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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:

By tenure: How long have your oldest e-mail subscribers been on your list, and what is the ratio to those that joined within the last six months? What is the average tenure of your list?

By participation: How many are donors? Subscribers? Single ticket buyers? How many signed up when they were buying a ticket for the first time?

By sign-up method: How many signed up in person, on your site, or when they were making a donation?

Finally, do you know what portion of your audience (or members) you even have an e-mail address for? And is that high enough?

Hopefully these questions will motivate your thinking about building your list and then targeting your e-mail marketing to some of these segments.

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