In an age where exhibitions are moving towards immersive formats, where the NFT market has reshuffled the deck when it comes to traditional art and where social networks are becoming a platform for museum-lovers to share their experiences, it turns out that one basic tool that allows you to communicate with your audiences still holds the same strategic importance: an email address.
Like your museum’s domain name, its email address can be a vector for credibility, visibility and differentiation if cleverly chosen. By customising your email address, you check not only these three boxes but others too. The one condition? Registering or already holding a domain name to associate with your customised email address.
The reflection of a unique, professional and lasting digital identity
As a professional in the museum world, your email address is vital for contacting and being contacted by your visitors, prospects, partners, journalists, etc. Indicated on all your communication materials (business cards, website, brochures, posters, emails, etc.) but also in spoken form, your email address is an integral part of your museum’s digital identity and must send the right information to avoid confusion or damage to your reputation.
Communicating under a generic domain like @orange.fr or @wanadoo.fr, for example, can make your email address signature seem ambiguous and cause you to lose credibility, not to mention the free publicity you provide for your email host. Replacing it with your own domain name allows you not only to use a clear and short email ID (element before the @ symbol) but also to officialise exchanges at a glance and more easily protect against the risks of usurpation. For example, it would be much more strategic for the Musée du Cristal de Paris (Crystal Museum in Paris) to opt for contact@cristal-paris.museum rather than contact-museecristal.paris@orange.fr, given that “cristal-paris.museum” is the domain name originally registered.
Once your email address has been configured, you can adapt it to all of your employees and/or departments consistently whenever you like: marketing@cristal-paris.museum, partnerships@cristal-paris.museum, etc. This customised and unique wording gives your contacts a guarantee that they are writing to the appropriate person and enhances your image as a connected museum – a real advantage when it comes to making an initial exchange a success and maintaining the professional nature of your correspondence.
A springboard for your communication strategy
By using your museum’s domain name, your business email address melds seamlessly with your website. As a mutual and natural echo of one another thanks to a common suffix, these two components of your digital identity boost your visibility and help build your brand and its good reputation on the Internet.
This unique and consistent signature thus amplifies all your communication campaigns, whether online or offline, and facilitates recognition and memorisation.
Every day, your Internet users receive dozens of unsolicited emails, for the most part spam. A customised email address (and moreover under dot-museum) allows you to fend off suspicion by establishing a climate of trust and security – a major advantage for your newsletter and email campaigns, for example, which will consequently have a greater reach and higher open rate.
A simple and inexpensive configuration
Getting started couldn’t be easier! As explained above, customising an email address goes hand in hand with registering a domain name, the purchase of which from a registrar often includes the configuration of one or more addresses at attractive prices.
Once this step is completed, you need to retrieve the send and receive settings associated with your new address (IMAP, SMTP, POP) to apply them to your email account (outlook, gmail or mailto, for example). Once this synchronisation has been carried out, you are ready to send and receive emails.
One last thing – remember that you can always change email host and still keep your email address, which will exist as long as you continue to renew your domain name!
Check the availability of a .museum domain name here.
