 70 percent of people on your list may not open that e-mail, they will still see the subject line in their inbox. You should make sure you’re using it to communicate a message of value.
So if you think about it, isn’t your envelope actually the subject line of your direct mail? Read the Article
Twice a month I offer expansions on the themes and topics that Michelle Paul and I wrote about in our book, Breaking the Fifth Wall: Rethinking Arts Marketing for the 21st Century. If you like these, you can buy the book from us here, or on Amazon’s Kindle or Barnes & Nobles Nook.
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Do you know who is on your e-mail list?
How many of your e-mail subscribers are just an e-mail address, not even a first or last name? And for the ones whose names you have, what exactly do you know about them? With a little bit of work and research, you can mine your data to segment your list in lots of useful ways. To get you started, here are some suggestions: Read the Article
Twice a month I offer expansions on the themes and topics that Michelle Paul and I wrote about in our book, Breaking the Fifth Wall: Rethinking Arts Marketing for the 21st Century. If you like these, you can buy the book from us here, or on Amazon’s Kindle or Barnes & Nobles’Nook.
In Chapter 9, we suggest that the online ticketing experience is actually the beginning of the cultural event, and perhaps the most important interactive experience your patron will have with your organization.
One aspect of ticketing that nobody talks about is the language used during the ticket-buying process and in the confirmation e-mail after the ticket has been purchased. Isn’t it true that if a customer were standing at your box office, you’d want the agent selling the ticket to be friendly and helpful? When I’m buying arts tickets, that idea doesn’t always seem to translate. In particular, when I receive the ticket confirmation e-mail, it’s almost always filled with unfriendly, negative, and legalistic language: Read the Article
In our chapter on e-mail marketing (titled “The Least Exciting but Most Effective Marketing Tool"), we take a moment to focus on e-mail subject lines. Frankly, this topic is so important that we could have written a full chapter on it.
If you’re tracking the success of your e-mails, you know that average open rates for the industry are around 20 percent, and if you’re doing really well, click-through rates are around 3 percent. So if you have 2,000 people on your e-mail list, you can be sure that about 400 are opening that e-mail.
But here’s a fact that many forget: if your subscribers are checking their inbox at all, then 100% of them are seeing your subject line! Subject lines, then, are the most important real estate of the entire e-mail because of their reach. Read the Article
