Featured E-Marketers: Ricardo, Ellen, Emilie, Raśl, Pattie, and Rachel
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Q & A with the Team

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Featured E-Marketers: Ricardo, Ellen, Emilie, Raśl, Pattie, and Rachel
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

PatronMail Client Since: July 2004
Starting E-List Size: 10,825
Current E-List Size: 136,737

Because of LACMA's size, its e-marketing efforts are handled by multiple departments. We spoke with several members of the team about the latest changes to their e-mail campaigns.

Ricardo Chavira (Membership Marketing Manager) and Ellen Castruccio (Senior Membership Marketing Manager) manage all of the correspondence to LACMA’s 66,000 members. Ricardo comes from a real estate background, specifically in agent-membership organizations. Ellen holds an MBA from the Anderson School at UCLA and has 15 years of experience in marketing, sales, consumer research, general management, and business development in both the for-profit and non-profit sectors.

Emilie Tarrant (Membership Services Assistant) coordinates the monthly e-newsletters to LACMA members. Emilie's background is in art history, specializing in a socio-political approach, and also she works with the Center for the Study of Political Graphics in Los Angeles. Raśl Flores (Membership Marketing Coordinator) coordinates correspondence to LACMA’s young affiliates group, Muse. Raśl comes from an education and studio arts background, previously working at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Pattie Esquivel, Education Art Class Coordinator, coordinates e-blasts for the museum’s NEXGEN membership program which provides meaningful art experiences for children and families. Rachel Mahon (Marketing Associate) coordinates all of the campaigns to general museum visitors. Rachel has been working in the marketing field for 5 years and has been involved with every aspect of the profession, from outreach and promotions, to media placement and event management.

Q & A with the Team

Can you start by telling us a little bit about LACMA, its place in the community, and the audience you serve?

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art was established as an independent institution in 1965,  and it has assembled a permanent collection that includes approximately 100,000 works of art spanning the history of art from ancient times to the present, making it the premier encyclopedic visual arts museum in the western United States.

Located in the heart of one of the most culturally diverse cities in the world, the museum uses its collection and resources to provide a variety of educational and cultural experiences for the people who live in, work in, and visit Los Angeles. LACMA offers an outstanding schedule of art exhibitions and Public Programs, including Talks & Courses, Music, and Films. In addition, Arts for NexGen at LACMA provides free museum memberships for children under 17 and offers a well-rounded core of family initiatives weekly.


You recently revamped the look and layout of your newsletters. Tell us a little bit about the changes and the reason behind the initiative.

The changes were part of a larger internal branding shift driven by the fresh and tech-savvy perspectives of our new CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director, Michael Govan. LACMA decided to revamp all of our publications, and it was obvious that the e-mail campaigns should follow with a similar look and feel. However, we also wanted to maintain a unique identity for our e-mails and tie them visually to our Web site more prominently. We spent a lot of time looking at the user-friendly templates PatronMail provides and how we could incorporate our new branding within them.

First, we decided to use some of our more underutilized areas differently. For instance, we ran the permanent links across the top close to the header image and used more abstract single words instead of sentences to describe them. This nearly doubled the number of people visiting the permanent links to our Web site. We created an "Exclusives" section in "Notes" that prioritizes information for the reader, reduces articles needed in a newsletter, and gives the recipient something they can't get from our other publications. We were also able to use PatronMail's new background color options to highlight this one section in particular.

Second, we looked at how information was displayed on our Web site and in the print publications. We know people read them both differently, so we created a combination of elements that would suit e-mail (how dates and hyperlinks are displayed, etc.). We also created a title incorporating the "@" symbol to make the e-mail stand out from the other publications.

Finally, we completely rethought our headers. We looked at how e-mails appear in newer versions of Outlook viewing panes, Gmail, etc., and sized the header images accordingly. Instead of just using one standard image, we decided to rotate images from the exhibitions in the headers to keep it fresh. Finally, we used the branded fonts from our print publications in the header title to strengthen our identity while using Web-standard fonts in the body of the e-mail. These may seem like simple or obvious ideas, but they have really made a huge difference for us. Stepping-back after a period of time and looking at how to rejuvenate our e-mails keeps our recipients excited about what they get in their inboxes.

Click here to see "before and after" versions of LACMA's e-mail newsletters.


These changes have proven to be a big success! Tell us about the results you've seen.

In the first month since making the changes, our open rate for our members' e-newsletter climbed by 21%, from to 36.7% from 30.4% the month before. The click-thru rate also grew from 4.6% to 5.7%, a 24% increase. Some of the open rates for our dedicated e-mail blasts to segmented audiences (Film, Events, etc.) can reach all the way to 78%!

However, our regular monthly newsletters were not nearly as high. Now, our average open rate is at 29.8% and our average click-thru rate is 4.1%. On a more personal level, we received some nice feedback from members who appreciated the new look and format. Even people with text-only e-mails appreciated the changes.


As an organization, LACMA mails frequently, sometimes as many as 10 campaigns in a month! What kind of planning and organization goes into maintaining a schedule like that?

We currently do around five monthly e-mail newsletters for different programs ranging from our Arts for NexGen membership group to our Film Programs aficionados list. This is in addition to our dedicated e-blasts (e-postcards, e-promotions, etc.) for individual events.

We built a small committee from those responsible for the e-blasts in each department that meets quarterly to schedule send dates, which management categories can be used, etc. Segmenting audiences is always the key, and each department keeps a close eye on campaigns sent to their respective list. Since we are such a large institution, we also came up with a standard monthly schedule and practice for every department in the museum to submit articles for consideration.

Visit LACMA's Web Site

What's new in Gene Carr's arts e-marketing blog

Now you can read and subscribe to regular updates from Patron Technology's President, Eugene Carr. Gene's blog provides a snapshot of his perspective on what's going on in the e-marketing world now, and how it relates to arts marketing.

If you haven't been reading, here's a quick look at what you missed last week:

1,000 Thanks: Last week, we signed our 1,000th PatronMail client! Thanks for all your support.

E-mail Delivery Case in Point: The issue of e-mail delivery simply can't be ignored. Even big brand companies need to focus on the problem...

Click here to read the blog, and submit your e-mail address in the upper left-hand corner to subscribe to e-mail updates.


 

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