Perf Reminders in Promotions

Richard –

Do you mean managing the emails or the promoted sources in particular?

Jamie

Hi - we're trying to keep up with all the various things we send our constituents and general emails and mailings I think we have a pretty good handle on.  Where I'm at a stopping point is our performance reminders:

We send an email to anyone in our system we have a valid email address on to remind them they have tickets to a performance on a weekly basis (i.e. on Monday we email everyone that has tickets through Sunday).  Keeping up with these in promotions seems to be quite a task and I'm wondering if anyone else has done this.  Further complicating matters is we send 3 different emails - one for single tix, one for subs, one for group sales, so these would have to be differeentiated out.  Is this a waste of time?

Anyone doing this or a version of this?  Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

RJ

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We send weekly performance reminders as well, usually on Thursdays prior to an upcoming weekend of performances.  It’s a great way to remind folks that purchased tickets well in advance, update patrons on any traffic/parking alerts, partner restaurant offers, and gives us another avenue to cross-promote future offerings.  We simplify the message by sending the same email to all types of ticket holders, although our subscribers receive a monthly “Subscriber Insider” e-newsletter. 

This winter we started using Mail2 for our email marketing.  Although I haven’t used this feature yet, they have a conditional content feature which allows you to customize certain parts of the message to certain constituents.

Feel free to contact me directly if you’d like to see samples of our performance reminder emails.

Jennifer V. Hubbartt
Marketing and Public Relations Director

First Stage
325 West Walnut Street

Milwaukee, WI 53212
(414) 267-2932 direct

(414) 267-2930 fax

Website: www.FirstStage.org | Facebook: www.facebook.com/firststage | Twitter: twitter.com/firststage
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Hi - we're trying to keep up with all the various things we send our constituents and general emails and mailings I think we have a pretty good handle on.  Where I'm at a stopping point is our performance reminders:

We send an email to anyone in our system we have a valid email address on to remind them they have tickets to a performance on a weekly basis (i.e. on Monday we email everyone that has tickets through Sunday).  Keeping up with these in promotions seems to be quite a task and I'm wondering if anyone else has done this.  Further complicating matters is we send 3 different emails - one for single tix, one for subs, one for group sales, so these would have to be differeentiated out.  Is this a waste of time?

Anyone doing this or a version of this?  Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

RJ

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The promoted sources in particular.  Here’s an example: we perform shows on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday evening then two shows (matinee and evening) on both Saturday and Sunday.  Further, since we do three separate messages (single tix, subs and groups), we would be creating, in the span of one week, up to 24 source codes to track the perf reminder emails.  Each week. Every week.  That’s a lot of sources.

I was wondering if anyone had something along the lines of, say, one appeal with three source codes (one for single tix, one for subs, one for groups) and a way to mark through the year the same source code over and over again.  Example would be a subscriber that has for an 8-play subscription 8 promotion records – each dated a week before their performance – with the same source code.  I think something like that is possible but only with a lot of manual work.

Has anyone done something like this?

If you're using WordFly, I believe the answer is a definitive no—the way the integration there works is that each list pull creates a new source, even if it's named exactly the same (and will be, if you're using the same triggered list/campaign).

If you're running the reminders manually, you can make your list criteria whatever you want of course, and not promote the activity. You'd then only be seeing whatever you decided to add.

I can echo Heather's comment about sending all of those sources to their own Appeal, though we don't use control groups to manage it any further. I personally have a reminder set up in Outlook to go in and mark the sources as expired about once a month so at least the active list stays remotely contained.

Assuming I'm understanding your set up correctly, I would suggest that you've got room to add some mail merge functionality so you can compress some of your messages. If you include ticket history as part of your output set, incorporate mail-merge, and send everything on Monday, you're down to just three sources for the week: single tix, subs, groups.

Jamie

Thanks Heather – I think we want to go that route – but 1200+ source codes sounds ugly.  These, if we do go on, will be their own appeal for sure and will make me sad driving up the count of sources.  =( 

Ah well – we do what we must.

And just to clarify - before triggered emails were possible, I did pull and send these manually once a week, and when I did that I did promote the weekly email.