3.03. "Don’t wake the dead" or use your contact database with care

Anyone who has ever had to communicate knows: it is very tempting to want to address your entire contact database. Similarly, it is also understandable to try to gather as many contacts as possible, thinking-under a comprehensible but unverified arithmetic logic-that reaching more people will lead to better engagement. Both these logics are as unfounded as they are ineffective and can even prove counterproductive for your marketing strategy. Here, we review these two reflexes to deconstruct, the applicable legal framework, and the good data management practices it determines.

  A message that is too general loses impact and can get lost among many recipients who are only mildly interested or not interested at all in the message. Take, for example, someone who frequents a cultural venue solely for classic theatre, with last-minute booking habits, and who receives a message about the opening of the youth season: chances are high that the message will hold no interest for this person. Conversely, the intended audience for that message likely needs specific information, an appropriate tone, or a tailored visual framework to be truly reached. Sending the same communication without specifically targeting profiles with a history of youth season bookings fails to meet the criteria needed to ensure impact.

This demonstrates that trying to please everyone ends up pleasing no one in a meaningful way.

Such indiscriminate sending behavior can be harmful to the marketing strategy beyond the send itself: if repeated, such untimely communication will be perceived as unwanted and may lead recipients to mark it as spam. These spam reports are tracked by your email service provider and affect the deliverability of your future messages. As a result, any future communication efforts may suffer the consequences of past actions. This is an important argument to keep in mind when facing urgent requests for unplanned communications (see the sheet "How to say no to yet another request for emailing or social media posts? (and succeed)").

Mass and unplanned email sends also represent a careless use of financial and human resources at the venue-resources that are precious and limited. Email sending is a costly service with limited economies of scale or cost reductions possible. Therefore, in the highly constrained reality of cultural institutions, it is necessary to carefully plan email sends to guarantee their effectiveness and keep costs proportional. Moreover, the teams responsible for the strategy are both evaluated and self-evaluate based on the impact of their communication actions. Wasting their limited budget on poor targeting while simultaneously harming their results amounts to a double penalty.  

Ultimately, how can you ensure the health of your contact database, use it effectively, and comply with the law?

First, by basing your communication actions on careful targeting or on segmenting your audiences [Link to sheet 25 "Defining audiences to adapt your messaging"]. Such an approach allows you to send a more engaging message to a smaller number of people, but who are much more likely to convert your content into a booking. It also has the virtue of avoiding over-soliciting your targets, who may become fatigued by an increase in communications that add no value to them, and eventually disengage. Regarding email sending, there is no need to rush: it is better to send your emailing to 50% of your database and achieve a 70% open rate than to send it to 100% with a 35% open rate. This will further improve your deliverability in the obscure algorithms of your email sending tool.

Furthermore, it is important to anchor your sending practices within the strict legal framework defined by the General Data Protection Regulation [link to sheet 9 "Regulations applicable to data"]. Regarding email sending, this framework precisely stipulates the conditions under which you can address your communications to a person, the most important being the collection of their explicit consent to be solicited by email, which takes the form of an "opt-in" in IT language. This explicit consent is typically collected during a reservation transaction on the venue's ticketing system, account creation, or voluntary subscription to the institution's newsletter. It should be immediately noted that the legitimate interest basis cannot be invoked to prospect commercially without this prior consent (for France, this is stipulated in Article L 34-5 of the CPCE).

Finally, it is necessary to regularly clean your database, and here again the GDPR has set the rule to follow: you must delete the contact details of inactive contacts for 36 months. This inactivity is judged by the absence of openings of your communications and, of course, by the absence of bookings for your shows. If you wish to keep the data of persons for behavioral analysis or reservation history tracking, you will need to anonymize them, following a complex process that only the editor of your database software can perform. If you work with an internal spreadsheet, as is also possible [link to sheet 14 "What place for spreadsheets"], it is recommended to follow the documentation established by your national data protection authority (in France, this is the CNIL. National authorities are referenced for all European countries in the sheet dedicated to data regulation). Finally, you should also clean all invalid email addresses from your databases and sending files.  

• [FR] Exemples de listes conformes et non corformes (external link), Mailchimp
  
• [EN] Reputation and Rejections (external link), Mailchimp
• [EN] Optimize and clean your contact list to improve email deliverability (external link), Brevo
• [FR] RGPD : le recours à l'intérêt légitime, un faux ami ? (external link), CMS Francis Lefebvre, janvier 2024
• [FR] L'anonymisation de données personnelles (external link), CNIL, mai 2020