E-mail and On-Air Fundraising
Not long ago a prospective client asked me how many e-mail blasts should be sent during a pledge drive.
E-mail has become a powerful tool during pledge drives because the station can send listeners special offers and notifications of matching grants and get their immediate response. It's not unusual for medium-sized stations to earn a half-day's pledges from one e-mail blast.
So I was a bit surprised when the station balked at my suggestion to send 3 e-mails over the course of its 9-day pledge drive. They argued that three e-mail appeals would be intrusive, offensive, and disrespectful of the listener.
But interrupting the programming for 9 days was not.
What makes the listener's mailbox holier ground than his radio?
E-mail has become a powerful tool during pledge drives because the station can send listeners special offers and notifications of matching grants and get their immediate response. It's not unusual for medium-sized stations to earn a half-day's pledges from one e-mail blast.
So I was a bit surprised when the station balked at my suggestion to send 3 e-mails over the course of its 9-day pledge drive. They argued that three e-mail appeals would be intrusive, offensive, and disrespectful of the listener.
But interrupting the programming for 9 days was not.
What makes the listener's mailbox holier ground than his radio?
posted by RadioSutton at 11:32 AM
4 Comments:
I shared this with some people here at the station, and one noted, "[But listeners] can choose not to listen...they can't really choose not to look in their email inbox....."
--Nathan in SA
Nathan, I think your colleague's response might actually reinforce my point. An e-mail that is immediately deleted is a 10-second (at most) intrusion. The recipient can delete without opening. And for most stations, the recipient gave the station permission to send such e-mails.
A pledge drive is a series of 3-10 minute intrusions, 3 to 4 times per hour, over 9 days.
No "permission marketing" option here. The listener's only choice is intrusion or to not listen.
The issue that I'm getting at here is respect. Somehow we're getting to the point that we respect thie listener's e-mail environment more than the programming environment we create for him. Why shouldn't equally high levels of respect be given to both?
Aaron said, "what you're describing is essentially spam." Oh, I'm not disparaging the concern over too much e-mail. I just a find it really interesting that e-mail boxes are held in higher regard that public radio programming environments. That it is okay to "spam" the programming 3 times per hour but not the e-mail box 3 times per week. (btw - stations are actually pretty good at sending e-mails to only those who give permission)
Interesting discussion here. I agree with John that 3 e-mails would not be too many to send. The key here is to be strategic and to craft effective messages both for your e-mail and for your on-air messages and to use the two mediums together to leverage one another. Most stations using e-mail for their fundraising efforts are using powerful software tools that enable them to track open rates, click thru rates and unsubscribe rates. If you get a big jump in your number of unsubscribes that could be an indication that you are sending too much e-mail. Also most of these tools allow you to customize ask amounts, send a second message only to those who didn't click the link the first time etc... and yes you do need to use opt in permission based practices. There are a few examples of e-mail appeals used in conjunction with pledge drives on the DEI website.
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