Question for CONSORTIUMS:
We recently launched a re-branding campaign for our 30+ year old consortium - Discover Your Center - and then sent out a quarterly brochure for single tickets that includes our shows + resident group shows to raise awareness for the breadth of programming available in our venues.
We did not include any tracking mechanism for our 14-15 institutional brochures.
We are doing the institutional brochure again for 15-16, but want to add meaningful tracking mechanisms.
How do we know the impact of our institutional brochure vs. sales driven by simultaneous marketing efforts by our resident groups and in-house marketing staff?
ANY SUGGESTIONS based on what has worked for you would be appreciated!
*We are considering including a limited time discount promotion for our in-house shows, but can't discount tickets for the other presenters included in the brochure.
We have also discussed creating a designated landing page on our site - kentuckycenter.org/discover - so that we can track web sessions back to the brochure.
Hi Christine,
I'm not with a consortium, so feel free to seek other opinions, but I have just been playing around with this concept myself. I would suggest three things to think about:
1) As a tracking mechanism, one of the difficult things can be that while you can assign a source code to a segment, if they purchase online, then they might just use the generic web source code, or it will be difficult to track. I have taken now to reporting on results by making sure that when the lists are pulled for brochures (or an end-of-financial-year development ask), that I create and assign a source code for all the segments. However, instead of using the out-of-the-box reports to see which source codes got used in a transaction, I instead do some custom reporting on looking at purchases by people with that source code.
You could do this with lists, BTW. So you could say something like, "I had 2,000 people in Segment 1 which was given Source Code X. I sent out the brochure in July and I want to see who purchased tickets to a particular season S." So you run a list that features everyone who had Source code X, who purchased tickets to Season S between the mailing date in July and the current date.
This works much more neatly if you can get it into a report, of course, but that's the general principle. It will tell you the purchases that got made by people with that brochure.
2) On your second point, though, which is how do I tell what came from the marketing brochure and not the other elements, this is more problematic. The reality is that, for most people, it was a combination of the communication elements together. However, because you probably want to make decisions about the effectiveness of each piece on its own, the best way to do this is to lock off a control group of people that only get that marketing communication.
So, if you want to test the institutional brochure, you lock off a random segment of those people (easily doable in an extraction), assign them their own source code, and then suppress them from all other types of marketing for the duration of the selling period. This is usually the best practice of measuring how the brochure, in isolation, competes against the rest of the segment that might get hit with multiple marketing methods.
You could also, if you wished, have a control group for each type of marketing, just to see how each one works in isolation.
The only catch is to make sure that the control group is representative of everybody. If you say something like, "We need a control group, but I don't want to spare any of my good leads for that", then you will never know whether they had a lower response because they only got one type of mailing or whether the leads were different from the others.
3) A third thing, following on from that point, is that it is worth thinking about is the idea of planning on locking off a control group (made up of the same type of customers) every year for the next three years. Then, all other things being equal (there will be some fluctuation based on your offering each year), you could start to build up a year-by-year picture of how the brochure is working relative to previous years, undistorted by any other form of marketing.