I’m delighted to share this informative article about how email marketing can lead to more art sales by Corrina A. Thurston. She is a professional wildlife artist specializing in detailed, vibrant colored pencil drawings. The artist explains that she began drawing in 2010, two years after falling chronically ill and having to medically withdraw from college. She taught herself how to draw from her bed as a therapeutic outlet. It then blossomed into a profession.
Corrina has recently taken what she’s learned from her efforts of building her art business with her limited energy and written a fantastic e-book, How To Build Your Art Business With Limited Time Or Energy, to help other artists do the same. I highly recommend it! To view Corrina’s art and learn more about her visit her website: corrinathurston.com. ~ Renée Phillips
How Email Marketing Can Lead to More Art Sales
By Corrina A. Thurston
About Email Art Marketing
Any marketing professional will tell you that one of the most important things you can do to market your business today is email marketing. What is email marketing? It’s exactly what it sounds like, marketing your business directly to your audience via emails.
The beauty of email marketing is that you’re talking to a warm audience. Everyone you email has signed up to be a part of your list. They know and expect you to email them. These are people who have already shown interest in your artwork and your business and want to learn more. That’s half the battle!
The second beautiful aspect of email marketing is that you’re able to connect and contact people over and over again. There’s a lot of research showing people need to see something multiple times before they recognize your business, remember who you are and what you’re offering. People also buy from those they know and trust. This means it may take them ten or more times seeing your products and hearing your name before they make the decision to buy from you.
Luckily, email marketing is one of the best (and cheapest!) ways in which you can put yourself in front of someone a number of times, without being spammy. If you’re sending out email newsletters weekly or monthly, people are going to start recognizing your name and what you have to offer.
However, email marketing doesn’t just let you reach out to people asking them to buy your products. If that’s what you’re doing, people will unsubscribe and your list will dwindle.
Instead, people want to be kept up to date on what you’re doing. They want to get to know you as a person and a business. They’re curious about you and what you have to offer, but don’t want to constantly be given sales pitches. Instead they want to feel like a privileged part of your inner circle, learning things about you that others may not know, learning about deals and new products before anyone else does, and getting great content on a regular basis.
How do you do this? Six Tips
Below are six tips for building your email list and succeeding with your email marketing campaigns in order to enhance your business and get more sales.
1.Be open.
Most successful businesses become that way because they don’t act like businesses, they act like people. Marketing is all about creating relationships. Let people in. Be honest. Communicate. Let your audience know what drives you, what you struggle with, how much you appreciate their support, your favorite parts of your job, etc. Let them peek behind the curtain into your process and what makes you different.
2.Be consistent to build trust.
Whether you decide you want to reach out to your audience monthly, weekly, or daily, be consistent. You want people to be eagerly awaiting your next newsletter. If you start skipping weeks, their trust in you will waver. But don’t just be consistent with your timing, be consistent with your tone, with your layout, with your subject lines, and everything else. You want your email to be instantly recognizable as your newsletter. Branding is important.
3.Build your mailing list.
Even if you’re making the best newsletter in the world, if you don’t have a list of people to send it to, it doesn’t matter. Building your mailing list is one of the most difficult parts of email marketing. You can’t sell to someone who is not there. So how do you get people to sign up?
a. Have a signup on your website.
Make it easy for people to sign up to your email list. I have a popup (see above) that comes up after someone has been on my website for 15 seconds, asking if they want to sign up. I also have it at the bottom of my website in the footer, and I also have a checkbox on my contact page when someone writes me an email, asking if they want to be on my list. I even have a signup on my Facebook page.
b.Create a lead magnet.
A lead magnet is a way to draw people in to your email list by giving them something in return. Have a great article or ebook your audience might like? How about a downloadable wallpaper of one of your pieces of artwork? Set it up so that people can get some sort of downloadable product of yours for free when they sign up for your newsletter. Just make sure it’s something that’s delivered to their inbox immediately.
4. Create content that is easily sharable.
This is where social media comes into play. If you write something amazing, you want people to be able to share it with their friends and get you more people on your list and more sales. Have social media buttons on your newsletter for people to use and create content that people will want to share, things others will find fascinating, such as images of your works in progress, finished pieces, videos, new products, events you’re holding, etc.
5. Don’t be afraid to repeat yourself.
Like I said earlier, it takes people a while sometimes to make a decision. Not to mention we’re all busy and have a tendency to skim articles and newsletters, which means we may miss something. Because of that, don’t be afraid to write about the same thing more than once. If you have an event coming up in a month, talk about it more than once and send reminders. People won’t mind, as long as it’s mixed in with new content.
6. Track your sales and engagement.
With most email marketing software out there, you can track how many people open your emails, how many click the links, and how many sales come from your emails specifically. Keep an eye on these numbers. You can see which subject line has gotten the most engagement, which types of links get clicked the most, and more, and then you can tweak your future newsletters to help increase those numbers.
Email marketing is one of the cheapest, most effective ways to market your business. Learn more about a number of marketing and time management tips in my recent book, How To Build Your Art Business: With Limited Time Or Energy.
Excellent article, this is something I am trying to show our students the benefits of not just creating art, but also how to market it and turn it into a career.
“Luckily, email marketing is one of the best (and cheapest!) ways in which you can put yourself in front of someone a number of times” You said it!
Thank you very much Matthew. Teaching is a gifted profession. Please give your students this website address so they can read weekly articles on many different art business topics. And, I hope you and they subscribe to my free email newsletter.
Thanks so much, Matthew! I’m glad you liked the article and completely agree about how marketing and selling artwork is just as important as an artist’s craft if they want to make a career out of their art! I’m teaching workshops and giving speeches about these topics now too, to go along with my book. Thank you for being a teacher!