Artful Use of E-mail Gives American Ceramic Society Triple-Digit Sales Spike

The 110-year-old American Ceramic Society (ACS) has been publishing magazines since 1953, but it only committed itself to digital communications, including e-mail and e-commerce, in 2007.  Since then, though, the non-for-profit organization has expanded it reach to more than 60,000 subscribers in 100-plus countries. What’s more, sales of its books, magazines, and DVDS have soared by more than 200%, to “well over $5 million,” according to Charlie Spahr, CEO/president of the Ceramic Publications Co., the ACS’s wholly owned division responsible for the organization’s print and digital products. That growth, he adds, is all down to the company’s e-mail marketing.

ACS’s Ceramic Arts Daily e-newsletter mails six days a week. The newsletter supports the CeramicArtsDaily.org Website by spotlighting one feature from the site each day.  About 18 months ago, Spahr says, the newsletter began including a link to a 5- to 10-minute instructional video every Friday, which increased both e-mail subscriptions and traffic to the site.

The videos “seem to have really taken off,” Spahr says. “It’s easy to see why. For our audience the how-to aspect is important. You can describe it, you can have photos—but it’s another level when you have another person demoing it live, especially when it’s an expert.” The videos have become so popular, ACS just acquired a second server dedicated to them.

Many of the videos are excerpts from the DVDs that ACS produces and sells. ACS also includes video clips and downloadable chapter excerpts when promoting specific products in its standalone marketing e-mails. While some might balk at giving away content, Spahr insists that people will still buy the cow even if you give them a bit of milk for free: “It turns out if you make a lot of stuff available at no cost, if they like what you give them, they’ll go ahead and buy more.”

Ceramic Arts Daily built its opt-in subscriber list from scratch in less than three years. The growth, says Spahr, was all organic. ACS promoted the Website and e-newsletter in its two print magazines, Ceramics Monthly and Pottery Making Illustrated, and at the sundry workshops and trade shows its staff attends. It also promotes the site via search engine optimization and Google AdWords and serves a pop-up promoting the e-newsletters to site visitors who aren’t yet subscribers.

In the past year alone ACS managed to double its subscriber base, due in part to improved deliverability and list hygiene. It credits e-mail marketing solutions provider StreamSend for enabling it effectively handle its increased volume. What’s more, “they’ve helped us to work with ISPs that sometimes have rules and guidelines that are hard to understand,” Spahr says. 

StreamSend has also helped ACS better manage its subscriber list. “Let’s say you’ve been sending an e-mail to an address and it’s a valid address and you haven’t been having any problem with the ISP, but [the recipient] hasn’t been opening it,” Spahr says. “Now we can identify people who haven’t opened for, say, three months. We’ll stop mailing to them. We won’t take them off the list, but we won’t send to them for a while. Our [total] e-mail [circulation] could be higher, but what’s the point? Why bother sending them if people aren’t open them?” Suppressing the nonengaged subscribers has increased ACS’s open and click-through rates, which has pleased its advertisers (Ceramic Arts Daily sells one ad banner spot in each issue).  

ACS further encourages engagement with the occasional contest. Its first effort asked subscribers to submit a video tour of their studio. After receiving about 30 submissions, the editors selected finalists and then asked the audience to vote for the winner. It also promoted the contest, as it does its other content, on its Facebook page, which has more than 12,000 fans, and its Twitter feed. In a few weeks ACS will launch another contest, in which it will ask subscribers to send a video of a tool they’ve made in their workshop.

“The e-newsletter has allowed us to reach a deeper and wider audience than we ever could in print,” Spahr concluded. “I’ve been fortunate in having a staff that not only adapted from print to digital but that embraced it.”