ST52

That is not the case.  Any marketer who sends an email to someone who has already booked (especially with a special offer on it) is not doing their job properly.  Any computerised box office system allows you to filter out existing bookers and only the most primitive venue would have a database that is not integrated with sales histories.  There's no excuse for this. It's about as basic as email marketing gets.  I'm an experienced theatre marketer btw.

In reply to:

"That sort of thing is actually suprisingly difficult to manage, as the booking system is invariably different from the marketing database, and they're never compatible with each other, you either need to have a feed from one to the other, or a third system dealing with taking the info from the booking system and applying it to the info in the marketing database. Or, you know, a human being comparing the list of people who have booked with the email addresses for each email run.

Trust me, it's far more difficult, time consuming and expensive than you think to do that kind of stuff!"