Our new policy this year was to have tickets wait to send until 2 weeks prior to each performance. As we are now having more and more shows each week calls from patrons not seeing their PAH ticket email have increased.
I think I have a theory but wanted to know if others have noticed similar trends.
Is anyone else having a lot of issues with patrons not seeing PAH tickets come in and do you have theories? YES, we do ask them to check their junk, spam, and even search for our boxoffice email address which they should be arriving from. =)
Thanks!
Christina
Christina,
We have this issue but it is almost exclusively with Gmail accounts. We do not wait to sent out PAH tickets typically, but we do wait to do so during our subscription renewal period. Regardless of if we wait or if they get sent just after the order, for Gmail, we have found that our order confirmations will go to people's "Inbox" but the PAH tickets go into a folder called "All Mail". Having people do a search for the email address our PAH tickets come from typically results in them finding them in that folder on the date they were sent.
Now that being said, it also seems to be not the solution for everyone! Research seemed to indicate that it may be an issue with Gmail and IMAP settings if someone accesses Gmail also through things like Outlook or the Iphone mail app, and how Gmail and IMAP handle folders and categories. So it would make sense that a large number of people may be having the issue. But not everyone who accesses Gmail through an IMAP account is having the PAH tickets go into their "All Mail" folder.
We also have all of our Tessitura generated emails bcc'd to a internal email address so that we can confirm that the emails have actually been sent out. This allows us to look up the originals and confirm that the email was sent from our side. The frustrating thing is that if I find our version of their email and just forward it from my own work email, they get it in like 5 seconds right into their inbox!
One of the issues with delay send that we have been concerned about is that if the patron doesn't really know when to look for the incoming email AND it goes into Junk/spam or not their inbox, we feel they are more likely to not see it and have to call the box office. At least if the PAH tickets are supposed to follow the order confirmation within a certain period of time, that can be something for them to look out for and reach out say within 24 hours if they don't see it, hopefully increasing the number of people who end up finding it after a quick search of their email.
Jeff