Twice a month I offer expansions on the themes and topics that Michelle Paul and I wrote about in our book, Breaking the Fifth Wall: Rethinking Arts Marketing for the 21st Century. If you like these, you can buy the book from us here, or on Amazon’s Kindle or Barnes & Nobles' Nook.
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A few weeks ago we were preparing for our Fifth Wall seminars in Spain, and we were reviewing our PT Arts Patron Survey data. As you man know, we have surveyed arts patrons each winter for the last seven years, and thus we have a lot of trend data.
We discovered that while the overall frequency of checking e-mail has stayed about the same (just over 80% say they're checking multiple times a day), the locations where people who check their e-mail has changed a lot! I’m going to pull out some very specific results to make a point.
Here’s benchmark data from 2008 for the question, “Where do you check your e-mail?”
8% said they check e-mail in bed
3% at the beach
3% while driving
3% in the bathroom
Only three years later, here are the answers for the same question :
16% say they check e-mail in bed -- a 100% increase
6% at the beach -– a 100% increase
7% while driving –- a 133% increase (and a bit worrying)
9% in the bathroom -- a 200% increase
Cleary the advent of the smartphone is driving these changes, making e-mail even more valuable than it was before. Over the years pundits have predicted the demise of e-mail to be be replaced by RSS, or text messages, or even Facebook’s messaging service.
So far, at least with regard to the patrons arts managers need to reach, e-mail is getting more mobile and therefore allowing you to stay on the minds of your patrons wherever they may be.
Great research, thanks for sharing. I had a hunch this was going on, and it proves that e-mail is going to stick around as a force longer than people thought it would. All the more reason why building your arts organization's e-mail list is priority number one.
Posted by: Howard | January 13, 2012 at 09:33 AM