How Van Gogh Museum uses email insights to make newsletters more relevant

Email serves several purposes at the Van Gogh Museum: sharing stories, introducing exhibitions and encouraging ticket sales. The team wanted to understand how each mailing contributed to its goal and what it could learn for the next campaign.

With SEINō, the museum brings campaign results and analysis together, compares newsletter editions over time and shares the findings with colleagues across departments.

Van Gogh Museum

Arts and culture

Stefan Kuil

E-mail Marketing Manager

Before SEINō, the Van Gogh Museum combined Deployteq reporting with Google Analytics data by hand in Excel. Each report was a snapshot that needed updating at the next reporting moment. The team could review campaign figures, but wanted a clearer view of trends and a more useful starting point for discussing what to improve.

Looking at engagement in context

The museum now uses SEINō to investigate which emails create engagement, for which audiences and with what result. Rather than reviewing each newsletter in isolation, the team can compare several editions and explore whether changes in content are reflected in performance.

This helps it look beyond opens, clicks and unsubscribes as individual statistics. The purpose of a mailing matters too. A newsletter designed to inspire readers with stories about Vincent van Gogh should be evaluated differently from a campaign intended to sell tickets.

International newsletter unsubscribe rate: ~23% lower
Dutch newsletter unique clickers, August to September 2026: ~15% higher

Using an unsubscribe pattern to review the content

In SEINō, the team noticed that its international newsletters were generating relatively many unsubscribes. That prompted a closer look at how relevant the content was to its readers.

The museum introduced a more editorial newsletter format. In the comparison shared for this case, the unsubscribe rate was approximately 23% lower after the change. The team describes this as a promising early result and plans to continue testing it over the following months.

The finding gave the team a reason to revisit its content choices. It is an example of using reporting to guide a practical change and then checking how readers respond.

Understanding the story behind a stronger result

The Dutch newsletter also moved toward a more editorial format, with stories and inspiration alongside the museum’s current offering. Between August and September 2026, the number of unique clickers increased by approximately 15%.

Instead of stopping at the increase, the team now discusses what changed in the newsletter and investigates which sections generated engagement. Those findings provide concrete ideas for the next edition. The increase is an observed comparison between editions, rather than a controlled measure of the editorial format’s effect.

Making campaign reviews useful across departments

SEINō Insights helps the museum analyze and summarize campaign performance consistently. The team adds those summaries to campaign dashboards and internal reports, giving colleagues an explanation alongside the figures.

That makes it easier to discuss what worked, what stood out and what could be improved. It also brings engagement and conversion into the same conversation. A campaign for a public event might attract a modest click-through rate and still meet its goal if it sells the intended tickets.

Colleagues in programming and marketing can therefore review results against the purpose of the campaign and use lessons from earlier mailings when planning new ones.

Building a closer relationship with the audience

For the Van Gogh Museum, the value is a more informed way to evaluate email: connect the campaign’s purpose to its results, compare developments over time and turn the findings into content decisions.

The team sees further opportunities in engagement analysis, audience development and lifecycle marketing. Its aim is to understand how email contributes to a lasting relationship with the museum’s audience, as well as how an individual campaign performs.