Hi there,
I'd like to get an idea of how many promotional emails people are sending out per month? Does anyone have strict policies on the number of emails that are sent (or rather, the number of emails an individual patron can receive) from your organisation?
I'm on a bid to limit our frequency of emails and get some solid guidelines in place - but need support by way of other examples!
I'm particularly interested to hear from other venues who frequently deal with outside promoters - we are bombarded with requests for dedicated emails from all of our promoters and am interested to hear how often people are actually saying 'no' to them!
Thanks
Emma
Hi Emma -
We don't have a hard and fast rule, but we have a rule of thumb that we only send one non-transactional email to a customer per week. We consider anything having to do with reminders of a show coming up, thank you for coming or email receipts exempt from the count.
We have a weekly meeting COP (Communicating with Our Patrons) that is cross departmental and looks at everything being mailed/emailed/phoned for the upcoming weeks. If we see times where someone might be getting too much from us, we'll prioritize what group gets suppressed from what so that a patron is only receiving no more than about one message from us per week.
Part of our strategy is that we don't want to bombard people with multiple messages and muddy the waters - so what is our priority. Part of it is just staff overload in creating the emails and part of it is watching our unsubscribe and open rates. We find that when we send out multiple emails in close succession, even if someone has subscribed to them, there is a small bump in the unsubscribe of the second email.
We don't have to deal with outside promoters usually - if we have a rental who wants to send out to our list, we make them fit in with our already planned emails and they get bumped for any of our own emails.
HTH,
HeatherSeattle Rep