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Here's the main reason you should start email marketing: Email Newsletters Work. Period. Nothing can compare to the level of directness and intimacy with your fans that you can achieve with email. It allows you to build real, human, relationships with your followers.
That's why artists, gallerists, art marketing coaches, gurus, experts and even collectors all encourage artists to utilize email newsletters.
Below is a non-exhaustive list of the benefits of email marketing:
You will nurture your connection to and build a positive relationship with your audience, followers, fans and collectors.
It's a great way to promote and market your art
It's a great way to promote and market your workshops and videos
It's easy
It's inexpensive
It's a channel everyone uses, and a channel most people check first thing in the morning.
It's a way to stay "top of mind" with your audience. As Jason Horejs of Xanadu Gallery says, "Your biggest risk with collectors is not that they will stop liking your work, it's that they will stop thinking about you."
Importantly, it's a channel that's mostly unfiltered and uncontrolled by big companies with an agenda. (With a few exceptions, like Gmail).
It builds you an asset that you own. Owning your marketing asset pays huge dividends and will open opportunities to you that you can't foresee when you're just getting started. You will have the ability to reach out, anytime you want, and promote anything you want.
A strong email marketing program protects you against the changing whims of your galleries, Facebook and Instagram. It's a channel you own and have a high degree of control over. If a gallery goes out of business, you can still reach out to your audience with email marketing. If Facebook bans you, you can still reach your audience with email marketing. If Google drops all your search listings, you can still reach your audience with email marketing. Owning your own marketing assets provides insurance for your art business career against galleries failing and Instagram changing their algorithm in a way that stops showing your artwork to your followers.
It's effective. The ROI of email marketing has actually RISEN and is now $42 of return for every $1 spent. [source] Email Engagement has gone up every year. People are spending more time than ever engaging with emails.
Email marketing is something that every artist should do. It doesn't matter where you are in your artistic career.
When you're just beginning you can use your email newsletter for feedback about your art and as a way to build an audience who will be there for you when you are ready to sell.
At mid-career, you can utilize an email marketing program to build a relationship with your collectors and to make sales.
When you become a master artist, you can use your email to promote workshops, classes, videos or even utilize it to affect greater good in the world by encouraging your followers to support great causes.
How Email Marketing Works
The goal of email marketing is to build an engaged audience of fans.
The original author of the concept of "True fans" hypothesized that you need 1,000 true fans to build a solid career. I think for visual artists that number is probably lower, perhaps much lower. But the concept is exactly the same. To build true fans you need to build a relationship and trust with them. And one of the easiest and most effective ways to do that is with email marketing.
The core asset of an email marketing strategy is a clean, up-to-date, list of email subscribers. An email subscriber is someone who wants to hear from you and has given you permission to send them information about you, your art and your career via email.
How do people get on your subscriber list?
Typically it happens when they meet you in person (and building a list will require some real world activity), or hear about you from a friend or colleague, or perhaps find you in an online venue of some type. No matter how they initially learn about your art, the ones likely to become fans see something in your art and become interested in you. At this point your main goal is to encourage them to "Join your insiders mailing list."
Your marketing plan should be roughly a three-step process: 1. You encourage people who are "kinda interested" to join your insiders mailing list. 2. You communicate regularly with those people to build interest, a relationship and trust. 3. You encourage them, now fans, to take the next step (attend a show, purchase a piece, etc)
The mechanics of adding them to your list looks like this:
It's typically done in person by asking them verbally if they'd like to be on your list (do this more often!), or on your website through a "Join VIP list" link. You can also obtain permission via a personal email to them asking if they'd like to be on your regular updates list. One often overlooked source is past buyers. You should be encouraging every past buyer to be on your mailing list. I've acquired dozens and dozens of pieces of art and none of those artists have invited me to join their list. Mistake.
Anyway, no matter how they subscribe, you now have permission to send commercial email to them. That's why an email list is called a permission based asset.
Send personal, timely and relevant emails to these people. AKA, email "newsletters."
Over time, these regular emails (and your personal responses to anyone who replies) help you build a relationship and trust with your audience.
Building a relationship and trust gets to the heart of real branding. Remember, branding is the only power artists have. And true branding takes lots and lots of positive interactions between you and your audience, so don't get discouraged and stop sending out your regular cadence.
There are two basic types of email marketing - email newsletters or broadcast email. And autoresponders. We'll cover autoresponders at a future time. For most artists, it's more effective and more common to focus on broadcast email or "newsletters." (Autoresponders work better for people selling information products).
Don't let the word "newsletter" trip you up. It's not really a "newsletter." It's a personal email, from you, about one subject.
Let me repeat that. Every broadcast email AKA "newsletter" you send needs to be focused, about one topic, it needs to be engaging and should have one, and only one call to action
A "call to action" is the action you want your subscriber to take when they receive your email.
Don't make all your calls to action "buy my art." Sometimes a call to action might be just requesting they reply with their thoughts. Examples of a call to action include the following: view my art, purchase this piece, register for my workshop, view pieces in upcoming exhibit, RSVP for studio tour, etc.
It's important to use an email service provider.
Using an "Email Service Provider" (ESP) helps to ensure your email campaigns don't end up in people's spam folders. They automate the process of subscribing and unsubscribing. ESPs also provide analytics and they ensure that you are compliant with commercial email laws. Email service providers include services such as Mailchimp, Convertkit and yes, our own ArtfulMail.
Do the things listed above on a regular cadence and, over time, you will build an audience of true fans.
It will be one of the best things you've ever done for your art career.
As you continue to do these things, and as people respond to your calls to action, they will become bigger fans, meet you in real life, take your workshops, or purchase your art.
How FASO Makes Email Marketing even easier
Typically, you need two things, often provided by two different services to sell your art as we've outlined in this article. You need an art storefront where you can show your art, and where customers can purchase it, and you need to use an Email Service Provider to send your newsletters. This either entails dealing with two different services, connecting them, and linking back and forth, which may be one reason so many artists don't actually send emails or, in the case of services like Squarespace - you must pay extra if you want to utilize their built-in email newsletter software.
But, with FASO you get, for the best prices in the industry, you get both, included. You don't have to figure out how to connect anything, you don't have to use different services, and you don't have to pay any extra fees.
To my knowledge, we are the only website provider that bundles an entire world-class email newsletter system with your website at no extra cost. For less than you'd pay for a generic website elsewhere, you get a world-class art-specific website, with full ecommerce and with a full newsletter system ready-to-go, out of the box.
We've spent years perfecting our email sending software, and we've become experts on email deliverability. In fact, this newsletter is proof that we can put emails into your customers' inboxes because we send every issue of FineArtViews with our own email newsletter product (known as ArtfulMail).
In addition, we bundle marketing automation into the process with our New Art Alerts feature (which you won't get with any other email newsletter provider or website provider), so even if you don't have time to send a newsletter, we'll take care of it for you.
Pardon me if I say this too strongly, but you really are making a mistake if you host your art website anywhere else. I've never seen an artist provide a world-class experience for the art buyer on a Squarespace site. You don't get as much for your money, and frankly, your website experience for your customers, your precious art buyers will not be as good.
You see, it's not enough just to have a website. You need to provide a good browsing and purchase experience. And that is what we are experts at.
It's time for you to take your art marketing to the next level. It's time for you to showcase your art in a way that buyers will appreciate, and not be frustrated with. It's time for you to get access to the best art marketing tools in the business.
Stop paying too much for your website and Join FASO.
Stop paying extra for marketing tools when you can get them all by simply taking the action to Join FASO.
Stop providing your customers with a sub-par experience and Join FASO.
It's time.
Join FASO.
You won't regret it.
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