Meet the Belcourt.
How a successful art house fills its seats and connects with fans.
We don't have huge dollars to spend on communication, and Emma is an incredibly affordable way to keep and continue to capture people who are interested in what we have to say every week.- Stephanie Silverman
Comforts for creatures off the screen.
The Belcourt is known for innovative programming, fun events like wine-tastings before movies and charmingly, um, uncomfortable seats. When they decided to raise money for new seats, they turned exclusively to Emma and sent three emails as part of a Creature Comforts campaign. Over the course of one year, 600 people gave from $10 to $2,500 each. Yes, they met their goal of $65,000 that quickly. That's way better than a Hollywood ending.
It's a fraction of what we would pay to do a direct mail campaign to get that kind of return.
Staging glamorous events.
In 2010, the Belcourt is one of eight theaters screening a festival film during Sundance. Of course, movie lovers in Nashville got excited about it, and the Belcourt sent their members an offer on a Wednesday. Emma's segmenting tools allowed them to stagger and control the communication – they sent the offer to the rest of their list on Friday, and the tickets were gone by the end of that day.
If we need to send to a smaller list, it's easy but still professional-looking. That kind of identity-building is so important.
Generating ticket sales.
When the Belcourt is holding a special event and advance ticket sales are lower than expected, they know just what to do. When sales for one screening were trudging along, they sent an email a few days before the big night, and 40 percent of the people who opened the email clicked on the “buy tickets” link.
Emma is one of our key arsenal tools when we see that people haven't heard enough about something.
Easy box office integration.
With Emma's tools, the Belcourt can easily upload its ticket buyer lists into their email database. Especially for schedule changes, Managing Director Stephanie Silverman thinks it's fantastic to grab the names of people who have tickets for that event and let them know that something has changed in “a lovely, professional format.” (That's what she said, honest.)
Emma is our primary database and our main communication tool. It's incredibly easy to integrate the Emma system and export those names.
Only popcorn could bring more people together.
The Belcourt was quick to make movie-like magic when innovative email marketing tools like Emma's came along. Now they're communicating through social media, too, integrating that strategy with Emma. They post a link to their newsletter on their Facebook page and incorporate handy links to their Facebook and Twitter pages in their emails.
We have a very Twitter- and Facebook-aware audience, so it's huge for us.