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Welcome to our June E-Marketing Organization of the Month, featuring PatronMail Client: Time Out New York.
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E-Marketing Organization: Time Out New York
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Mike Ankener, Online Business Development Manager at TONY
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PMail Client Since: February, 2003
Starting e-list size: 0
Current e-list size: 20,170
Time Out New York (TONY) has been New York City's where-to-go what-to-do weekly magazine for over ten years. The publication and distribution of a 200+ page weekly entertainment magazine is no small challenge and the editorial staff is at work 24-hours a day, experiencing all that the city has to offer and writing about the city's offerings in the magazine's signature, irreverent style.
TONY's ad sales team is on the front line of the business, forging lasting relationships with the advertisers who drive the commerce behind the magazine's publication model. As Online Business Development Manager, Mike Ankener directs all online advertising sales, online partnerships and integrated sponsorships, including their weekly e-Newsletter program and a new, highly successful, interactive e-mail-based promotional initiative.
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Q & A with Mike Ankener, Online Business Development Manager
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TONY's Free Flix Web site
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As a print publication, how does e-mail figure into your communication strategy? Who exactly is on your list and what are the advantages of building it?
Rounding out the electronic side of our business, our editorial content (all that great info about what's happening in New York City) is repurposed each week for publication on our website. The advertising content is extended through our weekly e-Newsletter program which reaches nearly 20,000 registered subscribers.
In general, our e-subscribers are 18-39 year-old, active, educated, single, female readers and entertainment consumers who have registered through our Web site and other online incentives to learn about events and opportunities in NYC and to take advantage of partners' offers.
Tell us about your e-mail strategy and the information you send your readers.
Our weekly e-Newsletter was originally designed to provide customized TONY-specific offerings from our print advertisers to our readers (no editorial content yet, although we are in the process of changing our model). Recently, we re-designed the e-Newsletter to include paid, stand-alone electronic advertising that is not necessarily an extension of our print advertising.
Each week, we ask advertisers to customize an offer specifically for our readers. The editorial content for each offer is generated in HTML form by our marketing staff, so each offer is truly unique to Time Out New York.
These exclusive offers are interactive extensions of advertising in the print product and provide readers with access to steep discounts (and in some cases free promotions) - making our e-Newsletter a weekly must-read!
What have the responses been to your weekly e-Newsletters (and exclusive offers)?
We look at the open rate and relative click-through rate for each newsletter, so we can better understand which offers attract the greatest interest and why. For a typical e-newsletter, open rates are usually in the 25 to 30 percent range, and as a rule of thumb, there are two factors that govern our open rate: perceived value of an offer, and in the case of a contest/sweepstakes, odds of winning. In general, the higher these two factors (as applicable), the greater the click-through rate.
You've recently launched a new campaign to build your list. Tell us about TONY Free Flix. What is the objective of the campaign and how did it come about? How does it work?
We recently launched TONY Free Flix as an electronic solution to an offline model we already had in place, where readers had to go to a local retailer to obtain their advance movie passes. Now, when advance movie screenings are promoted, readers are invited to log onto (or click through to) a dedicated website, where they can register for a chance to receive tickets to advance movie screenings, on a first-come, first-served basis.
This allows Time Out New York to extend its ticketing offer to a much wider audience of people who would not have had access before, and with a mandatory registration process, we've been able to aggressively build our e-mail database of registrants who are interested in films. We've also evolved the entire package to create a sponsorship program, so we generate profit in two ways: direct sponsorship and longer-term e-Newsletter ad sales (because of our growing list). Our current sponsor, Dave and Buster's, is promoted throughout the process and receives tremendous value through the integration of each working component.
Two days prior to the event, a "tickets are now available" e-mail (powered by Dave and Buster's) is sent to everyone who registered, and all of these recipients have equal odds of being among the first to receive limited seating. Both the perceived value (two advance screening passes) and the odds of winning (an auditorium's worth of) seats are high, so the click-through rate is extraordinary. We also encourage viral pass-along to friends, so each new screening represents an even greater database-building opportunity.
Do you have some tangible stats on the responses that the Free Flix campaign generated?
Both the open-rate and click-throughs have been impacted by the excitement around this program. For the recent screening of Universal Pictures' release "The Breakup," we enjoyed our strongest campaign to date. We announced the program in 18,500 newsletters. Our open rate was 39%, and an astounding 3,700 people registered for the program.
We've been experimenting with program parameters -so when we make a change as subtle as calling out the opportunity in the subject line of our e-Newsletter, we've seen open rates climb as high as 40 percent.
Click-through patterns are also influenced by the presence of a screening opportunity in our weekly e-Newsletter program. With no screening opportunity present, click through rates are more evenly distributed across all advertised opportunities, but with a movie included, click-throughs to screenings can account for up to 94 percent of all clicks through to advertised opportunities. For this reason, we recently shifted our strategy to separate the screening e-mails into their own, dedicated messages.
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Please watch for our next Monthly Update, coming July 25, 2006.
Our mailing address is
850 Seventh Avenue, New York, NY 10019
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