Hi everyone,
For our 2010-11 season, we are wanting to go green. In February, we would like to email our subscription renewals prior to sending paper renewals. Has anyone done this yet? Is it possible using the renewal format in Tessitura?
We are also looking at doing print at home tickets for the subscription tickets. We are currently using PAH for single ticket purchases, but we do not use PAH for subscription tickets. Has anyone attempted this? My first concern is the size of the attachment. Are there other issues to look out for?
Thanks for your help.
Dee Dee Fite |dfite@IndianapolisSymphony.orgDirector of Patron SystemsIndianapolis Symphony Orchestra*: 32 E. Washington St. Suite 600 | Indianapolis, IN 46204-2919(: 317.229.7080 | (f) 317.262.1159
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I have not done this but what I might do is create a report based off the canned one. The stored procedure of the report could generate the emails using sql mail.
Last season for our first wave of renewals we e-mailed anyone who had provided an e-mail address. However, we didn't e-mail a personalized renewal, just a link to our online renewal process letting them know they could renew now. So I don't know how much the helps, but I thought I would give you some idea of the pitfalls we ran into:
1. There were a large number of people that didn't pay attention to the e-mail and therefore didn't even know it was time to renew until we sent the second notices out. All second notices when out through the mail specifically to ensure that people who didn’t get or ignored the e-mail received something in a more traditional sense. My suggestion is that you do some pre-communication letting your subscribers know that they are going to receive their renewal via e-mail.
2. The largest complaint that we got from the people that did pay attention to the e-mail was that there wasn't enough detailed information on our site about the season. We didn't have our virtual brochure ready when the e-mail went out (an issue we are correcting this year).
We have toyed with the idea of doing print @ home for season tickets, like you were are currently only doing them with single tickets, but so far we can't think of an efficient way to deal with all the other communication that needs to go with the tickets. Most probably could be accomplished with links to the information on our site, but the personalized subscriber reward card is a stumbling block. We would need to mail that to them, so it defeats the purpose of doing the print at home. That and the file size issue that you mentioned.
HI Dee Dee -
Our experience was pretty similar to Kay's. We sent out emails to those people that we had emails for and we directed them to our website for their renewal information. There weren't a lot of complaints, but I'd say that the percentage of people who opened their email and renewed was a lot less than one might hope for. It saved us a wee bit of paper and mailing costs, but definitely was not something we'd ever try to use to replace the actual mailing of renewals.
- Heather
Seattle Repertory Theatre
Both the Yale Rep and the School of Music have done email subscription renewals here at Yale. We have a custom procedure that generates personalized renewal links for each subscribers, and our websites allow them to log in automatically when they click the link. We are working on doing something similar for membership renewals. We are also working on turning the procedure into a report so the users can generate the links themselves, rather than having to make the request to IT.
If anyone is interested in either more technical info or in talking to the ticketing folk, please let me know, and I'll happily put you in touch with the right people here.
Best,
Mara