Tate makes e-bulletins an artform

Arts website Tate Online has tailored its email bulletins system to pull in more people to its websites and increase sales.

Tate Online sends out around 350,000 emails per month keeping supporters and visitors up-to-date about events and exhibitions at the four Tate galleries - Tate Britain, Tate Liverpool, Tate Modern and Tate St Ives - as well as any new online content.

Users can pick which email bulletins to receive based on their interests or geography - for example if they want to know only about London-based galleries.

John Stack, editor of Tate Online, told silicon.com the email bulletins are much cheaper to run because a bounce back on email costs a very small amount of money compared to the price of a second-class stamp.

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Tate Online uses the Lyris ListManager system to send out the e-bulletins, which cost up to £20,000 to deploy and have increased traffic and sales across the site.

Stack said: "If you feature something in an email bulletin you see a spike in traffic to that page and an increase in sales."

Lyris and Tate Online are now working on developing a system to quantify this increase in sales and traffic.

Tate Online already has a system in place to monitor if its online shop e-bulletin increases online transactions and it is now working with Lyris to implement a similar feature for its events and exhibitions bulletins to quantify how the bulletins push advanced ticket sales.

The Tate Online sends out its bulletins overnight - with some the larger email lists sent out over two nights due to the high volumes of subscribers.

Stack added this two-night spread is not a problem because Tate Online schedules bulletins months in advance and so the content is not affected by this gap.