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
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
From: Tessitura Marketing Forum [mailto:forums-marketing@tessituranetwork.com] On Behalf Of Richard Jackson Sent: Wednesday, May 30, 2012 4:51 PM To: Jamie O'Brien Subject: RE: [Tessitura Marketing Forum] Perf Reminders in Promotions
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?
From: Tessitura Marketing Forum [mailto:forums-marketing@tessituranetwork.com] On Behalf Of Jamie O'Brien Sent: Wednesday, May 30, 2012 3:22 PM To: Richard Jackson Subject: RE: [Tessitura Marketing Forum] Perf Reminders in Promotions
Richard –
Do you mean managing the emails or the promoted sources in particular?
From: Tessitura Marketing Forum [mailto:forums-marketing@tessituranetwork.com] On Behalf Of Richard Jackson Sent: Wednesday, May 30, 2012 3:07 PM To: Jamie O'Brien Subject: [Tessitura Marketing Forum] Perf Reminders in Promotions
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A couple of follow up things - I looked at my separate appeal and I had about 1000 promotions in it cause we're not crazy beans like Jamie and only have 8 productions with approx 30 perfs per production. We do a daily pre show reminder (but it is only one promotion per day since we customize it for sub vs single using output set elements) but we do three different post show emails per performance with a promotion for each because the way we've designed our emails requires physical separation of segments. (Foo)
I do have as part of my nightly email script to inactivate sources from a week prior in that one appeal (again, helpful to put 'em all in one separate appeal).
This can mean a patron will have 2 promotions per show (or more if they come multiple times) but again, we like seeing how many times we're talking to the patron rather than just guessing.
It is actually helpful that WordFly names the promotions the same thing for a run of performance emails because it makes it easier to aggregate that data by source name when we need to.
- Heather
Thanks for the responses all - we don't use WordFly right now and are currently discussing internally if we want to keep track of perf reminders. The custom stuff i've written can handle the other mailings we do out of Exact Target (uses the email to find the customer number, creates a list, puts those customer numbers in said list, then promots them).
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.