NEWSLETTER SAMPLES: CHRYSLER MUSEUM OF ART
THE WEEKLY
Here's a storyteller's look at using newsletters to engage an audience. It's told via a weekly that grew in size because it had to, that developed a remarkably loyal following — and wound up a labor of love.
Starting at the beginning
The director wanted to make the museum more accessible. He wanted to get away from content done in typical museum style — stuffy, boring and stilted. To which I said: "Sign me up.
Step No. 2, once they signed up someone who could work fast, was to move from a monthly to a weekly.
Click the image or click here to read the sample edition.
Researching quickly and writing fast were the foundations here. I processed all the imagery and took almost all of the photos. Each edition was 2,000 words researched, written, designed, coded and deployed in two days. I kept up that pace for nearly five years.
It's not about what you want to say. It's about what people are looking for.
It doesn't seem ground-breaking, but it kind of was, the idea that you could market an art museum in other ways than just art.
The museum was a great place for a first date. Why, you could even talk about movie night and it would be okay.
Click the image or click here to read the sample edition.
All the marketing as a destination became moot when the museum closed for 16 months of renovations. Suddenly the newsletter itself was the connection to the art world, and I had to move fast. Why would people keep opening emails from a museum that wasn't even open?
Look at that headline!
In need of content, and in need of keeping people interested, it was time to break some rules.
We had never mentioned shows at other museums. We proudly promoted them now in a sense of we-are-all-art-lovers here. I constantly scanned artsy news sites for quirky items of interest. Because that was the key. It always had to be interesting.
Click the image or click here to read the sample edition.
Every writer wants to emulate the great novelists or the great writers of magazine-length profiles. Oddly enough, one of the hardest things to do, and one of the most important, is knowing how to write a blurb that will generate a click.
Content out of thin air
The relentless pursuit of something interesting led me to the museum library and archive. The key in adding a Throwback Thursday was knowing how to keep it consistently quirky. Fashions in the mid-century modern genre were always popular.
Whenever possible, we tied the archival content to events held at remote locations. With a newspeg, it didn't feel like it was always coming out of the can.
Click the image or click here to read the sample edition.
Over the years, I grew the mailing list from 2,000 to 12,000 people. After the museum reopened, I'd talk to people at events and consistently heard great things about The Weekly. I had planned to cut it back. I knew I couldn't.
It started as an "I told you so."
It became one of the top features.
Only natural that as the newsletter ballooned in length that I'd have bosses asking if it was getting read.
My answer was to create a closing section and keep track of the clicks. I called it Refrigerator Art, a downloadable image accompanied by a short story about the piece. Even if you didn't put on your fridge, it would teach you something about art.
The feature became a big hit, confirmed by people clicking through to the very end, and it gave me a way to talk about art that wasn't even on display.
Well, unless it was in your kitchen.
Click the image or click here to read the sample edition.
With the renovation finished, and a $40 million fundraising project complete, the museum director found it a good time to retire. So I got a new director and, eventually, he brought in a new marcom director. She thought it was, quoting now, "absolutely insane" to spend so much time on an email newsletter.
After cleaning out me and most of the department I was in, you can now find Chrysler Museum emails back to where they started. Calendar-based promotions. Chrysler-only content. Stuff that sounds like a brochure.
I wonder how their numbers look...
Mr. Marshall, who uses italics when speaking in the third person, was a logical choice for a museum looking for a non-curatorial tone. His previous job was selling cars online.