E-newsletters offer museums a targeted and effective way to showcase what you have to offer, which is why they should form the backbone of any digital marketing strategy.
During the Covid-19 crisis, and the closure of all museums in the UK, e-newsletters are a good way to stay in touch with audiences; promote the work you are doing digitally and from home; and raise awareness of fundraising campaigns.
Below are some top tips by on creating effective e-newsletters from the Museum Practice archive:
Subscribers
Museums should seek to grow subscribers whenever possible. Sign-up opportunities should be promoted wherever visitors interact with the museum – normally this would be via visitor questionnaires, as well as on every landing page on a museum website and on social media profiles.
Using competitions can act as an incentive for new subscribers.
As with any other element of digital marketing, newsletters must be used strategically. It is important to focus on the goal you are trying to achieve and then work backwards from that, said consultant Eleanor Snare.
Subject lines
This has to start with an engaging subject line that is simple to understand and concise, avoiding words that might cause email servers to block it as spam such as “free product” or “click here now”.
“Given the volume of emails people receive now, the subject line is crucial,” Snare said. “People just pick out the ones that look most interesting, so think of the subject line like a newspaper headline.
"It should be enticing and interesting but clear about what the newsletter contains. If you make a promise of something, it must be in the actual email.”
However, the shorter the subject line the better: “Write it, cut it in half and then probably cut it in half again,” Snare said.
Email marketing programmes such as MailChimp can help with subject lines.
Most email programmes, some of which are available for free for organisations with smaller databases, also allow users to test subject headers before sending them out.
Content
Katie Thompson, a digital marketing executive at Agency51, which works across the leisure and tourism market, advised museums to also keep newsletters reasonably short: “Content should be divided with appropriate headers and images, and contain relevant links and appropriate calls to action to encourage the user to click through.”
It should also be mobile-optimised so it can be read on different devices, such as a smartphone or tablet.
If the purpose of the email is to encourage click-through to the website, then limit content and make sure it contains a call to action. Otherwise, the newsletter should feature self-contained messages that do not require the reader to do anything.
Ideally, the content should also be something that visitors cannot get elsewhere. This not only deepens engagement but can also grow a museum’s subscriber base.
In order to develop great content that is timely and well produced, one team should be made responsible for developing ideas.
Contact details should always be prominent at the top and bottom of the email.
“The team also needs to curate what is happening across all of the different departments,” Snare said. “It is the marketeer’s job to see opportunity around the museum and magic in everything it does but, ideally, the whole museum should play a part in coming up with ideas”.
Scheduling emails
Scheduling emails is crucial to getting good open and click-through rates from subscribers. Once again, modern email programmes can offer insight into the best times and days for individual sectors. “I always find early evening is a good time,” Colley said. “But it is good to experiment.”
In order to establish and maintain a good customer database, it is important to implement an email marketing strategy to avoid “spamming” potential visitors and increasing unsubscribe rates.
While it is important to stay on top of your database, today’s email marketing providers make it far easier than it used to be. Providers do not want to be associated with sending out spam, so if newsletters are regularly slipping into spam folders the list in question will “frozen”.
Analysis
Learning from how subscribers interact with the newsletter and responding to what the data shows is extremely important in order to maximise the benefits of email marketing.
Newsletters should tie-in to the wider digital marketing strategy, and all the data collected should be viewed together. This should begin to offer an insight into how visitors are interacting with an organisation across a variety of different touchpoints.
Ultimately newsletters should be treated like any other part of a marketing strategy.
“Think about what you like to read then think about what you want your readers to do,” Snare said. “Really think about what you want to drive people to do then begin gently coaxing them down that way.”
This is an edited version of a Museum Practice article published in 2017. Click here to explore the full Museum Practice digital archive
