Karen Fricker asks in To Text Or Not To Text on the Guardian’s website
whether using text messages to market theatre performances is a good idea.
I think it's an excellent idea, with the following provisos. The recipients must give their permission (which is a legal requirement), the marketers must make it easy for them to stop receiving the texts and thecommunications must be of genuine use to them. The last point is probably the most important. As with mail, it is only junk or spam if you’re not interested. If the texts are targeted to people according to their previously declared interests (new productions going on sale, late offers, particular genres, etc), then there should not be a problem.
Well, there might be one problem- the marketer must not abuse the fact of being given permission to text by bombarding the recipient. An online CD retailer fell foul of this a little while ago. At first, they found that the more frequently they emailed their list of people who had asked to receive news, the more CDs they sold, until they were emailing once a week and doing very nicely. But they carried on increasing the frequency, eventually sending a daily email, and suddenly their business collapsed. Their customers simply got annoyed and voted with their feet.
The optimum number of emails seems to be no more than once a week and I suspect that the same applies to texts. I propose that, when someone subscribes to receive texts, they are not only asked what they are interested in but also the maximum number of texts they want to receive in a month.
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