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PatronMail Client Since: May 2003
Starting E-List Size: 1,750
Current E-List Size: 13,269

Roundabout Theatre Company was founded in 1965 and has grown from a small 150-seat theatre in a converted supermarket basement to become one of America’s most significant producers of theatre. This not-for-profit company, with more than 44,000 season subscribers, is committed to producing definitive productions of classic plays and musicals alongside new plays by today’s writers, ensuring that audiences and artists alike have access to high-quality, professional stagings of important works.

With three distinctive homes in New York City - the American Airlines Theatre, Studio 54, and the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre/Laura Pels Theatre - and through national tours, live broadcasts, and educational and outreach programs, Roundabout touches the lives of millions of theatergoers, students and artists across the country.

David, start by telling us a little bit about yourself and your background.
 
I have a degree in communications and advertising. Right out of college, I worked at an advertising agency with arts-based clients because I knew that I ultimately wanted to work at an arts institution. 

I then spent four years at Lincoln Center Theatre prior to being hired as Marketing Director at Roundabout. I’ve been with this wonderful institution for almost 13 years. During my tenure, Roundabout has grown dramatically from having 18,000 subscribers to becoming a cultural force in New York City with over 44,000 subscribers. 


Can you give us a quick overview of Roundabout's general marketing scheme?
 
Roundabout is renowned throughout the country as an innovator in marketing and audience development. In addition to the variety and quality of the productions on our stages, we’ve created marketing programs that not only engage our audiences, but treat each audience member as an integral part of the organization.

For more than a decade, Roundabout's innovative Theatre-PLUS programs have enhanced the theatre-going experience for thousands of subscribers. Twenty percent of our subscriber base is enrolled in the Theatre-PLUS program, which offers pre-show and post-show educational and social programming, as well as different show times and special discount packages. There’s truly a program for everyone, and the subscribers in this added-value program are some of our most loyal.

HIPTIX is an audience development program that we started only 6 years ago. Now, we have over 9,000 members ages 18-35 who see our shows at a discounted rate. The program is conducted entirely on the Web and has been enormously successful in creating a younger audience-base for Roundabout. 

We try to make each of our subscribers feel at home at Roundabout. Each week, we send an e-mail from Todd Haimes, our artistic director, to all of the subscribers about to see one of our shows, offering inside information about our productions. Todd invites subscribers to reply to the e-mail with their reactions to the production, and he answers every single response personally!

You've been doing e-mail marketing for a long time - what has your approach to building your list been?

Early on we recognized the power of e-mail as a tool to communicate efficiently and directly to our audiences. Efforts to build our e-list include an “opt-in” button on our home page, kiosks at each of our three theatres, and mention of our E-CLUB in all of our subscription-related materials. Our list has grown in size from just 1,750 subscribers to over 11,000 names over the course of three years.

Our non-subscriber list has also grown enormously, from around 6,000 names to 11,307.

Now our main focus is shifting, as we become more aggressive in growing the list by having a more visible presence on our homepage and launching an on-site campaign with attractive incentives for both subscribers and single ticket buyers to join our E-CLUB.


In March 2007 you tried a new experiment with e-mail collection on your site - can you tell us about that?

The new idea was to make the sign–up form the very first thing patrons see when they visit our site - not even a pop-up window, but the actual first main screen. This approach was actually inspired during a discussion with Gene Carr about political campaign sites [note: see Gene's blog posting about that subject here] – it was around the time that all the 2008 candidates were getting started on their campaigns, and we saw that they were all doing it this way - so why couldn’t we?

The timing was perfect because we knew we were already getting increased traffic to our site because The Apple Tree, starring Kristin Chenoweth, was generating a lot of buzz. This was a wonderful opportunity to capture that audience while we had their attention, and make sure we'd be able to continue marketing to them later.

Click here to see what the form looked like on the site.


So what kind of results did you see? Do you plan to continue this approach in the future?

The experiment was an unqualified success - we gathered about 150-200 new e-mail addresses in just the first week. The screen was up on the site for about five weeks total, and in that time we collected about 2,000 names! Compared to the same time period during the previous year, that's 700% more growth! To put it another way, the total size of our list grew by 8% in that one month.

When our renewal season began, we decided to take down the form. Most of the traffic to our site during renewal season is from patrons who are already included in our list, and we didn’t want to hinder their ability to reach the rest of our site quickly and efficiently. But once renewal season ends we plan to put the form back up.


Any final thoughts? Is there anything you've learned from your years of doing e-mail marketing that you'd like to share with your colleagues?

There is really no more efficient way to communicate directly with our subscriber base and share with them inside information that might not be available to the general public. From a sales perspective, no list garners more successful results than our own list of subscribers and single ticket buyers. We’re going to continue to expand our campaigns and Web site with more exclusive content for our online audience.

That said, this kind of interactive online program can never fully replace the face-to-face interactions that we have with our patrons, from the great customer service practices of our Ticketing Representatives, to the friendly house staff we have at all of our venues. Those face-to-face interactions are as crucial as all of the work we are doing in the realm of e-marketing.

Visit Roundabout Theatre Company's Web Site

Now you can read and subscribe to regular updates from Patron Technology's President, Eugene Carr. Gene's blog provides a snapshot of his perspective on what's going on in the e-marketing world now, and how it relates to arts marketing.

If you haven't been reading, here's a quick look at what you missed last week:

BSO Idol: The Pops Goes YouTube
The Boston Pops has launched a competition on YouTube - people post videos of themselves singing, and the audience votes on who gets to sing live with the Pops at a future concert!

My World Was Flat
Reporting live from Paris, Gene reads the New York Times and checks his e-mail on the Metro and realizes Tom Friedman was right.


Click here to read the blog, and submit your e-mail address in the upper left corner to subscribe to get updates e-mailed to you.