Hi, all! Two questions:
Has anyone successfully integrated Theatre Manager with an email marketing tool like WordFly?
Thanks, all! Hope you’re well and staying safe!
Tommy
Hi Tommy! We recently returned to TM (with Mailgun as the email provider) for our eblasts and external mail list signups. I’m not familiar with WordFly, but our prior eblast process used a custom API-integration between TM and InfusionSoft. The integration was not overarching, but allowed incoming mail list signups to check the email address against the patron database before creating a new account and connecting InfusionSoft’s unsubscribe to a patron’s do-not-email flag. We managed the lists themselves in both programs independently, however, pulling and updating our essential “seed” lists from TM using relevant criteria, but also using InfusionSoft’s built-in grouping features for segmentation, etc.
It was not perfect, but far better data management than we had previously with manual unsubscribe imports and totally separate “email” databases for our general newsletter. I was only tangentially related to the day-to-day blasting process, but am happy to ask the folks on my end more specific questions if you have them.
It might be important to note, however, that in our new Covid financial reality, we decided to leave our InfusionSoft costs behind. And while I’m sure the Marketing department salivates for a few of the more advanced dedicated email marketing tools that InfusionSoft (and previously Informz) provided, we have easily and quickly been able to meet all of our fundamental email marketing and signup needs with TM’s existing features/services.
As for embedding ticketing pages into our main website, I’m not fully sure I understand the question. Our “buy”, “donate now” and “signin to your account” buttons link directly to the relevant webstore pages. If it’s relevant, however, we do still use a custom integration between TM and our main site for our ticketed event pages. The importer pulls event title, performance dates and times, etc to create an initial event landing page that we then “prettify” on Wordpress. The importer also allows for semi-automatic “buy” button appearance when the performance is set to go on-sale online.
Once again, we paid a local agency to write this custom code for us. I will note that this particular integration hasn’t been as flexible as we needed and as it’s complex coding, we don’t have the in-house skills to update it when we run into a new or unplanned use case. Some examples include alternative venues, performances we couldn’t delete but shouldn’t appear, accidental performance number node deletions from Wordpress, etc. Most recently, we’ve had to go around the importer and do manual event landing pages for virtual content that can be bought and viewed for extended time after the performance datetime. Obviously these are new needs and TM fields that we couldn’t have accounted for when we had the integration built, but our inability to continue customizing it cheaply and quickly is a factor worth noting.
Hope this helps a little!
Thanks so much! WordFly is an email system that was originally designed to integrate directly with Tessitura. Right now, and we did this with Mailchimp previously, is export from TM only and then we have to export unsubscribes from WordFly and check those against accounts in TM. It’s an overwhelming amount of manual labor which also allows for human error.
As for the embedding question, what I want is to be able to embed the TM portal (ex. a particular show) within our actual website so we’re not sending people off to a second website for purchasing which also comes with the requirement of an entirely separate set of Google Analytics, Facebook pixel coding, etc.
Due to the pandemic, our budgets are frozen so paying TM or an outside agency to develop additional integrations is just not going to happen.
Tommy,
Totaly understand the budget constraints. Here’s a couple of quick thoughts to maybe save you guys some manual effort, but still keep your same process without a custom-integration:
You can use the Import feature to get WordFly unsubscribes back into TM - so long as you’re recording the patron number in your exports from TM to WordFly lists, this is pretty simple and quick. We use to do this every 2-3 months or so. So if you are manually checking accounts, this could save you quite a bit of time.
I’m not sure how embedding works on the backend, but I suspect that embedding still sends patrons to the webstore pages, it just doesn’t look like that on the front end. By all means, someone correct me if I’m wrong about that, but if I’m not, the value of using TM’s webstore pages is the credit card encryption and PCI compliance. You’ll need to add operating costs to cover secure payment processing within your marketing site, versus having that covered already with the TM pages. If I’ve misunderstood, sorry all!
There’s a way in Google Analytics to combine multiple properties, both your marketing site and the web pages. This is definitely not my area of expertise, but we’ve had folks set this up for us for easier cross-property tracking and I can try to get more information if you’re interested.
Props to you guys for putting the effort in to keep your data integrity with multiple systems - it’s so important and definitely not easy to navigate!
Thanks, Sophie! I appreciate all of this.