Marketing/PR

I was over at Arts Marketing blog last week catching up on Chad Bauman’s posts. One of his January posts contained some rules for administering bulk email lists. I looked over what he suggested and felt proud of myself for coming to many of those some conclusions on my own.

The next day I went in to work and reviewed the report for an email I had sent to my Listserv list the evening before. There was a long list of email address with the error message “Excessive Spam Content Detected” I had blatantly broken the rule about not using keywords common to spam in the subject line.

Now in my defense, I always do a test email to my work and two personal email address and the email passed those spam filters. It also passed through Yahoo and Hotmail filters so following Chad’s tip about using them as tests wouldn’t have helped. My email didn’t meet with the approval of the local Time Warner RoadRunner filter and that represents a pretty large chunk of folks.

What were the offending words you ask? One of the groups of musicians we are presenting boasted in an interview that they aimed to make people lose 20 lbs. by the end of the night through dancing. Thinking this was a good hook, my email subject line blared “Lose Weight with Band X at MyTheatre.”

In the message body I explained the boast, talked about the group a little and gave the ticket information which is probably why it got through most other filters. The timing was a little humbling given that I had been so smug about having already divined the guidelines.

Knowing the guidelines and following them are two different thing though, eh? Just goes to prove you should always approach what appears to be information with which you are overly familiar with an open mind.

Ah, Christmas Break! When no one is around and you can work on all those things you couldn’t when the phones were ringing and people were asking you questions. Though I have to admit the absence of others left many unanswered questions like “where do we keep the x?”

One of the suggestions that consistently pops up on our surveys is that we should advertise our events on Myspace.com. For the last few days I have been creating a presence on Myspace for my theatre. I am usually a little reserved about joining in on the newest thing.

First, if the trend is just a flash in the pan you waste time and resources getting involved only to have it wane. Second, I like to assess the strengths and weaknesses of a new trend to see if it really holds any value for me and if so, how to best employ it. I remember the 90s when everyone had to have a webpage but didn’t know how best to use it. People were adding every new special effects feature they could. Unfortunately, it all outstripped the capacity of a modem connection and ended up hurting relationships with businesses rather than enhancing them.

In the case of a Myspace presence, signing up is free and I already have images and text developed for my website. There isn’t a terribly large investment of time or new resources to make it happen. Also, Myspace has tools that allow you to tell all your friends about an upcoming events with a click of a button. Now all my theatre needs is friends…

One thing I do know I will have to spend time on is making some small changes to how I present the theatre and its events on Myspace vs. our website. Even though there are zillions of people on Myspace they actually comprise a niche market that will react better to a different approach than the one on our public website.

Speaking of fine tuning ones approach, I broke one of my cardinal rules of press release writing today. I quoted a reviewer. My general feeling is that quoting a reviewer is a crutch for the lazy and/or unimaginative.

However, I do think I used the quote in an imaginative way. The performing company had included quotes and newspaper editorials from audience members that were just dynamite. For my press release I essentially said that one might think the group was excellent from what X reviewer said, but when you read that audience members said this, this and this, not only does it sound like the reviewer is being miserly with his praise in comparison, but you can see the group really engages and excites audience members unfamiliar with the discipline.

Yeah, I know written here it sounds like I have essentially replicated those movie ads where they have “candid” interviews with people who saw the show. I think my execution is clever and original enough to expiate my sin of quoting a reviewer.

About a month ago I got a call from a reviewer who had some questions. At the end of the call she commented that she really liked my writing style and that my press releases were interesting to read. If nothing else, I know I am on the right path with my efforts to write better releases.

I have had some of those “easy for you to say” moments the last few months and I thought I would relate my experience in the interest of the “Practical Solutions…” subheading of this blog. (And in the hope that someone out there has a better, practical solution!)

Over the summer I worked on putting together a way to send out an email newsletter to interested patrons on a monthly basis. Thus far we have sent out a sneak peek at the season email and three focused on the month ahead. I have been pleased at the response we have gotten reflected by the number of people who cite that as their source of information when buying tickets and by how much earlier we are selling tickets for upcoming events.

I have encouraged people to do this sort of thing in past entries and I do so again.

But, as I noted, it was easier to say than accomplish.

To make up my newsletter, I used Microsoft Word placing a photo in one cell of a table and the text in another. Word has an option to send to a mail recipient as HTML which moves everything to my email client ready to go. With the correct settings the text flows around the pictures nicely as the window of your email is re-sized and the font size will automatically be enlarged by anyone who has sight problems and has set their email program to do so.

The problem is, it looked good when I emailed to myself at work (where I use Microsoft Entourage), but what was sent to my home address looked strange. The font size would change from line to line and strange spaces appeared. People with Yahoo email accounts got entirely blank emails.

In an attempt to remedy this problem, I have tried to use Dreamweaver web publishing software and InDesign desktop publishing software to find a solution, but they don’t export information directly in the body of an email. (At least that I have discovered.)

One option is creating a PDF of the document with Adobe Acrobat. You can place the a PDF directly in the body of an email. The problem is while it looks great, it is static. Resizing the email window cuts off the text and the text doesn’t automatically enlarge in accordance with your settings. Also, the inserted PDF doesn’t always appear well or at all in some email clients.

What I settled on this past month was sending out the newsletter as an Acrobat attachment. Using the free Acrobat Reader, people could look at it more dependably and enlarge it as they needed. The problem with this approach is that there is no impact upon opening the email because of the lack of pictures. All they see is a note saying the newsletter is attached. I am counting on people to be interested enough to open the attachment and to download Acrobat Reader if they don’t have it already.

If anyone knows of a fairly cheap, quality solution, I would love to know about it. I did explore options with the university alumni association about how they send out their monthly e-newsletter. It turns out, they send out an email with story synopses and hyperlinks to a web page with the full story with big lovely pictures on it.

For me this has the same problem as the PDF attachment. Without persuasive visuals you are totally dependent on curiosity to get people to take action to explore further.

One last element of the “easier said” kind. Constantly updating an email list with additions and subtractions is a pain in the butt and offers many opportunities for mistakes. You can go the route of creating an address group in your email client which is honestly a pain to maintain, but there are other options.

One option that I blessedly have available to me is a Listserv. I send my newsletter to one listserv address and all the people subscribed to the list receive the email. You can set it up so people can join or leave by themselves and you can add or subtract them yourself either individually or en masse.

The software is readily available and pretty easy to install if you are a semi-tech geek and have an in-house mail server. If someone else hosts your mail server, they can probably set a listserv up for you. Even though they have a web interface for altering the settings it can take a little trial and error getting things set the way you like it. (Actually, the interface is easy enough to use, it is the manual/help files and the commands you have to enter that are about 10 years behind the times.) The license for the limited or standard software runs between $450 and $9000. If you figure out how much you would spend mailing out postcards every month, you will probably find it is worth it. (I am betting running a handful of lists will cost toward the lower end of the spectrum.)

Another option is to use an email marketing service like Constant Contact (I have never used them, but someone who has suggested them as a possible solution to my e-newsletter problem.) Essentially with services like this one you open an account and enter all your email addresses on their servers. They provide tools to categorize your addresses (subscribers, experimental series, donors who subscribe, etc) and even offer templates with which to create snazzy emails. Among the features they offer (and I haven’t read them all) is the ability to see how many emails were opened and how many people clicked on the links contained in them. Pricing seems pretty reasonable–$30 a month for 500-2500 addresses with unlimited emails a month.

One last thing to be aware of if you decide to explore the e-newsletter route is the CAN-SPAM law governing commercial emailing. Essentially it says you have to accurately identify who you are, why you are sending the email and offer an opportunity to opt-out in the future. For most arts organizations, an angry response and wholesale boycott of your programs will indicate you are not in compliance with the law long before you show up on the FTC’s radar.

I was at a meeting a couple weeks ago to learn how the tourism authority was going to promote the arts over the next year. Someone suggested that the arts organization program along a unified theme and use that as something of a hook. The same thing had been suggested at the same meeting last year. Remembering some of the problems with that idea, I was going to speak up but someone effectively removed the idea from the table.

One of the travel writers in attendance told us that the publications that commissioned stories weren’t really interested in stories about themed seasons. She mentioned a number of other ways to pique interest, but said that wasn’t one of them.

If that is true for travel journals, I wonder if it is true for local publications as well. Early on in the planning of our current season, we noticed that a theme of revolving around storytelling ran through it. We started promoting the season with a “What’s Your Story” theme and invited people to submit anecdotes on the website. We got plenty of orders but nothing submitted. (Not terribly surprising or worrisome) But we also got no acknowledgment from any media.

Granted there isn’t a real big compelling hook in the theme. I was wondering if anyone had any recent success with getting recognition for themed seasons. I wouldn’t mind terribly if the media doesn’t care for them. It’s less effort and brainpower on my part if I don’t have to come up with a common thread to bind my season to get attention.

That said, about seven years ago when I was working in Orlando, FL, my theatre was part of a cooperative effort on the part of many arts organizations to present works based around Oscar Wilde. If you put any effort in to it, you can easily arrive at our slogan- Go Wilde! The local papers did cover the effort with a feature story and mentioned the theme whenever a show that was part of the theme was being performed.

I don’t know if it is a matter of different time, different place that is dictating the lack of interest in mentioning the theme. The papers in Orlando might not have been as interested in writing something up if it weren’t for the fact people could get a discount by grabbing a free punchcard and going around to visit the different events.

A theme is one thing, but a theme that motivates people to buy the paper to find out where and when the next discounted performance in the series might be provides a newspaper with a good reason to report on it.

Anyone else out there have any successes or failures at promoting a themed season or series of events in cooperation with others?
Email me or comment below..