Ideas

Why do people become fans of your organization, or any brand or organization for that matter? A December 2009 MarketingSherpa survey indicated that learning about specials and sales was the top motivation of those who friended or followed a brand online. Learning about new products, features or services closely followed as motivations.

I think it is fair to say that the performing arts industry is pretty far behind the email marketing curve, operating with email 1.0 technology. New technologies exist to tie email into e-commerce on email 2.0. Think of email marketing as a conversion funnel where the first step is a user opening an email and the final step is a user purchasing a ticket on your website. Most email programs that arts organizations employ stop tracking a user once they click on a link in an email. All they track are email open rates and click-through. New technologies can track much further, following users all the way to purchase or cart abandonment. Email 2.0 systems can be set to automatically send follow-up messages based on user browsing and purchasing behavior, which can ultimately lead to major increases in sales.

I am proud to have worked on a video fundraising project at New York City Opera that was a collaboration between the marketing and development departments. We created a video of General Manager and Artistic Director, George Steel, discussing the recent successes at City Opera and sent out email appeals asking patrons to help out with a matching gift drive by donating online. This is the second time we have created an email video appeal campaign and this time I think we did it quite well.

The New York Times writes about new ticket buying services that incorporate social media here.

Facebook has been referred to as an online popularity contest. Whether that is true or not, popularity is certainly a factor in the number of fans your organization has. Other factors include the number of constituents your organization serves, the amount of effort put towards marketing your Facebook Fan page, the geographic reach of your company (touring the world certainly helps), and how early your organization joined Facebook.

Last week on his blog Gene Carr of Patron Technology wrote about email open rates. He concluded that while open rates are important, marketers should also measure "cumulative average open rate." This is a measure of how many recipients open emails consistently, how many open sometimes, and how many don't open at all.

Here are 10 useful usability findings and guidelines from SmashingMagazine.com that may help you improve the user experience on your website.

Would you buy a new car and never change the oil? Never get it washed? Never change the tires or tune it up? Of course not. The same is true for a website.

People read email differently than they read a brochure or a newspaper. If someone is enticed by the subject line (or very loyal to your organization) they may open your email and skim it, not really read it. Lots of text makes skimming difficult.

It is easy to get carried away with fancy features and tools when tasked with designing a new website. Every department within your organization has wants and needs for their section of the site. You can easily end up with a large list of complicated and expensive-to-build tools and features.