Email marketing: 10 tips for museums and culture
You regularly send out emails for your museum, foundation or non-profit organization, but they are rarely opened and it takes up an enormous amount of time? You are not alone! Many organizations lose time and lose a lot of income because of their unstructured email marketing. However, with a few simple tips and useful marketing tools you can quickly achieve great open rates and profits. Plan your weekly or monthly newsletter smarter. You can read how to do that here. For more advice and hands-on help, we at Museamarketing are ready to help you!
1. Go for a weekly or monthly newsletter
Go for a weekly or monthly newsletter that you send by email at the same time every month. Include current and interesting content. Setting up a good weekly or monthly email strategy makes writing and sending it automatic. You will automatically start thinking of topics that could be included in your newsletter. Tools send your campaign automatically and you save a huge amount of time that you can spend on other things.
You get subscribers to your newsletter by advertising and communicating about it. You can do this using a registration form on your website, a link in your email signature or place it in your Google extensions in your Google search campaigns. When you plan a promotion or promotion on social media, you can encourage interested parties to subscribe to your mailing list or newsletter. This can be done by giving something away in exchange for the email address or a look behind the scenes.
2. Start with an attractive subject line and super subject line
The subject line of your email is perhaps the most important part. It is the first thing the recipient sees. Make sure it is attractive and makes the recipient curious to open your email. The subject line should also match the style of your museum or non-profit organization. Many marketers pay little attention to the subject line and super subject line (the sentence below the subject line), which causes low open rates for your campaigns. We want to avoid that at all times. A good subject line ensures more involvement and therefore a more successful email campaign.
3. Be relevant
The content of your email must be interesting for the recipients. Think carefully about what is actually interesting for your target audience. That's not always the same as for you. It is about making the offer and content of the email as relevant and valuable as possible for your target audience. Think of new events, current affairs surrounding the subject of your museum or promotions in your museum shop, etc. Marketing is leading and technology brings your message to life, not the other way around. Be relevant. You don't want to lose your readers.
4. Personalize your emails
When you address someone by her or his first name in the subject line or at the beginning of your email, you immediately create more involvement. There are all kinds of tools with which you can personalize your emails. Did you know that you can also personalize the content? For example, you can only send information about certain events or exhibitions to people with children. This way you don't overload the public with emails that are not relevant. Together with Museamarketing you will learn how to segment your target audience correctly and which email campaigns are best used for which target group.
Tip: also read about personalization in your museum campaign via Google Display.
5. Call to action
Every email you send should encourage the reader to take action. This could be visiting your website, buying a ticket for an event or participating in a competition. Using clear links to your website or 'call to action' buttons, the recipients of your email can easily take this action. Make the buttons and links clear. Consider bold words, underlining or another color for the encouraging text. Ask Museum Marketing for advice on what works and what doesn't!
6. A/B testing and research data
How do you know which subject lines or 'call to action' buttons work? Using A/B testing, you learn what drives your readers to open your emails and click on buttons or text. What's more, you can also test pieces of text, images or colors using an A/B test. Make sure that you only test one element at a time with a maximum of two variants, so that you know for sure what works and what does not. You can use tools like Mailchimp to set up your A/B tests. Museum Marketing supports you in setting up these tests and analyzing the results. You'll soon be sending even better emails!
It is important that you keep testing. Investigate different elements in your campaigns so that you can continuously improve your campaigns. Your audience is evolving, you, your museum or non-profit organization are also constantly evolving. You therefore need to continuously test and measure results to continue to improve your email marketing and to know what resonates with your ever-changing target audience.
7. Use automation tools
The secret of good email marketing is a well-thought-out strategy and efficient automation. Without automation, you have no insight into the results of your email campaigns and you miss out on income. Automating your campaigns ensures:
– increasing conversion rates
– improving efficiency
– scaling campaigns more easily
Moreover, thanks to automation processes from tools such as Mailchimp or Hubspot, you have more time for other things. These tools send you emails at a time you schedule. What's more, thanks to templates you don't have to build every email from scratch. Museum Marketing helps you set up templates and automate your campaigns, including A/B testing.
8. Consider rendering and layout features
You can do a lot with automation tools. You can create beautiful email campaigns with high-quality images and GIFs. Keep in mind that not everyone always has a good internet connection and images of your new exhibition, videos about the latest event or GIFs can take a long time to load. That slows down the opening of the email. Provide beautiful but attainable images and a fallback image if your GIF or video does not load.
Museamarketing recommends keeping in mind that many people open their mailbox on their mobile or tablet. Your email must therefore also meet the layout requirements of such devices. Many tools take this into account for you. Still, we recommend double-checking whether your message will also look good on mobile. The same goes for the black mode available on most smartphones and tablets. In this mode, which is easier on your eyes, the colors of your email change. Check whether everything is still legible and the color combination is appropriate.
9. Don't forget the 'unsubscribe' button
Thanks to GDPR, or privacy, rules, every email you send in Belgium or the Netherlands that is not a service email must have a button with which the reader can unsubscribe. This button ensures that recipients of your email can easily unsubscribe without any hassle. Typically, this button is placed subtly at the bottom of the email. You naturally want to avoid people unsubscribing and no longer receiving your newsletters. As long as this button is somewhere in your email, is readable and leads to a clear landing page where the reader can unsubscribe, you comply with the GDPR rules.
10. Work with Museum Marketing, your MailChimp expert
Our final tip is to get support from experts when setting up your email marketing. This way you can be sure that you have beautiful templates in the branding of your museum or non-profit organization and that you achieve the best results. Museum marketing can also help you automate and optimize your email campaigns. As experts in Mailchimp, we ensure that your email marketing is in perfect order.
With a successful email marketing strategy with interesting newsletters you can reach a lot of people. Typically, email has a high ROI. Take advantage of this and automate your newsletters and emails to get even more out of less time.
Do you have any questions or do you want to get started right away? Contact Museum Marketing.