Resources for your artist mailing list

Dear Alyson, with regard to your comments in the Art Marketing Newsletter regarding adding folks to your list who have not signed up, you are absolutely on the mark with this! But I’d like to say, even with regular mail, if I haven’t at least signed a card, requested information or somehow expressed interest, when I receive something unsolicited, 99% of the time it goes straight into the trash with all other unsolicited mail…I call it “junk mail”. Here’s the rub, whether it’s email or regular mail, I don’t waste my time looking at it unless I’ve given permission for it to be sent to me (granted,”permission” is given by my inquiring, signing up or somehow responding to an ad, website offer or something). If artists are sending out anything, regular mail or email, and they have no “permission” from the recipient, at least 99% of it goes straight to the trash, and if it’s email, I mark it as “Junk” and they are wasting both time and resources. I know this is only me, however, my suspicion is, most other people operate by these same principles because of the plethora of junk mail and spam being sent these days. I know the temptation is to take shortcuts to build mailing (emailing)lists, however, I recommend people read some of the articles you have written about how to do this with opt-ins as it’s the only way they’ll end up with a list that’s worth anything. Bottom line, there are no shortcuts and if one doesn’t do it right, they might as well not bother. So I guess, to conclude with these two cents, my point is, while people might not really mind getting unsolicited regular mail, odds are, if there has been no interest expressed by the recipient, 99% of the time it goes straight to the trash with the rest too. Mike Callahan

As someone who is working on having an email newsletter soon I found this to be an extremely useful newsletter packed with good information. Your book also has great info around this. Very helpful.