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volume five ~ issue one
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Welcome to our January E-Marketing Organization of the Month, featuring High Five Tickets to the Arts, an innovative New York City organization that has particular relevance for us at Patron Technology, since our president, Gene Carr, was one of its founders. Read on to find out how High 5 is making full use of the Web to reach its target market...teens.
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Featured Client: High 5 Tickets to the Arts
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Ada Ciniglio,
Executive Director
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PatronMail Client Since: 2003
Starting E-List Size: 3,000
Current E-List Size: 9,000
High Five Tickets to the Arts was founded in 1995 to encourage young people in the New York City area to access the arts by providing tickets to the performing and visual arts for
only $5.
Ada Ciniglio, High 5's Founding Executive Director, came to the organization with a background that included both the corporate and not-for-profit sectors: communications and marketing at Chase; fundraising and development at The Drawing Center; sponsorship at Bravo and WNET; and public education at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. High 5 was a perfect fit for this broad skill-set and when Citigroup Foundation offered the seed money to get High 5 started, Ada took on the challenge of building the organization from the ground up.
Since
its beginnings (which coincided with the early development of the Internet),
High 5 has understood the power of using the online medium to reach out
to young people. In the Q & A that follows, Ada highlights how High 5 has grown its e-marketing activities steadily since that time, morphing from minimal e-marketing, to their current situation... as an online marketing powerhouse.
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Q & A with Ada Ciniglio,
Executive Director
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To begin, Ada, tell us about High 5's mission. How does it work?
From the start, High 5's mission has been to make the arts affordable and accessible. We've kept ticket prices at the $5 level since we started, and when we added museums to our roster, we set the price at two tickets for $5. We realized that information was the key to making arts accessible and if we were to really reach new and younger audiences, delivering information to them was the way to encourage their participation. We consciously tried to remove barriers to young people's ability to attend. We let them bring adults with them; we expanded our market to included middle as well as high school students and we didn't set any membership or geographic requirements for qualifying.
Teens can buy tickets from High 5's Web site where we are currently tallying 75% to 80% of our sales. They can also buy tickets by phone (212-Hi5-TKTS) or by coming to our office. Ticket buyers print out a voucher, which is turned into the box office on the day of performance for a guaranteed seat. From the start, the fact that arts organizations were willing to donate tickets to us that we market and promote on their behalf, has made our work possible. There are literally hundreds of arts organizations that participate in High 5-from New York's major players to the smallest off-Broadway theaters, and even some from New Jersey. All of them realize that the only way to guarantee that they will have an audience for the future is to bring in young people now.
Because our target market is students, it seemed natural to organize our calendar around the school year-so we have a fall, spring and summer calendar. We have staff dedicated to gathering inventory and to maintaining relationships with presenters. We also add new shows regularly and can now take donations and list shows within one hour.
The Internet is pretty crucial to High 5's operations. How have you been building your e-list and Web presence over the past few years? What results have you seen?
We launched our Web site in 1996 and by 1999 we had established a listserve of more than 3,000 names and had begun to sell tickets online. By 2001, our online purchases had increased from 3 percent to about 10 percent and in a concerted effort to extend our reach and sell more tickets online, we switched from sending occasional e-mail alerts to sending a weekly e-newsletter that highlighted new events and promoted shows many customers had missed during the rush to purchase tickets at the opening of a season. This allowed us to deliver fresh information rapidly and to maximize the last-minute nature of our inventory.
In early 2003, we launched a new Web site, with a constantly updated event calendar that linked directly to Ticketmaster purchase pages (who have provided their services as a philanthropic contribution so that student aren't charged additional fees). We complemented the new roll-out with a Picks of the Week feature in our e-mails - a selective list of events and shows from our current season. In late 2003, we joined PatronMail, moving from text-only e-mails to full color with photos and increased link capacity. These moves had an immediate impact. By the end of 2003, our online purchases accounted for approximately 30 percent of total sales and our weekly e-mails were reaching 5,000 subscribers.
By December 2006, online purchases accounted for nearly 85 percent of the 1,500 tickets we sell every month. Our e-mail list has grown to more than 8,000 and we have moved to a digital catalog of events that was downloaded more than 20,000 times over the summer season - with more than 60,000 downloads during 2006.
While we still work on a seasonal model, launching four months of events on a single day, three times a year, our efforts now are concentrated on developing a mobile, flexible audience that is looking to purchase tickets two weeks to two days in advance of the performance date.
How has the success of your e-mail and Web developments effected your print collateral?
The trajectory of our marketing efforts has directly paralleled that of the growth of the internet and of electronic marketing. The prevalence of electronic communication has freed us from escalating printing and mailing costs, and allowed us to reflect changing inventory immediately. Now we depend almost entirely on the combination of our Web site and PatronMail to reach our audience.
But we still utilize print communication. We mail a postcard announcing each new season with the aim of driving traffic to our site and providing a physical reminder of our online presence. The core message of any of our print pieces is to: a) visit the Web site, and b) sign up for the e-mail newsletter.
Recruitment for opt-in subscribers is an integral part of all of our marketing efforts. Our Web site receives thousands of visitors each week, at an average of 3,000 page views per day and a footer on every page has a link to our subscriber sign-up. Every FAQ or default page exhorts the user to sign-up for the e-newsletter to receive the latest info on the High 5 season and the same appeal is made on our downloadable PDF brochure, as well as in each weekly PatronMail campaign we send.
With just these efforts alone, we've been adding more than 1,000 newsletter subscribers each year. In 2007, our goal is to gather more than 7,000 new addresses to reach 15,000 subscribers. Our campaign includes in-school outreach efforts as well as aggressive guerilla/buzz marketing efforts.
Tell us more about the responses your e-mail campaigns receive? Have there been any stand-out results that have surprised you?
The true power of our e-mail efforts is easy to spot: steadily increasing site traffic and a quick response to last-minute inventory. Even when we're recruiting for our Teen Reviewers and Critics program, or reminding teens to visit our reviews online, e-mail is essential.
We have been astonished by the speed with which sought-after tickets have been snapped up. For instance, when we received 400+ tickets to "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" for a Saturday matinee, we sent an email blast to our entire list and expected to sell out fairly quickly - a day or so, perhaps. Instead, 15 minutes after the e-mail hit, the event (which was limited to two tickets per purchase) was sold out. Limiting the promotion to our e-mail subscribers had the added benefit of offering something special to those customers who regularly check their e-mail - not to mention bumping our open rate up to 50 percent.
We have had similar experiences with New York City Opera, City Center Encores, American Ballet Theater and Blue Man Group. In certain cases, we have limited our alert to patrons who have signed up specifically for e-mails concerning a specific genre. Within minutes of an e-mail drop, customers are moving on the offer. In the future, we plan to carve our offers to suit our patron preferences - promoting a bond of trust between us and our customers so that any teen can trust us and take a chance on something new in the arts. Now it's just $5. We predict it's a passion they will pursue for a lifetime.
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Visit High 5's Web site.
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Winter E-mail Marketing Seminars Planned for this March
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In the next few days we'll be sending you an announcement of our next series of e-mail marketing seminars, which will take place in March.
The dates are now being confirmed, but we wanted to give you advance notice of the cities we're planning to visit:
- Atlanta
- Boston
- Cincinnati
- Dallas
- Ft. Lauderdale/Miami
- San Francisco
- Las Vegas
- Tulsa
We'll keep you posted on exact dates and times very soon!
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Improve your E-marketing with books by Eugene Carr, President, Patron Technology
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Wired for Culture: How E-mail is Revolutionizing Arts Marketing (Second Edition)
Learn how to get started with e-mail and do MORE marketing for LESS money and get BETTER results.
- Essential tips for great e-mail marketing
- Why an investment in e-mail marketing will provide a spectacular return
- What arts patrons do online, and why arts e-mail is so powerful
Web Sites for Culture: Essential Principles for Great Arts Web Sites
Provides a structured way of thinking about how to build and improve your arts Web site. You'll learn:
- The basics of site strategy, conception, and design
- What most arts sites are lacking
- What it takes to run your site once it's launched
- How to get properly listed on Yahoo! and Google
Sign-Up for Culture: The Arts Marketer's Guide to Building an Effective E-mail List
Learn how to grow your e-mail list!
- 20 top ideas to build your list quickly
- How arts patrons behave online and how to market to them
- What goes into an e-mail acquisition plan and how to create one
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$15 each from Patron Technology (click to buy)
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Watch for our next E-Marketing Organization of the Month,
coming February 27, 2007.
Patron Technology
850 Seventh Avenue, Suite 801 | New York, NY 10019 | 212-271-4328
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