I was taking a gander over at Artsmarketing.org and found a link to an arts e-marketing study that was done in England. While buying and attending habits of people in the US may differ from our European cousins, I found the suggestions about how to employ email and websites to good effect and the findings of the study to be quite thought provoking. Also, one of the really valuable pieces of information they provided was how to interpret the data logs from your website to determine how many hits, return visits, etc you are getting (pg 59-60) if you don’t have access to report software like Awstats. (And even if you do, it is tough to recognize what the heck you are looking at.)
Among their key findings were:
E-marketing can be seen to be cost-effective and valuable. However, there are many areas of potential development for participants and for the industry as a whole.
The ‘typical’ arts organisation (i.e. benchmarks for an arts organisation) will:
– spend less than 3% of their direct marketing budget on e-marketing activity
– spend less than 1p (marketing costs only) to attract each visit and each unique (different)
visitor to their site
– spend less than 3p (total online spend e.g. including maintenance) to attract each visit and
each unique visitor to their site
– spend less than 40p (marketing costs only) to achieve one ticket sale
– spend less than 10 seconds of staff time working on e-marketing to attract each visit
– spend 30 seconds – 1 minute to attract each unique visitor to their site
– attract between 2,000 and 8,000 unique visitors each month to the web site
– attract 30 – 45% of the visits to their site from unique visitors – different people
– receive 2 – 3% of all bookings online
– receive �2 – �4 more per ticket bought online than per ticket bought offline
Of those who visit the ‘typical’ arts organisations website (benchmarks for visitor statistics):
– 15 – 25% will return within the month, making 55 – 77% of the total visits to the site (the
Pareto effect works online!)
– they will visit 3 – 6 pages on the site each visit and will stay for 2 – 6 minutes
– each unique visitor will view just under 20 pages over any one month
– less than 2% will ‘convert’ to live visitors i.e. make a booking online (this is just slightly lower
than results found by other industries)
– less than 2% of them will sign up for further communication
The Arts Marketing Association felt that their research was somewhat incomplete simply because a number of organizations declined to participate because they had no idea how to access the web data needed or felt uncomfortable doing so. (They survey actually did provide instructions about which numbers to refer to.)
This lead to a fairly easily made conclusion that arts organizations were under utilizing their websites as a marketing resource and that the number of conversions to ticket sales or involvement with an organization could be increased if more attention was paid to designing and maintaining an effective site.
As much as I have been harping on the power of blogs and the internet for spreading the word about issues and ideas, I am ashamed to admit that I am hardly any better than the respondents in the survey and haven’t really taken a look at who is visiting my organization’s webpage or ticketing site. (And even worse, I know how to do it. I check the report on the people visit my blog regularly.)
Excellent, that was really well explained and helpful