Hi everyone,
Very, very new member of the Tessitura community here! National Museums Scotland are right at the start of our implementation and I'm after some very basic advice about email subscriber sign ups.
We are weighing up the pros and cons of having all email sign ups going into Tessitura, rather than them going into Wordfly and then linking up with a Tessitura record once the constituent has made a purchase. We only collect email address from newsletter sign ups that come through our website so are unsure if having them all in Tessitura will be tricky with so few details. We also cannot make email address a mandatory field in Tessitura as a number of our members and donors do not have email.
Any thoughts/advice greatly appreciated!
Hannah
Hi, Hannah! Currently, we gather sign-ups when people make a purchase and are added in Tessitura, and through an email sign-up on our website that goes into a WordFly list. I add that list to my weekly newsletter. Otherwise, I think we would end up with a lot of idle Tessitura accounts created for people who were curious, but maybe not intending to take action and make a purchase.
We follow this same process. We have a general interest list in Wordfly that includes names carried over from our previous MailChimp system, and that's where the sign-ups go. That way our Tessitura database is primarily based on transactional data, unless specifically entered as a prospect.
What I wish I could do, though, is isolate just the folks who signed up by this method and export them somehow. It doesn't appear there's a way to do this en masse, though you can see "sign-up location" in each subscriber profile.
Ann, do you have a specific list just for newsletter sign-ups? I'm wondering if I should switch to this instead of my bigger general interest list, just for research purposes.
Jean - We don't have a specific list for sign-ups in Tessitura, but we do in WordFly. I created a stand-alone list and all of the sign-ups go there. That way I can grab it for specific emails (like the newsletter or season announcements). I can also download the list if we want to use it for social.
In our system, every web signup creates a Tessitura account. All WordFly eblasts are pulled via Tessitura extractions or lists so we can see responses in the database. I do sometimes use suppression lists to keep from mailing people who haven't engaged with one of our messages for six months or a year.
I have a job that runs frequently, updating e-mail addresses with a mail purpose of "WordFly Marketing" that are 1) marked primary; 2) with the marketing box checked; 3) of the type "Email address" (we also have e-mail types of Unsubscribe, Hard Bounce, Press, Duplicate Address, and a couple of others).
Eblast lists get pulled based on having the WordFly Marketing mail purpose and whatever other criteria we are targeting--bought a ticket to our last production; is a donor above a certain level; lives in a particular group of zip codes; etc.
Lucie
Hi Ann and Jean, thank you so much for sharing, it's very helpful. How does this work with opt outs? If someone unsubscribes from a wordfly email does this also get passed back into Tessitura if they have a record?
Thank you so much for sharing Lucie! Do you collect email addresses alone for email sign ups or names as well?
Our web form asks for name, address, e-mail, and day/evening phone numbers. Most patrons give us most data, but a few put a string of zeros or other characters in place of one or more of the fields. We enforce an address in Tessitura, so patrons that don't provide one get a default "Please add address" street address, default postal code of 99999, default city of "Please add city," default state of "XX." (Invalid addresses get tagged with a "No valid address" mailing indicator.)
I have a job that runs nightly to take all unsubscribes and hard bounces and change the e-mail type from "Email" to "Unsubscribe" or "Hard Bounce," remove the WordFly Marketing mail purpose and replace it with "No Email to This Address" (for unsubscribes), then close the CSI that the unsubscribe created.
Lucie mentions what I consider most important here--the concepts that we're emailing constituents in Tessitura for our campaigns and we look for response data on their records.
Although I might not consider it essential to immediately migrate an email list from an old ESP into Tessitura (as in, I think it's quite reasonable to make this a follow up step within a massive implementation project), I really prioritize only needing to manage constituent data in one place and, since you'll be using Tessitura, that means Tessitura. I acknowledge that many people find email-only type records to seem like 'database clutter' compared to other ones, but you are really after establishing a lifetime picture of a constituent. Ideally, your email subscriber becomes an attendee or a donor, or any other sort of active engager. You want to be able to look at their origin and their activity. Also, you'll probably reap efficiency benefits from having your list set up all happen in Tessitura, rather than doing one round in CRM based on ticket history etc, another round within WordFly, and maybe not even having quick explanations for how many people are in X list if someone asks for projections.
I have a couple of complaints about the TNEW Create Account Brief set up, but if you'll be a TNEW user, it gets the job done fairly nicely.
Our WordFly lightbox set up was chaotic so I have done a mass export from WordFly, match with Tessitura accounts and bulk import when setting it up again. My wish would be to get a popup modal on my Marketing site that uses TNEW Create Account Brief instead.
I'm on Jamie's side re single source of truth. Having customer information distributed across databases is a headache. Also with eNnews/eBlasts lists living in WordFly, there is inevitably Campaign marketing that want to use those lists. Not being able to assign an extraction segment (waterfall), or know when they have been moved up the engagement ladder makes it really hard to control what message you want to give them.
This is great! Thank you Kevin. I think we're leaning in this direction, we had so many challenges with customer data being held in different places, aiming for a single source of truth would solve a lot of these issues.
Thank you so much Jamie and Heath. I'm definitely leaning towards Tessitura being the single source of truth thanks to your advice.
I'll throw my vote in here with Jamie and Heath- managing records in one place is usually the best choice for my team. Per a question you asked earlier, you'll set up some tables in Tessitura to record email responses, including unsubscribes, which get written back to records in Tess from your email campaigns. Here is the article from the Wordfly help system that does a rundown of how this is done.
Lucie's next step is awesome to take this a step further and clean up the email and record in other ways (I might be taking a leaf there myself!), and in general, it will help to prevent future errors by making the constituent record easier to read for anyone who is not immediately involved in the data management. Win win win!
There are a range of opinions obviously but it's worth bringing up in the wonderful new Email Strategy group (who also have meetings)
https://community.tessituranetwork.com/topical_groups/email-strategy-user-group
Very thought-provoking discussion, thank you all! During our implementation we had all decided that having non-transactional records in Tessitura wouldn't make sense, but this is making me rethink that process.
Can anyone advise what steps we would go through after the fact to redirect the website sign-ups into Tessitura?
And in Tessitura, where on the customer record does it reflect that this is a website sign-up? Is it an Attribute or something to that effect?
Thank you!