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Regina: The New York Transit Museum turned 31 years old on July 4th. It was opened in 1976 as a temporary exhibit to honor the U.S. bicentennial and became a permanent museum due to popular demand. It is housed in a decommissioned subway station from the 1930s in Brooklyn Heights.

We take what on the surface appears to be a pretty narrow topic of transit and public transportation in the New York Metropolitan area and expand it to show how the transit system was, and still is, a major force in shaping the entire area, from social, economic, cultural, technological, and environmental perspectives.

We have exhibits by contemporary artists who are inspired by the subway and mass transit, exhibits on the history of the system’s architects, and exhibits about new initiatives to make things environmentally better, especially buses, among other topics – all these things are part of the Museum and are complemented by an extensive schedule of tours and programs.

Really, it's a lot of fun - we have at least 20 restored subway cars and elevated trains on display, and we also have a fleet of vintage buses that comes out once or twice a year at our Annual Bus Festival and other events (as they don't fit in a subway station!).

What's the scope of the organization in terms of budget and activities, and what kind of audience do you serve?

Our budget is about 4.1 million dollars, and between our subway station home in Brooklyn and our Gallery Annex in Grand Central Terminal we see approximately 450,000 visitors a year. Our audience varies from schoolchildren and camp groups (we see about 1,000 school and camp groups a year, or 20,000 students), to local families, tourists and transit enthusiasts, to seniors and people in their twenties thinking, “Oh, this is so cool, it's something so different and totally New York.”


How does e-marketing fit into the Museum's overall marketing scheme?

We're still getting started on our e-marketing, but we recently moved our quarterly newsletter, which goes out to all of our members, over to PatronMail. Now it’s exclusively available by e-mail, no more paper copies, which has been a big motivation for us to collect everyone's e-mail address. Our members, who currently make up about half of our e-mail list, love the museum so much that they collect all the newsletters, and we never have to worry about them not opening them because they read every word – so that’s been a great way for us to grow our list, and our open rates!

We get great response rates in general. The average open rate is about 42%, and when we send targeted messages it can get up above 60%.

Switching to an electronic newsletter has also made our information timelier. Previously, design and production of our newsletter was done as an in-kind service, so we had to have a lead time of three months. Now it is easy to include things that come up at the last minute. Who knew three months ago that the Transit Museum would be a part of the plot on ABC's Ugly Betty last week?

Our list has over 3,000 names, which is about twice what it was when we started a year and a half ago. My goal is to e-mail once a month: we have the quarterly newsletter, plus we can highlight different lectures, tours, or other events going on at the Museum.


Your list size has doubled in the last year and a half - what have you done to encourage patrons to sign up?

Like I mentioned before, changing our newsletter to an online-only version created an incentive for people to give us their e-mail address (and keep it updated), so that’s helped our list grow quite a bit. After announcing the change, the number of members who provide their e-mail address increased from about 50% to over 80%.

Also, whenever we have a festival or other public event, we provide note cards for people to fill out in order to join our mailing list, or we'll have a raffle associated with it to give people more incentive to sign up. And on the form, the first thing I put was e-mail - because I know sometimes when I'm filling out forms, I won't actually bother to get all the way to the bottom, so if “e-mail address” is the last thing, I might not fill it out. Instead, we put the e-mail line right at the top and we’ve definitely gotten a better response rate that way.

[Click here to see an example of a the Museum's sign-up card]


Besides your quarterly newsletter, tell us about a couple of the most interesting things you've done with your e-mail marketing.

We're a member of a group called the Brooklyn Cultural Circuit, which includes a number of unique Brooklyn organizations that all cross-promote. One of my favorite things that we’ve done with PatronMail was last year when we sent out an e-mail that highlighted one activity from each of these organizations [Click here to see the e-mail].

It was interesting to see what our patrons clicked on, as we could see what other institutions they were interested in. This gave us proof that we should continue with this collaboration because it was clear where our patrons’ interests overlap.

Also, our education department launched an online teachers' resource center last year, with everything from how to coordinate a field trip to the Museum to ideas for lesson plans, what to do at the museum, and information about the history of transit.

[Click here to see the resource center]

We sent out an e-mail announcing it, which was actually one of our most successful PatronMail campaigns, because we sent it to a targeted group of teachers and linked them directly to that section of the Web site. This proved to be a great way to get in touch with those teachers already on our mailing list, and also to follow up with the teachers we met at a city-sponsored new teacher open house. The e-mail got a 49.4% open rate, and a 16% clickthrough rate!


What have you learned since you started, and what advice do you have for your colleagues in the field?

Don't forget your links! It's so easy to get people right where you want them to go, and if it's a click away people will do it. Our Web site can be a little hard to navigate right now (but we’re redesigning soon!), so it's important for us to link directly to a particular page, rather than the main screen, and to lead visitors where they actually want to go. Whenever I mention a benefit of membership, from discounts at the Museum store to information about an exclusive Members-only event, I always make joining easy by adding a link to our membership page.

If I'm outside or on the subway and I see an ad with a Web address on it, I might think it sounds interesting, but I won't necessarily remember to go to it when I get back to my computer. But once someone’s reading your e-mail they're only a click away, so add a link and you'll have them where you want them!

Visit the New York Transit Museum's Web Site

On Thursday, November 8th, Patron Technology hosted its first day-long E-marketing E-mersion E-vent. The event featured e-marketing experts from around the world including Roger Tomlinson, Tim Baker, and Steven Roth, and Patron Technology’s president, Gene Carr.

One of the conference themes had to do with the importance of segmentation and data mining. You can read more about that here. 

In addition, in Gene Carr’s opening session his overview of the state of the internet could be summarized this way:  A few years ago, as the Web was getting started, “content was king.”  Soon after, “commerce was king.” And now, both content and commerce are given... and "convenience is king."

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:

Inspiring Japanese Trends: More than 50 percent of Japanese send e-mail and browse the Internet from their mobile phones. Is this what's happening in the US right now?

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