Email Marketing
Your email list is your most valuable marketing asset. It’s more reliable than social media, more personal than advertising, and uniquely yours.
These posts and episodes of The Art Biz cover the practical side of email marketing for artists.
Clean your email list to improve deliverability and engagement (236)
Most artists focus on growing their email list—but what if the real power comes from trimming it? In this episode of The Art Biz, I share why cleaning your email list is essential for improving deliverability rates, boosting engagement, and building a more confident marketing practice.
Learn when it’s time to remove inactive subscribers and how doing so creates space for genuine connection and sustainable growth.
Test your email marketing and track your results
In marketing your art, there are no absolutes—regardless of what you might hear from a so-called expert or influencer. Everything is a test. You don’t know what works until you try, look at results, and make adjustments.
How do you know which is right? There’s only one way to know which is the right option for you. Test and track them!
Vary your marketing message
There is no reason to be repetitive in emails and social media posts when you promote your art exhibition, event, or class. Hitting a different angle with each message makes it more likely you’ll pique the interest of followers.
I have some ideas for doing just that. Many of these suggestions lend themselves to emails, while others could easily be adapted for social media.
Rethinking mailing lists for artists (182)
Your artist mailing list is your most valuable marketing asset. It is the primary tool you use to share your art with the world. It’s your #1 marketing asset.
Let me emphasize that by saying it a different way: There is nothing more important you can do to build your art business and career than to nurture your relationships.
In reality, most artists have 3 mailing lists, not just 1. Here’s what I mean.
The purpose of your artist newsletter
An artist newsletter is not for sales. Rather, it helps you maintain a warm connection with subscribers. It’s a commitment you make to yourself and your art.
Without the nurturing, you might find yourself having to reintroduce yourself at some point to a list that has gone cold.
Bonus: Staying in touch makes you the artist who comes to mind when people look for art.
Options for growing your email list
When used, your email list can help you establish trust, cultivate relationships, and showcase your experience and expertise.
It’s your #1 marketing asset—unique to your art and goals.
While growing an email list has become challenging, that doesn’t mean we should give up. Take advantage of every opportunity (asking, using forms, offering freebies) to attract and add subscribers—remembering, always, that it’s more important to engage the right people than to focus on the numbers.
How to warm up a cold email list
What good is an email list if you’re not using it? (Answer: No good.)
Neglecting subscribers for months or,yikes!, years, renders your list cold. If you’re ready to commit to staying in touch with the people who asked to hear from you, you might need to reintroduce yourself.
It’s not as difficult as it sounds, but the longer you wait, the bigger the task seems.
Master your subject lines in 49 characters or less
Email subject lines shouldn’t be an afterthought. Their purpose is to encourage people to open your email.
There’s no use sending an email if people don’t open them.
Here are 7 tips for improving your subject lines and, as a result, your open and click-through rates.
7 Ways to segment your mailing list and make it more useful
Ever worry about bothering people with your emails or postcards? Even though everyone on your list has opted in to hear from you, it still doesn’t feel right to email so many people so frequently. I get it.
There’s a solution to this dilemma. Send emails only to certain segments of your list, which will vary based on the messages you are sending, but these are the 7 types of segmenting that I suggest frequently to my clients.
How to start your email list
How do you start a mailing list? One step at a time. This doesn’t have to be difficult, but you do need to follow the law if you are sending marketing messages through email.
Your list starts with everyone you know, but I want you to do a few more things before you add names and addresses to an email marketing platform.
I think that it is important to mention that most e-mail blasts will only get a 25% open rate. If you get 30%, you are doing well. E-mail press releases to media will often get a far less open rate.
Think of how you handle your own e-mail. How often do you look at you e-mail and start deleting messages without opening them? I’ll bet most of the time. As time goes by, it is becoming clear that, while cheap, e-mail is not as effective as was once thought, unless you have lots of names where a 25% open and a 2% response translates into thousands.
I make a point of putting my last name in the title of all email blasts to my art list, which is sent only to people who want to be signed up. I figure this will get the emails opened more often, since the recipients know me. Seems like it doesn’t hurt to have my name repeated in an art context, too.
What do you think, folks?
Good advice about luring people to a website.I just published a photobook containing ten of my pieces, and plan to put it up on my site for sale. Now I realize that I can get people to click through from the email blast by describing the amazing quality of the new photographs that went into the book, in addition to the availability of the book. Now I just have to post those new pix!
My last name, Read, could be seen as an instruction or an order. Not sure it would work well in an email title, but I like the idea in principle, just have to find a more creative edge.
Since both your first and last names are short, you could include them both.
A question I have I use email for marketing often however my fear is that i get deleted as spam. Any thoughts. Also what is your recommendation for subject line?
Catron: Did you read the link re subject lines? There’s a whole article there.