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Photography © Jeff Goldberg/Esto
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Sarah, can you start by giving us some background information on the Denver Art Museum?
The museum was founded as the Denver Artists Club in the 1890s. Our collection was housed in various city buildings until our first permanent galleries opened in the 1950s. We're now one of the biggest art museums in the Rocky Mountain region, and our collection includes more than 60,000 artworks from around the globe; we have different collections that cover every continent.
We have two buildings, including our new Daniel Libeskind-designed Frederic C. Hamilton building, which opened last October (pictured above). That addition doubled the size of our museum, and enabled us to expand our special exhibitions program, since we have so many new spaces. We're really the only art museum in the area that brings in those big traveling art exhibitions. Our next big show, Artisans & Kings: Selected Treasures from the Louvre will open October 6.
Who is your audience?
A lot of our audience, and especially our members, are in their fifties, well-educated, interested in art, obviously... but we're really trying to expand that. We have a philosophy that if we can appeal to people when they're young, that we can build a relationship with them that will last their whole life.
We try to appeal to a lot of different audiences with programming that goes beyond just showing the art. We have a lot of in-gallery activities, we have summer day camps... we really focus a lot on our kids programs, bringing in school groups, getting young people used to coming to the museum and thinking of that as part of their life, in the hopes that they'll grow up and come back and become a member and maybe even a donor someday.
How has that effort to attract a younger audience influenced your e-marketing?
We segment our mailings, and when people sign up we do ask them to give their preferences. We have a group of people that subscribes to family and kids information, and we're also trying to enhance our appeal to the young adult audience with Untitled, a series of hip events featuring DJs, performance art, and poetry slams.
Our Untitled Web site includes a blog with comments enabled, and links to related content on the Web, and we also promote the program through e-mail and word-of-mouth efforts on local college campuses.
Click here to see the Untitled Web site.
Can you give us a general view of your overall e-mail marketing program? How does a large institution like yours assemble the newsletter?
Our e-newsletter has been around for about five years, and I was part of the group that helped found it. We started with a text-only e-mail, but we quickly outgrew that - very quickly!
Now we have a committee that meets once a month to decide what programs we want to promote in the following month, but I'm really the one who puts all that information together. We think of the e-newsletter as a way to maintain relationships with our audience, and it's really great for the timely information that doesn't make it into our print pieces.
Our e-mail list is about half members and half non-members. We send our monthly "Art Mail" e-newsletter - we used to do separate ones, one for members and one for non-members, but we just recently combined them. For the member version of Art Mail we've seen open rates average around 35-40%, which is great. The rates are definitely lower for non-members, more like 25%, so we are expecting to see our overall average go down a bit.
We also send out occasional Art Mail Extras, which are those segmented e-mails to specific groups. For those, open rates are about 34%.
How has your list grown over time?
We started out with just a few thousand people, and that was five or six years ago - now we have 20,000! Signing up for Art Mail is incorporated into every sort of interaction that we have with our patrons: you can sign up at the museum or on our Web site, and when you're becoming a member you can just check a box and you'll be signed up for Art Mail too. We added almost 4,000 new e-mail addresses to our list last May during our big membership drive.
We've also done some more concentrated list-building efforts. For example, we've used Art Mail sign-up forms to collect names for contests to win free memberships or exhibition catalogs from the Museum Shop. During a big special event, we can gain hundreds of new subscribers using this method.
What's one particularly great success story you have from your e-marketing experience?
Last year we did a series of what we called "expansion updates" as we were preparing to open our new building, and there were several events associated with that. On one occasion we had an event that kind of came together at the last minute, and we didn't have time to send a printed invitation at all, so we sent out an e-postcard to our entire list - and the event was packed!
It was a really great learning experience because we never even thought it was a possibility, to not send a printed invitation and get that kind of response. Now if we're having trouble selling registrations for something, we'll send out an Art Mail Extra and it can sell out within a couple of days! We can see a really clear correlation between the e-mail going out, and the sign-ups for the event.
Visit the Denver Art Museum's Web Site
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