Email Marketing For Museums and Galleries

Email marketing brings many more consistent participants to your gallery or museum's existing or upcoming exhibitions. As Director or CEO of a museum or gallery, you need to find cost-effective and easy ways to promote your exhibits to bring customers in on a regular basis. After all, the higher your attendance numbers, the better the funding. Email marketing is that cost-effective and easy-to-use tool for informing your contact list about the exhibits.

The cost of email marketing in comparison to other forms of media is not even comparable. It is a few dollars to send out thousands of emails, and they are focused on your direct market, as these people will have signed-up to receive your information.

With other forms of media, you are spending thousands of dollars, hoping that you are reaching those that need to hear about your exhibit.

Email marketing is more than just easy-to-use and cost-effective. It can also help you to attract more traffic on a consistent basis to your exhibits and advertise to clients about upcoming exhibits. A good way to grow your mailing list is to place a free web sign-up box on your website or invite school group organizers, audio-guide renters and gift-shop buyers to sign up for your newsletters.

With a free web sign-up box, the web visitors who are interested in your museum exhibitions can sign up for your newsletters and ongoing promotions. Entice them to do so by treating them as "preferred clients" and offering them exclusive discounts.

When schools sign up or bring their groups to your gallery, ask the person who has organized the school trip to sign up for your newsletters and promotions. By offering them a 'per-school package,' where they receive certain bonuses for coming to your museum more frequently, you will garner greater numbers per year, per school. No great exhibit can exist without the proper funding and these added numbers will get you that funding.

For people renting audio guides or purchasing souvenirs at the gift shop, you can ask them to sign-up to receive free information regarding the exhibits in your museum or gallery. By offering them a discount on their audio guides or 10% off of their purchase in exchange for their email address, you will receive plenty of sign ups. This way you will be sending out information to people you know are interested in receiving more information about your exhibit (otherwise they wouldn't be signing up for an audio guide or buying products related to the exhibits).

The reason this is to your benefit is because you will be increasing your value to the customer as an organization. In so doing, you are promoting your museum or gallery to exactly the customers who are interested in coming to your museums on a more regular basis - those that are passionate about educating themselves. When you provide this group of customers with your information, they will feel more compelled to return more often to your museum.

Having money to allocate for better exhibits is the ultimate goal for any museum or gallery Director and CEO. This creates a snowball effect: the better your exhibits are, the more attendees your exhibit will garner; the more people at your exhibits, the better the funding; the better the funding the better the exhibit...etc.

With email marketing, you can save thousands in advertising costs by directly targeting customers who you know will be returning to your museum with greater frequency; all they need is to be reminded by an email marketing campaign. Bring school groups and enthusiasts to your museum or gallery more frequently by giving them a greater background on your current exhibits, and by providing them with newsletters and promotions on upcoming exhibits. This way, email marketing will continually open the treasure chest of wonders that you have to offer to your community.