Tag Archives: email

Mailchimp & Tessitura together at last

tessitura-mailchimp

The short version is:

There is now an integration between Tessitura & Mailchimp. If you are a Tessitura Licensee, and have access to their BitBucket account, you can get it here.

So you can use this lovely Mailchimp Interface to create your emails…

Screen Shot 2015-08-20 at 12.36.19 PM

… and connect it with all of the power of Tessitura, through this easy to use tool.

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The long version is:

It’s the last day of the Tessitura Learning & Community Conference, and I’m all checked out of my hotel, sitting in the conference hall, thinking about all of the things I’ve learned this week, and all of the people I’ve met.

So many of the people I’ve talked to have been asking about the Tessitura-Mailchimp Integration we launched in partnership with Mailchimp and JCA, Inc. this past week, and so I thought I’d write up a blog post to try and explain what it is, how you get it/use it/make it better, and more importantly, why we did it in the first place.

A long while ago, Cooper Hewitt had an enormous email list. Some 60K emails on one massive list powered by a e-marketing service that was clearly heading out of business. This giant list wasn’t working. We weren’t getting the results we thought we should, and what’s more, we had no way of measuring our success. So, we switched to Mailchimp. It was a pretty obvious choice. Mailchimp offered the museum an incredibly quick set up time, a beautiful user interface, with super clean and easy to use templates. What’s more, Mailchimp placed a lot of emphasis on “list quality” and advised us to put out an appeal to our current bloated list to do an “opt-in” and create a whole new list made up of real people, with valid email addresses, who actually wanted to receive mail from us.

The list dropped down. Way down. After a few “last chance” appeals, our 60K subscribers were whittled down to about 2500. This was challenging territory for many departments in the museum who relied on the large numbers for a sense of security more than their effectiveness, like at almost every non-profit.

But we pressed on, and noticed quickly that our open rates were dramatically high. Our click through rates were excellent, and it was clear that people were actually reading our emails, and acting on our calls to action. If you haven’t noticed by now, I’m trying to include as many marketing buzzwords into this post as possible. You know, due-dilligence and all.

This is a long way around to explain that we all started to fall in love with Mailchimp. It’s ease of use and deep analytics and reporting tools were a huge win for the museum as a whole. Our list continues to grow and our “satisfaction” rating remains pretty steadily on the high end. The staff seem to enjoy working in Mailchimp, especially following the recent redesign of the user interface.

One day along the way, the museum decided to implement Tessitura as our CRM ( constituent relationship management ) and ticketing system. It’s a super robust, enterprise class system that is sort of the swiss army knife for non-profits, performing arts centers, and more recently, museums.

In the long term strategic plan for Tessitura, it appeared as though we would have to ditch Mailchimp and move to one of the two providers that offer an integration with Tessitura. We looked at both of them, and while they both did the job at hand, neither of them offered the pleasant experience and incredible analytics tools that Mailchimp did. It would have been a tough sell to our staff to move them off something they clearly all had grown to love and on to a system that would probably work just fine, but not make their hearts any warmer.

So, we talked with Mailchimp. Mailchimp has a wide variety of third party integrations, and we started to converse about what an integration with Tessitura would look like. We all got really excited at the possibilities, and so once a small amount of funding was secured, we partnered with JCA, Inc. to build us something.

Mailchimp was really excited about the idea, and being a forward thinking tech company, they pushed us to make the integration free, and open source. This is something we strongly believe in at Cooper Hewitt as well, so we worked with the staff at Tessitura, and figured out a way to share the code within the Tessitura Network, so as not to violate any non-disclosure agreements. Things were starting to take shape.

So what will it do, and how does it work?

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We tried to limit the scope of the project to the bare essentials. We wanted to stay within our budget, and build a simple tool that does what it says on the tin. The hope here is that Tessiutra licensees will try it out, see that it’s a good thing, and run with it, adding features and customizing it to suit their needs. Open source goodness.

At the moment, the project is a pretty simple .NET application that anyone can install on a windows machine that can talk to Tessitura and Mailchimp. You fill out some initial config information, and then schedule a nightly synchronization job. This allows Tessitura licensees to export their primary lists on a nightly basis into Mailchimp.

You can also perform synchronizations on an ad-hoc basis, meaning, any Tessitura user can easily create a segmented list in Tessitura for a specific purpose, and sync that list to Mailchimp for immediate sending.

This is a really nice feature, because it actually creates or updates a segment in Mailchimp. Rather than create many bespoke email lists, you can then just use a single master list in Mailchimp, and use the exported segments so you are only sending to the addresses you are interested in.

What it’s not

It’s important to understand that this is an open source tool and is provided “as is.” There is no support staff waiting to take your calls and answer your questions. This remains the responsibility of the Tessitura community.

As I mentioned, it’s a simple tool, and at the moment, it basically does the two functions I’ve outlined above. There is no syncing of analytics data back in to Tessitura, for example. We really love the analytics tools built right into Mailchimp, and so for most this may not be a deal breaker. These are the kinds of features we hope will get added by the community down the road.

What it is, again.

It’s a super exciting thing for us to all think about! The Tessitura community really needs to take more control over the entire eco-system of third-party applications and extensions. Without a vested interest in building our own tools, open sourcing the work we are all doing, and joining in the conversation with regards to direction and strategy, the community will always be waiting on the next update from those vendors who have chosen to build products from the system.

How do I get it?

First, you need to be a Tessitura Network licensee. Then, you just need access to the Tessitura Netowrk code sharing site on BitBucket. You can get this by sending an email to web_dev@tessituranetwork.com. Once you are there, you can go to here, and download the code, or the binaries to try it out on your system. The repository has a README with all the relevant info on how to install it from scratch, build from the source, and set things up in Mailchimp. If you don’t have this capability you can also download the compiled binaries and just try it out.

How do I contribute?

If you are a Tessitura Network licensee, and you’ve gotten this far, read the README to get the full picture on how to fork the code and contribute. For the time being, feel free to log issues, and send feature requests, and I will do my best to follow up on them and help get them resolved, but eventually, we hope that someone within the community will pick up the torch and help us to continue to develop what we think is a really valuable integration and option for the broader Tessitura community.

Reminder: First, you need to be a Tessitura Network licensee. Then, you just need access to the Tessitura Netowrk code sharing site on BitBucket. You can get this by sending an email to web_dev@tessituranetwork.com

A new feature you may never see – ticketing follow up emails

A few weeks ago we rolled out a small update to the ticketing website that sends a reminder email to anyone who has purchased tickets in advance.

This is sort of an experiment. but first, some background.

Recently I attended an event at another cultural institution ( which I won’t name ). A few days prior to the event I received a very up-selling reminder email, reminding me of membership discounts and other events I might like. The links within the email took me to the landing page for the event, and offered little actual information that I found useful unless I wanted to buy even more tickets, or combine my purchase with a book in the shop.

To make things worse, on the night of the event, and just as it was finishing up, I received a “follow up email” , which I found really annoying. It was literally timed to send exactly as the event was ending and while I was on my way out the door, as if to say, “wait, come back in and buy the book too!”

In fact, the subject line read “How did I enjoy [insert event title here]?” But, the email itself didn’t offer me a way to answer that question ( even if I wanted to ) and instead simply pointed me to the same landing page of the event I had just attended, along with links to their social media channels and other upcoming shows I might be interested in. The whole thing made me cringe a little as I pressed the delete button on my phone.

I thought to myself, “let’s not do that.”

I really just wanted to send a gentle reminder email, full of actually useful info to people who were planning to come visit the museum. I thought it would be nice if I had booked tickets in advance to get something like this the day before I was planning to visit. Something with a map and some info on how to get here, and potentially a little synopsis of what I might do once I arrived.

So, here was my thought process.

Like I said, it’s an experiment, and so I’m still just sort of beta-testing this feature, and trying to analyze how useful/annoying people find it. We already get so many emails, so I really wanted to make sure I wasn’t bombarding our visitors with additional garbage, or even worse, confusing them with unneeded information like what I’d recently experienced.

First of all, it would be all about timing. While talking out loud in the Labs about this one, Aaron’s comment was simply “time zones.” Computer’s have time zones ( all of ours are set to UTC ), people are in time zones. It was clearly something to consider.

Right now, we can only assume that you will be here sometime during our open hours on the day you purchased the ticket. We don’t presently do timed tickets, and unlike an event space, each day’s “performance” spans the entirety of our hours.

So we decided to try out sending the reminders the day before at 4pm, our time. I guess it’s generally safe to say that visitors are nearing our time zone the day before their visit, but its really still a best guess. Also, we are not going to “remind you” if you are booking for the same day as that’s probably overkill. So for now, at 4pm, the day before your visit, is when the email goes out.

Next I had some fun coming up with a way to extract all the relevant info from our Ticketing CRM ( Tessitura ).

I needed the following info:

  • All the things going on tomorrow ( this is sort of future proofing for when we let you book other things beyond general admission )
  • All the current orders for all the things going on tomorrow.
  • All the email addresses for all the orders for all the things going on tomorrow.

Getting “tomorrow” was pretty easy in PHP.

$datetime = new DateTime(‘tomorrow’);
$tomorrow = $datetime->format(‘Y-m-d’);

4pm EST is 9pm UTC on the same day, so all good there in calculating “tomorrow.”

Our Tessitura API wrapper I mentioned in my last post has a method that lets us get all the “performances” in Tessitura for a given date range. Simply passing it “tomorrow” yields us all the things we are looking for. We also have a method that can get all the orders placed for a given performance. Finally, we have a method that gets the email for the user that placed the order.

Now we can send the actual email.

Obviously, people place multiple orders and buy multiple tickets per order. I really only want to send one email regardless of what you’ve booked. So when I am looping through all the orders, I only add the email address to the list once.

The last step was to make a cron job that runs this script once a day at 4pm. Done!

( Incidentally, all of our servers are set to UTC, but for some reason our RedHat server’s crontab doesn’t seem to care, and somehow ( possibly magically ) thinks it’s on EST. I have yet to figure out why this is, but for now I am just going with it. )

Right now, the email is a fixed template. We are sending out emails via Mandrill, so we get some decent analytics and can track open rates, and click rates. We also added Google Analytics tracking codes to all the links in the email so we can see what people are clicking right in GA.

So far we’ve experienced an open rate of about 75% and a click rate of about 20%, which seems pretty good to me.

Our open and click rate for the last 30 days.

Our open and click rate for the last 30 days.

And here is the GA results for the “Ticket Reminder” campaign from the same time period. From here you can dive deeper into the analytics to see what pages people are heading to once they are on the site, and all sorts of other metrics.

GA TicketReminder

Since you can only really “see” this feature if you book an advance ticket I’ve posted an image of what the email looks like below. We went through a few design iterations to get it to look the way it looks, and I’d really love to hear your thoughts about it. If you were visiting us, and received this email the day before your visit at 4pm, would you find it useful, annoying, or confusing?

Reminder Email Template

Our reminder email template

Of course this will change again when the Pen goes live shortly.