Presenters - how do you announce your season?

Hi – We have been wrestling with this for years.

1.       We decided to stop selling any sort of packages 2 seasons ago, and only sell single tickets from the start.  We had a very low subscription rate –and we were giving them these ridiculous, traditionally months-long subscription-only sales periods (season announced in April for subscription sales, renewals and acquisitions throughout the summer, single ticket sale in August) plus they got a 10% discount.  Additionally, we had a very low member rate, because the only tangible member benefit at the entry level of $75 was a few week pre-sale on the subscriptions.

2.       We decided to go with a membership and single ticket sales systems.  Our Strathmore Stars (as we now call our members), pay $65 per year ($50 in the first year of membership) and they get a pre-sale on every single show we announce (a month for larger sets of shows via email and direct mail, 5 days via email only for single or small groups of shows), plus a 10% discount on everything we sell from shows, to education events, to café, to gift shop items and facility rentals.  Now, we are no longer giving people discounts to get them to buy our shows, we are actually getting them to pay us money to buy our shows and giving them a small discount in return.  This has increased membership from 900-1200 to over 3000 in two years.  The revenue we get from the memberships more than makes up for the 10% discount.  We are finding people are mostly buying the same amount of shows still.  One area that is suffering are what we in our industry like to call “the dogs” that you throw into subscription packages and sell to those subscribers.  If you are selling flex packages only, you have probably gotten past the “dog” issue already, but they DO still fall off as people are no longer adding something really risky to them to fill out their 4 or 5 flex package show minimum.  Our solution is we don’t book anymore dogs.  If something is important artistically, we book it, market the crap out of it, and set a low capacity sales expectation (say, for instance, our Charles Ives festival this fall – important artistically, but low sales)

3.       Direct mail still works – in the past we have mailed brochures at the announce in the spring, and we did one in July that had worked well for years, but stopped working so well the past 2 seasons, so we are going to cut July this year, and for 2012-2013 announce our 40 in May and then anything we add (typically 10-15 more shows) with a full season brochure in September we will carry for the whole season.  We see significant revenue when we mail these pieces, even though most people get the email first.

4.       We do have a microsite that sells tickets, but for our patrons, going only with websites and emails instead of print works well for show announcements of 5-6 or less, but it is too much to look at for 40 shows. This also stays up most of the year, and we remove shows after they are done.  We are about to take it down as we build the next season, but you can still see it for awhile here: http://www.strathmore.org/eventstickets/seasonb/seasonglance.asp

5.       We’ll continue booking shows that won’t make it into any brochure, sometimes they make the newsletter we have but other times we just market via our own Stars list, full email list, and print/radio/tv/online advertising only.

Hope that helps! Happy to answer any further questions you have.

You should also look at State Theatre NJ’s loyalty program, as that is another way to crack the same nut us presenters face.

Jen

Hi. We're working on our marketing budget for the upcoming season of "Kentucky Center Presents" - a series of 40-50 one-night-only offerings.

If you program/present one-night-only shows, I'd be interested in your answers to these questions:

Do you still produce a season announcement sales brochure? Why or why not?

Do you offer flex packages [discount early in the season for people purchasing multiple shows in a single order]? Why or why not?

Have you ever used a mini-site to promote your season apart from content on your institutional site?

If not doing any of the above, how do you market & sell your one-night-only programming? One show at a time...no sense of a "season"?

Thanks.

Christine

clong@kentuckycenter.org

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Hi – We have been wrestling with this for years.

1.       We decided to stop selling any sort of packages 2 seasons ago, and only sell single tickets from the start.  We had a very low subscription rate –and we were giving them these ridiculous, traditionally months-long subscription-only sales periods (season announced in April for subscription sales, renewals and acquisitions throughout the summer, single ticket sale in August) plus they got a 10% discount.  Additionally, we had a very low member rate, because the only tangible member benefit at the entry level of $75 was a few week pre-sale on the subscriptions.

2.       We decided to go with a membership and single ticket sales systems.  Our Strathmore Stars (as we now call our members), pay $65 per year ($50 in the first year of membership) and they get a pre-sale on every single show we announce (a month for larger sets of shows via email and direct mail, 5 days via email only for single or small groups of shows), plus a 10% discount on everything we sell from shows, to education events, to café, to gift shop items and facility rentals.  Now, we are no longer giving people discounts to get them to buy our shows, we are actually getting them to pay us money to buy our shows and giving them a small discount in return.  This has increased membership from 900-1200 to over 3000 in two years.  The revenue we get from the memberships more than makes up for the 10% discount.  We are finding people are mostly buying the same amount of shows still.  One area that is suffering are what we in our industry like to call “the dogs” that you throw into subscription packages and sell to those subscribers.  If you are selling flex packages only, you have probably gotten past the “dog” issue already, but they DO still fall off as people are no longer adding something really risky to them to fill out their 4 or 5 flex package show minimum.  Our solution is we don’t book anymore dogs.  If something is important artistically, we book it, market the crap out of it, and set a low capacity sales expectation (say, for instance, our Charles Ives festival this fall – important artistically, but low sales)

3.       Direct mail still works – in the past we have mailed brochures at the announce in the spring, and we did one in July that had worked well for years, but stopped working so well the past 2 seasons, so we are going to cut July this year, and for 2012-2013 announce our 40 in May and then anything we add (typically 10-15 more shows) with a full season brochure in September we will carry for the whole season.  We see significant revenue when we mail these pieces, even though most people get the email first.

4.       We do have a microsite that sells tickets, but for our patrons, going only with websites and emails instead of print works well for show announcements of 5-6 or less, but it is too much to look at for 40 shows. This also stays up most of the year, and we remove shows after they are done.  We are about to take it down as we build the next season, but you can still see it for awhile here: http://www.strathmore.org/eventstickets/seasonb/seasonglance.asp

5.       We’ll continue booking shows that won’t make it into any brochure, sometimes they make the newsletter we have but other times we just market via our own Stars list, full email list, and print/radio/tv/online advertising only.

Hope that helps! Happy to answer any further questions you have.

You should also look at State Theatre NJ’s loyalty program, as that is another way to crack the same nut us presenters face.

Jen

Hi. We're working on our marketing budget for the upcoming season of "Kentucky Center Presents" - a series of 40-50 one-night-only offerings.

If you program/present one-night-only shows, I'd be interested in your answers to these questions:

Do you still produce a season announcement sales brochure? Why or why not?

Do you offer flex packages [discount early in the season for people purchasing multiple shows in a single order]? Why or why not?

Have you ever used a mini-site to promote your season apart from content on your institutional site?

If not doing any of the above, how do you market & sell your one-night-only programming? One show at a time...no sense of a "season"?

Thanks.

Christine

clong@kentuckycenter.org

This message was sent automatically to you by www.tessituranetwork.com because you subscribed to the Tessitura Marketing Forum. You may reply to this message to post to the Marketing forum or visit the site to search, read and post to the forums. In the interest of keeping the forum posts from becoming cluttered, we encourage you to delete previous message text from your reply before sending. Thank you!