Using Audience Spectrum we dug deeper into the demographics of one of our email marketing lists.
One of the strongest services within the Audience Connect offer is our quarterly, Go See This printed newsletter. Mailed directly to a selected 10k culturally engaged households, this cost-effective piece of collaborative print has a proven track record of engaging audiences across the North West. Based predominately throughout Greater Manchester and the North West, this database serves a local audience with a keen interest in culture and the arts at large. We know where the recipients of our newsletter live, we know they’re culturally engaged, but with the arrival of Audience Spectrum we got to thinking; how much do we actually know about our subscribers?
The geographical spread of our subscribers
Audience Spectrum provides us with a unique opportunity to profile our database with arts audiences in mind. Audience Spectrum is a population profiling tool which describes attendance, participation and engagement within the arts, museums and heritage sectors, as well as monitoring behaviours and attitudes towards such organisations. More information can be found about Audience Spectrum segments here.
One notable point is the strong concentration of clusters outside the Northwest, especially those centred within London and the Midlands. This is an indicator, firstly of the drive times audiences are willing to commit to, and secondly the nationwide interest in cultural hubs other than your own. The question is, how do we us use these pools of data outside the North West to expand our service on a national level?
The ten segments allow us to analyse the data at a deeper level and truly understand what makes our subscribers tick by allocating each of them a specific profile. Segmenting in this way could enable us to mail specific segments such as Commuterland Culture Buffs, or Facebook Families with a targeted message more appropriate to their likes and dislikes.
The combined Go See This and Family Friendly profiling is as follows:
Our combined database of 18,701 postcodes was successfully matched to the relevant Audience Spectrum Segments. The data has been compared to a North West base.
The first thing to note is that our data spans the ten segments, giving us a percentage in each. This is extremely useful considering our quarterly newsletter includes events across many art forms.
Secondly, it’s worth noting the strong presence in both the medium and lower engaged segments, which is a good indicator of the strength of this data set. Particularly noteworthy is the 11% representation in Facebook Families, a strong percentage which still leaves room for growth when compared to the North West base. There is also room for development within the Trips and Treats segment. While 16% of the data is strong, we would aim to grow this beyond the North West base within the next six months through targeted campaigns. The most highly represented segment being Dormitory Dependables is also worth mentioning, it being a medium engaged group.
Moving forward, it will be interesting to investigate how this intelligence can be best used. Enabling organisations to mail specific segments in accordance with their own audience development strategy would be one suggestion, whilst still allowing our quarterly newsletters to serve the entire database. I would like to encourage collaborative pieces of print between venues to increase a particular, desired audience. For example, it may be advantageous to mail a collaborative piece of print between classical music venues to the Home and Heritage segment – a segment of 1601, medium engaged subscribers likely to attend classical music. The relationships and connections we have built through the Audience Finder programme and our network of Regional Directors will help facilitate this, as well as the strong client relations and sector knowledge we have within the Audience Connect team.
This profiling has also allowed us to highlight which segments we might need to develop in accordance with organisation’s targets and strategy. This is an improvement on broadly encouraging sign ups, as we can now target potential subscribers within specific Audience Spectrum segments. The strong representation across Commuterland Culturebuffs, Dormitory Dependables, Trips and Treats and a strong presence across the lower indexing segments, shows the value and strong engagement with the Go See This and Family Friendly offering. The database continues to grow and we aim to develop this in an intelligent and targeted manner.
In addition to our mailing database, we also operate a weekly Go See This e-newsletter with a database of 5000 serving Greater Manchester and a monthly Family Friendly e-newsletter with a database of 6000 serving the North West. The Go See This e-database is broken down is slightly differently. With this we capture the audience’s preference at the point of sign-up, whether that be drama, dance, exhibitions or another art form. This allows us to send each recipient a slightly different email based on their individual preferences. This level of customization is very popular with our subscribers and clients alike.
For more information on our Go See This and Family Friendly services, please contact a member of the Audience Connect team.