Smarketing: smarter marketing for libraries.

• Author: Duncan, Ross

Smarketing (Smarter marketing) while not necessarily limited to electronic means, requires libraries and their management teams to rethink and reinvent marketing and promotional strategies. In an operating environment where library budgets are under pressure, and there are increasing demands on the times of both users and nonusers messages must be targeted, easily accessible and the results monitored closely to ensure continued relevance. Described is how the Learning Communities Branch of the new Sunshine Coast Regional Council in Queensland approaches and analyses marketing and promotion through an electronic newsletter to library members.

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With increasing choices available to library users, and increasing pressures on their time, it is imperative that public libraries improve their marketing.

Much has been made of the letter 'e' in front of goods and services to emphasise that they are available and accessible electronically. While the placing of 'e' at the front of existing services is purported to indicate that an innovative approach has been taken, too often the 'e' simply means 'electronic', and that the service has merely been transcribed to a new format rather than reinvented or redesigned.

Since April 2009 the Learning Communities Branch of the Sunshine Coast Regional Council has been sending an electronic newsletter titled More for you @ your Library or 'eNews' to a database of library members on a monthly basis.

There are about 37,000 email addresses in the mailing database, which is added to as new library members join. Since its creation, there has been considerable effort to remove the email addresses that do not function, resulting in a decrease in the number of bounced emails from 22% in March 2009 to 4% in August 2009.

The targeted nature of the content for each edition has also seen the number of opens (instances in which the recipient opens the email) increase from 29% to 43% between March and August 2009. An open can only be detected if the recipient's email program allows it. The remaining percentage to whom the email was confirmed as delivered, may have opened the email, but their email program or technical environment will not allow the email to be tracked. With this in mind, the numbers presented here can be considered conservative.

The efforts to keep the newsletter as relevant as possible, combined with the low frequency of issue, has resulted in a decrease in recipients choosing to unsubscribe to eNews. From March 2009 to August 2009, the rate of unsubscription has decreased from 2.91% to less than 0.4% in the latest issue.

The newsletter is opened by people in many countries around the world, as indicated in the following tables.

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