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To begin, tell us a bit about your background and your role at the organization.
I came to Wigmore Hall in August 2004, to be Marketing Manager. I am responsible for the marketing of all the Hall's own promotion events (those on which we take the financial risk), about 200 per year, as well as working with external promoters who hire the Hall to promote their own events; I'm also in charge of the marketing for our CD label, Wigmore Hall Live.
Last year I became Head of Sales & Marketing, and am now responsible for the Box Office as well, which is quite a natural partnership, I think. Before coming to Wigmore Hall I worked as Classical Music Marketing Officer at the Barbican, a multi-arts centre in the City of London. I was there for nearly four years working on their Great Performers series and Mostly Mozart Festival and assisting the resident ensembles with their marketing. Prior to that, I worked for the BBC for a year at the BBC Proms and BBC Concert Orchestra… and before that I was at university!
Can you give us a general overview of Wigmore Hall? Who is your audience, and what’s the scope of your activities?
We have an annual budget of about 3.3 million pounds (about $6.7 million dollars), and about half of that comes from ticket income. We sell about 140,000 tickets each season to events including chamber ensembles, song recitals, and chamber recitals. We also do concerts aimed at children -- some as young as two years old, and we have family concerts and events for young people, helping people progress through as they grow to attending the normal evening concerts.
For the main concert season, most of our audience comes from London and the southeast of the U.K., but we also have a relatively large number of people who visit us regularly from the rest of the country, and quite a lot of people who visit us from abroad, either because they're visiting London and they want to come to Wigmore Hall, or people who come specifically from abroad to hear events that are taking place here.
Through the community and education events, we work with a lot of people who might not normally attend classical concerts: a lot of younger people and people from less-well-off backgrounds.
Your e-mail list has grown pretty drastically in the past year. What have you done to achieve that growth?
The list size is around 10,000 at the moment - about two years ago we were at 1,600, but I think it's fair to say that won't be a consistent growth rate. That big jump came in April 2006 when we uploaded about 6,000 new e-mail addresses that had been stored separately in our box office system, and we mailed to those people asking if they would like to remain on our e-list. Thankfully, most of them did.
We do ask people if they have an e-mail address when we take bookings, but since people tend to be quite reticent in giving that out , our box office staff are trained to explain to people that we won't e-mail them unless they specifically say that we can.
All the e-mails that go out from the staff of the Hall have a line at the bottom that tells people they can sign up for the list online: “Receive up-to-the-minute information on Wigmore Hall concerts by joining up to our free e-list at www.wigmore-hall.org.uk/e-list”. Our direct mail also asks people to join the e-mail list as a free way to keep up with what we're doing.
Can you give us a general overview of your e-mail schedule?
We send out a monthly e-newsletter on the 1st or 2nd of every month, which details some of the events coming up in that month; then if we have a specific concert or a festival that we're doing, we would then send out an e-mail either to the whole list if that were applicable, or just to a segment of the list.
Our lists can be segmented down to interests; for instance, if people are interested in hearing early music and baroque concerts, or contemporary concerts, or just piano recitals then we can be slightly more targeted about who we might tell about specific events. We know that the segmenting has a measurable effect: our average open rate for all e-mails is around 32%, but the average for e-mails we send only to our “Students” category jumps to 39%.
We occasionally send ticket offers to our e-mail list, but that isn't really planned in advance, it happens when needed.
Are there one or two things you've learned from your e-marketing experience that you’d especially like to share with your colleagues?
I think the important thing with e-mail marketing is because it's a lot cheaper than direct mail, and generally a lot quicker, it's very easy to slip into the trap of just banging out a quick e-mail and not really thinking about it in the same way that you would if you were constructing a letter or producing a piece of print. But I think it's important that you do take the time, that you really do think of it is as being direct mail, it's just being sent out in a different way.
I think the content of e-mail marketing is the most important thing to consider, because people get so many e-mails - I mean, certainly I get hundreds more e-mails every week than I do letters - so in a way it's more important that the e-mail is eye-catching and interesting than a letter, because while people do generally open a letter, e-mail is very easy just to delete without even looking at it.
Although it can be very quick and cheap, you do need to take the time to make it effective as well.
We always go through and check that the information we're giving out in an e-mail is actually interesting, that we're not just recreating the listings from our Web site, because if people want that, they'll just go to the Web site! We always include a photo and a short paragraph about the performance, along with a press quote to endorse what we've said about the event.
Click here to see an example of Wigmore Hall's event highlights newsletter
Your CD marketing seems to be one of the most important things you’re doing online. Can you tell us about it?
The main way we sell Wigmore Hall Live is through our Web site. We also of course distribute it as any other record label would, through a distributor, but we make a lot more money by selling them directly ourselves.
I'd say that we're probably even more proactive in e-marketing for Wigmore Hall Live than for the concerts themselves, because it's such an easy channel for people to buy CDs from us. We send out an announcement whenever we release a new CD, which we do about four times a year – the average open rate for those is around 36%, and the average click rate is 3.9%
We’re redesigning our Web site now with the goal of selling downloads and having free sound clips that people can listen to before they buy the CD, as well.
Visit Wigmore Hall's Web Site
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