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NOTES ON ENERTEX PRESENTATION
On July 18, 2007 GEMS hosted a very informative meeting with Enertex Marketing and a number of NYC early music ensemble representatives about generating a collaborative mailing list for the New York City early music community called the “New York Early Music List Cooperative.”
Enertex has been working with performing arts organizations for over 25 years, helping them develop and create community and regional arts databases, commonly referred to as arts Big Lists. They identified several important factors in the professional creation and management of an effective mailing list. Among them is the “RFT rating,” defined as follows. Recency: How recently a potential audience member purchased a ticket to a related EM event; Frequency, how frequently he or she buys such tickets; and Type, the type of purchaser he or she is (subscriber, single ticket, and so on). Together with a “scrubbed” (processed through the National Change of Address database) and “segmented” (sorted by various categories such as type of music events) mailing list, mail campaigns can reach a wider audience with a better RFT rating and thus do so with less waste and better outcomes.
Enertex’s objective is to help YOU achieve your goals by spending the least amount of money. For example, you may present them with a fixed budget, and they will then help you select and create the most effective mailing list from the List Cooperative within that budget.
Some participants questioned the efficacy of direct mail vs. email campaigns. Direct mail is alive and growing! We suggest you read the New York Times article (see below under Handouts). Don’t give up on it by turning to email-blasts only. There is still a lot to be said for a physical piece of paper. With a better, more specialized mailing list, you are able to send “appreciated mail,” not “junk mail.” Using Enertex and their expertise will also yield less undeliverable mail, as a result of the use of National Change of Address (NCOA) database to update the mailing lists.
Other participants were worried about of “cannibalization” as a result of these shared lists, i.e. patrons attending another group’s concert instead of your own. Research and similar mailing list collaborations has consistently shown, however, that overall attendance increases for all participants when patrons and prospective patrons feel they are a part of a larger arts community. Our goal is to help create this sense of community, with a core group of people who regularly attend many early music concerts.
Financial considerations - The setup cost is $150 ($200 for 2009) for each participating organization. GEMS will subsidize any additional costs beyond this. This is an annual fee, since the list is reconstructed annually from the data that each group maintains during the course of its season. Obtaining output from the master list costs a minimum of $110 ($125 for 2008) plus $2 per 1000 names, possibly more, depending on the number of list segments (categories) required. These costs are competitive with standard mailing-house fees.
Once you obtain a mailing list from Enertex, you are entitled to use it as many times as you wish (so you don’t need to pay the extraction fee multiple times), although you are not entitled to add the names to your own in-house database.
Each participating organization still needs to maintain their own mailing list. The Enertex Big List is good for one year, at which point each organization re-submits their updated mailing list for the following year. You are still the gatekeepers for your own events and have direct access to ticket sales records and other sources of audience data.
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NOTES ON HANDOUTS
New Jersey Cooperative Data
Page 1 shows distribution of cooperative list names by Sectional Center Facility (“SCF”), which is the first 3 digits of the zip code.
Page 2 shows distribution by individual zip code. Note how certain zip codes contain a high concentration of arts consumers.
Page 3 shows other distributions. An important one is “Multi Appearances.” These are names that appear on two lists (2X), or three lists (3X), etc. These “multi’s” are key names—people who go to several arts events. Note that if a name on your list turns out to be a “multi,” it is not considered a “unique” name on your list.
New Orleans Merge-Purge Analysis
We will all receive a copy of this report for the New York Early Music Cooperative list. For each participating organization (in this case, New Orleans Opera, Southern Repertory Theatre, etc.), we will see:
KEY - unique identifier for each group’s own list, to identify the source of each name
TOTAL NAMES IN – number of names submitted
SCF OMITS – names outside the list’s main geographic area
INTRA FILE DUPES – number of duplicates within a group’s own list
INTRA DUPE RATE – percentage of duplicates
UNIQUE NAMES OUT – net number of names yielded after removing bad addresses, SCF omits, internal dupes, and multi’s
MULTI NAMES OUT – names on your list that appear on one or more other lists
TOTAL NAMES OUT – sum of previous two columns
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