Will Lester

Arts Marketing Campaigns and the Segments Who Love Them

Posted by Will Lester, Oct 09, 2013 0 comments


Will Lester

Will Lester Will Lester

Arts marketers are often in the business of predicting the unpredictable:  “If I do (insert tactic), will they come?”  The question applies to every piece: an expensive brochure, a low-cost email campaign, a Tweet or Facebook post—just about anything in the marketing arsenal.

Arts marketers aren’t psychic, but you can predict how your direct marketing campaigns will fare. Analyzing who took you up on your past offers tells you where your base of support for future campaigns lies.  Tracking response gives you predictive power for future campaigns:

  • We got almost a 1% response… We can expect a similar response on future mailings to these types of patrons, then.
  • We sold about $90,000… Historically, similar renewal campaigns have done the same. Let’s use this number in revenue projections.
  • Our ROI was 3-1, but we made a lot of revenue…When we spend more on acquisition campaigns, we make more.

Understanding response to campaigns, like so many things in arts marketing, is dependent on using good methodology to track patron behavior. At TRG, we research the behavior of patrons within individual organizations’ databases, as well as aggregate data in 20 community networks across the country. Our research helps arts marketers harness the power of their local arts market by describing how patrons behave across organizations in their city or region. Using this individual and aggregate data, we’ve been able to find the best ways to track patron behavior and start finding meaning in those numbers, including some I talked about in a recent webinar.

The problem that inevitably arises with response tracking is that many methods don’t accurately capture response. Promotional codes can be mis-categorized or typed in wrong at the point of sale. For example, if there’s a discount offer associated with the promo code, you’ll often get “hidden responses” where people received your piece but don’t use your discount code; instead, they choose to pay full price for a different date, seating section, etc.

Another common tracking problem is when you get responses from people to whom you never sent the mailing.  These people are obtaining the offer code from someone else, as when a discount code goes viral. Really, the only way to be sure who responded is to do a one-for-one match of the data after the fact—people who bought something (anything) matched back to the list of people you sent the offer to.

Arts Segments Segmented mailing list from an arts organization’s direct mail campaign

Knowing that a campaign did well requires context. First, you have to look at response rates of each segment from your mailing, email or telemarketing list to judge their effectiveness. Response rate is simply the number of responders divided by number mailed in each segment.

  • Awesome: These segments stand out right away as your best responders. Mail again in the future!
  • Pretty good: You broke even or did a little better than. Might be worth it to mail again.
  • Awful: You didn’t break even on these guys. It’s time to try a different approach with these people.

It’s obvious what to do in the future with the “Awesome” and “Awful” responders. But what about the “pretty good” segments? Let’s talk about the instances where “pretty good” responders become “really good” responders.

When is “Pretty Good” Good Enough?

You may find yourself saying, “Mail is so expensive, time consuming, and troublesome that I should only ever be contacting my ‘Awesome’ prospects. Why should I mail to my ‘Pretty Good’ customers?”  Mailing only the “awesome” prospects will certainly give you great ROI and be cheaper, but you won’t sell as many total. Including some of the “pretty good” segments is less efficient, but often grows your audience and the loyalty of newer or less engaged patrons.  Simply stated, if you don’t send out enough invitations, you won’t have enough people show up.

When picking which “pretty good” segments to include, you’ll need to consider the business environment you are operating in. If your organization is selling well, you may decide that mailing to the “pretty good” leads will only drag down your overall campaign ROI and not deliver meaningful new sales, which will leave you focusing exclusively on the “Awesome” leads.  That’s perfectly fine.  On the other hand if your situation is more dire and you need to put warm bodies in seats (at almost any cost), mailing the “pretty good” leads will deliver the incremental orders that could mean the difference in a positive perception of success in your venue and having the place “feeling” empty.

The bottom line: You hold the power. You may not be able to predict whether people will come in every arts marketing scenario, but with careful tracking you can get pretty close to predicting response to direct marketing campaigns. That gives you better control of who you contact and by extension, gives you control over the number of people who will respond.

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