The challenge: Improving their owned channels
Kelly’s first focus was getting her weekly email series to her main audience established and thriving. In June of 2021, she attended some of Mailchimp’s webinars on best practices and realized she needed to clean inactive subscribers from her list. It became clear through Mailchimp reporting that MCA Denver’s marketing shined in its owned channels. Kelly decided to shift their primary marketing communications from their social media channels to direct emails. “There's a huge opportunity for growth in our email list,” she said. “It works, and we have control over it.” With their open rates on the rise, she decided to make more improvements.
Kelly delved into Mailchimp Marketplace to look for ideas on what to do next. There, she discovered the premium email templates and integrations that would prove to be game-changers for MCA Denver. “The move to the templates made us able to focus more on the content itself,” she shared. “Knowing that we were going to have a beautifully branded email was kind of just a load-off.” With the templates in place, Kelly saved time and focused her energy on the content of the emails themselves. The switch also enabled her to pass off some of her work to her growing team, freeing her to develop other initiatives and their overarching strategy.
With their regular communications in a good place, MCA Denver’s marketing team looked for opportunities to help the museum grow. Like many businesses adapting during the pandemic, Kelly’s team felt the need to create an online presence for their museum store. They also needed to shift some events that had traditionally been in-person to a digital space and find new ways to engage with their donor base throughout the year.
After some evaluation, they decided to use Shopify to launch the e-commerce arm of their in-person museum store. “It was the right move for us,” Kelly said. “One of the reasons we went with it was the integration with Mailchimp.” They also set up welcome automations through Mailchimp for new online customers.
After integrating their Shopify store with Mailchimp, they managed their events with Shopify too. With event-goers and museum shoppers synced to Mailchimp, MCA Denver had a holistic view of their audience and an opportunity to market strategically. “Since it’s an owned channel, we can send all of our traffic to sites that we know we can capitalize on,” Kelly said.
Automations and integrations also benefited their donor-base and membership efforts. The team set up automations 60 and 30 days before a membership’s expiration to help drive renewals. As they continue to look for ways to expand their reach, Kelly and her team make sure to focus on tools and apps that integrate with Mailchimp, including Textedly for SMS marketing and Social Good for donor outreach.
The result: Growth across the board
The combination of all MCA Denver’s efforts paid off. Their email list experienced measurable growth between June 2021 and January 2022, their average open rate increased from 35% to 50%. The increase in readership had other benefits too—more folks clicked on the links within their emails, and MCA Denver reported that their Google Analytics data from that same period showed a 25% increase, on average, in web traffic.
