A message from Michelle Paul, VP Product, Patron Technology…
As of this month, we’ve officially shut down PatronMail after more than 15 years of operation. The last PatronMail email campaign (ever!) was sent at 7:00 AM on March 1st, 2017.
We decided to “sunset” the PatronMail service this year because we’ve made a choice to focus our energy and resources on PatronManager development instead… and we’ve spent a lot of time in recent months making sure all our clients were aware of the change. But now that it’s all over, I didn’t want to let this moment pass without saying a few words about the history and legacy of PatronMail.
Our CEO Gene Carr’s first book Wired for Culture, published in April 2003, begins with an enthusiastic introduction to a brand new kind of marketing tool:
Fellow arts marketers, there’s a new and fantastic world of e-mail marketing waiting at your fingertips. It’s faster, cheaper, and more effective than practically any other kind of marketing, and arts patrons are responding to it in amazing ways. In this era of budget cutting and last minute ticket buying, e-mail can help you do MORE marketing for LESS money and get BETTER results.
What’s really amazing is that now, almost 14 years later, everything he wrote back then remains just as true today! (Well, except for the “new” part, and the fact that we don’t hyphenate the word “e-mail” anymore.) According to our client research in 2016, email remains the most effective marketing tool you have, by far:
We’re proud to have led the email marketing revolution in the arts world. Since PatronMail’s launch in November 2001, arts organizations have used it to send, collectively, 697,637 email campaigns. That’s 2.7 BILLION email messages total, advertising ticket sales, asking for donations, and generally keeping arts patrons up to date on all the happenings in the arts world.
Here are some early “highlights,” a few of the first PatronMail campaigns from the 2001-2003 era:
Though it’s time for us to say goodbye to PatronMail, we’re still just as enthusiastic as ever about the future of email, and we look forward to the continued success of our clients as they use other integrated email marketing tools with their PatronManager accounts.
I’m particularly excited about our new integration between PatronManager and Emma — I know from working with them over the last several months that the folks over there share my own interest (obsession?) with email marketing, and are dedicated to helping our shared customers be successful. Here are two of my favorite blog posts on Emma’s site:
Lastly, on behalf of our entire company, I want to say thank you to everyone who used PatronMail over the years — around 2,200 companies and organizations in total, across the United States and in the U.K.
It’s the end of an era, to be sure, but it’s also been a natural progression from those early days of “a new and fantastic world of e-mail marketing” to where we are today. PatronManager wouldn’t exist without our PatronMail users — the relationships we developed with you through the years, your desire for an arts-focused CRM system that would let you step up your marketing efforts, and your support and trust as we embarked upon this extraordinary journey of building a box office ticketing/fundraising/marketing system on the Salesforce platform. We’ve loved being your partner through the years and look forward to more innovation in the future.