How should you engage arts audiences with email marketing?

In our April webinar, we brought together three practitioners from across the sector to share what’s working, what isn’t, and what they’ve learned from email marketing.

We were joined by Jessica Harvey-Olayemi, Customer Journey Manager at Shakespeare’s Globe, Natalie Brown, Senior Marketing and Communications Officer at Cast in Doncaster, and Jacqueline Ewers, Tech Champion for Email Marketing at the Digital Culture Network. Between them, they brought perspectives from a major London venue, a regional theatre managing around 110 concurrent campaigns, and the consultancy side, where Jacqueline advises organisations across England through Arts Council England’s free support programme.

• Email works best when it’s built around your audience, not around what you need to say. Not every send needs to drive a booking. Sometimes the job is to stay visible, build familiarity, or remind someone you exist before they’re ready to act.
• The fundamentals are: right person, right time, right content. But getting there means keeping your list clean, understanding your segments, and being honest about what you’re asking people to do.
• The gap between opening an email and actually booking is widening. Measure performance over a longer window, because a campaign that looks quiet in the first few days may have planted a seed.
• Booking behaviour varies by audience type; for example, family audiences are starting to plan later than previously assumed. Sending too early in a campaign, before an audience is even thinking about booking, doesn’t mean the email failed.
• There are audiences in your data you’re probably not talking to yet, who are people who’ve expressed interest but aren’t in your main programme. A simple targeted newsletter can help reach them.
• Assumptions about what your audiences will respond to are often wrong. Leading with the ‘why’ (why this show, why now, why it’s for them) tends to work better than leading with a name or a hook you’ve assumed will land.

Throughout the session, a few consistent principles came through.

Send with intention, not habit. Frequency is the number one reason people unsubscribe. Every email should have a clear answer to: why this person, why now?

Let your data lead timing decisions. Different audiences book at different points in the cycle. Review your results over a longer window and adapt your send schedule to match actual behaviour, not your campaign calendar.

Give people the ‘why’. Rather than leading with an event or a name, give context. Why does this belong in your programme? What does it mean for the person you’re talking to? That framing builds trust and tends to convert better.

Look for the gaps in your list. It’s easy to focus all your energy on your main programme audiences. But registered contacts who sit outside that programme, like interest groups, access scheme members, and lapsed bookers, are often more responsive than you’d expect if you speak to them directly.

If you’d like support with your email marketing strategy, get in touch.