It is one of the best times of year! Capacity Interactive has published their most recent Arts Industry Digital Marketing Benchmarking Study findings.
In looking at these findings year-over-year, it is interesting to see what has changed and what hasn’t. I highly recommend that you download the report for yourself, but here are some tidbits I found particularly interesting:
We asked how organizations are informing their new site designs and found that, overall, patron-focused and data-informed inputs do not lead the charge. For example, whereas 62% of the surveyed organizations said they considered internal needs and priorities in their latest website redesign, only 25% utilized analytics data. In fact, the use of analytics data was only slightly more common than drawing on the opinions of leadership and board members (selected by 24% of the respondents).
Organizations reported that pre- or post-performance, exhibition, or event emails, as well as triggered emails based on patron behavior, yielded impressive open rates ranging between 44-50%. This range is far above the average 26% reported for more commonly used newsletters or promotions.
The reported number of overall website visitor sessions correlates with operating budget size but, strikingly, the percentage of mobile visitors does not. In fact, the average percentage of website visitors that arrived via mobile was 43% and the averages for each operating budget size only varied between 41% and 44%. Furthermore, mobile visitation was remarkably consistent across all volumes of website visitors.
