At Pearl in San Antonio, the people are the main attraction. A local ceramic artist turns a Mother's Day project into a property-wide scavenger hunt. A chef takes over a restaurant and makes the menu their own. At the year-round farmers market, the same regulars turn up every weekend, rain or shine.
Pearl is the flagship brand of Silver Ventures, the San Antonio venture capital firm that develops and operates the site of the former Pearl Brewery. Under the Pearl name, Silver Ventures runs restaurants, shops, a year-round farmers market, live music venue, and residential communities. It also operates 3 other distinct brands: Hotel Emma, the boutique hotel on site; La Babia, a sustainable beef brand that supplies several of the property's restaurants; and Potluck, the restaurant concept incubator responsible for bringing world-class dining options to Pearl.
Nicholas Caballero, email marketing manager, joined Silver Ventures from a career in journalism just over a year ago. Sitting down with people and telling their stories was already familiar work. The new part for him, and Silver Ventures, was doing it through email.
"There are a lot of people here, and a lot of people have really good stories," Nick says. "It's just fun to talk to them—not be like, 'Hey, we're downtown, come spend money.' It's more like, come and experience other people's ideas here."
With Intuit Mailchimp, Nick and the small Silver Ventures team have built a storytelling-first email program that supports 3 distinct brand voices and a community of subscribers who want to be part of it.
The challenge: Email was an afterthought in a venue full of stories
When Nick joined Silver Ventures, the email infrastructure already existed but wasn't pulling its weight. The team sent emails to Pearl's subscribers about twice a month, with no automations and no consistent design strategy. Data came in from sources such as the OpenTable integration, but those new contacts often never received follow-up communications from Pearl.
There was also a strategic gap. Pearl's marketing skewed transactional when the destination's actual draw was the community of artists, chefs, ranchers, and makers behind it. Nick wanted to flip that but needed to build an email program that could surface those stories and keep the voice distinct across Pearl, Hotel Emma, and La Babia.
Nick’s approach started with finding the stories. He began identifying potential interview subjects across Pearl—those artists, makers, chefs, and ranchers who make it unique—and shaping email content around the conversations he had with them.
One of his first projects was the Cow Parade, an installation of 5 life-size ceramic cows painted by local artists. Nick and a teammate spent an afternoon at the property in the San Antonio heat, talking to each artist about what inspired their cow. It became the template for a monthly series.
He also rethought how Pearl talked to its audience. Instead of pushing event announcements and reservations, he wanted the emails to give people a sense of what was actually happening on site. He developed a question he kept asking his team: "What can get my parents here?"
His parents lived 30 minutes away. If a story or event couldn't get them off the couch, it probably wouldn't move anyone else.