ICP Email Newsletter Overhaul
Skills: Strategic Planning, Project Management, Digital Marketing, Internal and External Communications, Editing and Proofreading
Task
As senior manager of marketing and communications, I conducted an assessment of the International Center of Photography’s (ICP) email newsletter program. I found that:
Newsletters were often clipped in Gmail due to their length, suggesting that a significant percentage of our subscribers were missing out on content.
Program information was presented by department, leading to missed opportunities to create thematic connections across the institution.
A one-week production timeline left little time to think strategically about content or address last-minute issues.
Open rates were slightly below average for our industry
ICP’s newsletters were often clipped in Gmail, the email client most used by our audience, due to lengthy copy, vertical images, and a cumbersome layout.
A lack of word counts led to imbalanced content.
Action
In response to my findings, I developed a plan to increase the quality of our newsletter content while decreasing overall length, create more flexibility within the production timeline, and increase open rates. To meet my goals, I:
Gathered feedback from key stakeholders across the institution.
Used that feedback to develop a two-week production timeline that increased capacity to strategize content and collaborate with colleagues.
Produced a content plan that drew more deliberate connections between different departments, therefore reinforcing ICP’s aim to provide a broad a public audience with multiple pathways to engage with exhibition and education programming.
Determined evergreen content options to help communicate essential operating information as well as the collaborative nature of our programming departments.
Identified opportunities to highlight underrepresented areas of the institution.
With ICP’s art director, crafted new email templates with word counts and image guidelines to curb email length and ensure our emails were no longer clipped in Gmail.
Created a work plan for researching, developing, testing, and measuring effectiveness of subject lines.
The new, two-week production timeline in Asana, the marketing and communication team’s project management tool. By increasing our timeline by a week, we increased opportunities to strategize content and collaborate with colleagues.
Result
The extended production timeline and redesigned templates resulted in shorter, sharper emails that made clear connections across departments and allowed for more promotions per newsletter. This more standardized approach to newsletters has increased the marketing and communications department’s capacity to strategize content and focus on other email marketing initiatives, including subscriber-growth campaigns and efforts to create a more robust data reporting process. Finally, our average open rate increased by almost two percentage points within the first month. We’re now consistently within the average range for our industry.
Instating strict word counts per section and using a square crop on the majority of our newsletter’s images resulted in sharper copy and shorter emails.
Once we launched our new branding, we noted a marked increase in clicks per unique opens.
Praise from Launch Week
“I just need to let you know that I really like the adjusted email newsletter. I think it looks really clean and we look like we have SO MUCH going on.”
“I’m a huge fan. Amazing job!“
“LOOKS BEAUTIFUL!!!”