Digital Lab. Forced Entertainment. Ask the Audience.

I am in the early stages of my Digital Lab experiments after my first meeting with my mentor last week. One of my experiments is to look at how we are using our mailing list to communicate with our most engaged and loyal online audience. 

We don’t have a large mailing list database but looking at the open and click through rates from our most recent monthly newsletters, we can see that this audience are highly engaged. The content we are sharing with this audience is mainly focussed on tour dates, both nationally and internationally and this is information that we also share on our social media platforms and website regularly. Therefore, this highly engaged audience is not receiving anything different or new in advance of anyone else.  

As part of my Digital Lab experiment, I will be looking at how we communicate with this audience and how by doing this, we can grow our mailing list database. Offering exclusive insights and information before we make them public.  

The first step for this, is to ask the mailing list database what it is that they would like to receive from us and how often they would like to be emailed via a survey. I will be doing this in November as a part of our monthly newsletter and I am intrigued to see what they respond with. There was a question over whether this should be something we ask them or whether we should just start to implement some changes into our communications with the database. However, due to this audience being highly engaged, asking them what they would like from us feels like the first step into opening up the communication between ourselves and our audiences.  

I think this is a great opportunity to share more with our audiences, create more content and grow our database. 

Photo: Out of Order. Forced Entertainment. © Hugo Glendenning

Alice Dale, Marketing and Communications Manager at Forced Entertainment