EMAIL LIST BUILDING ESSENTIALS TO SELL YOUR ART ONLINE

Growing your audience on Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest is amazing, but your followers may come and go. Plus, they’re not all necessarily going to buy your products. However, your subscribers are much more personal. They’re the people who have given you something very important to them… their email address and they did so most likely because they’re interested in your artwork and what you have to say. Today we want to talk about the email list building essentials you need to know!
 

 

EMAIL LIST BUILDING BASICS TO SELL YOUR ART ONLINE

 
If you’re just getting started with your online art business, email marketing is a great way to build your brand. It allows you to communicate directly with your tribe and build trust by sharing information that is useful and helpful. Most importantly, email marketing is an amazing way to boost sales, as you can inform your clients about collections or upcoming exhibitions and encourage them to share the love with people that might also be interested in your art.

The Biggest Takeaway here? Your email subscribers are interested in YOU!

With social media and search rankings you’re always at the mercy of algorithms, so you may not be reaching the right people at the right times. However, with your email list you have complete control, which means you can reach out to your clients directly when you want. People are much more likely to open an email in their inbox than click on a link on a website or social media feed. In addition, clients can save emails to read later or even forward them to other interested parties. Email subscribers also have a high sales conversion rate… way higher than social media followers.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Before we move on to the basic steps of getting your email list set up and growing, we want to make one thing very clear: when people give you their email address, they’re basically inviting you into their inbox, which is the virtual equivalent of inviting you into their home. Therefore it is VERY important to be on your best behaviour and treat them with respect. This may go without saying, but by no means should you be spamming them or inundating them with aggressive sales pitches, and you should NEVER give out their email address or info to any other company or individual as you could very well be breaking data protection laws.

Ok, that being said, let’s move on!
 

HOW TO SET-UP YOUR EMAIL LIST. THE EMAIL LIST ESSENTIALS!

 

1. Sign Up With an Email Marketing Service

 
An email marketing service will give you all the tools you need to create opt-in forms and send beautiful emails that will hopefully convert to sales. But with so many services on the market, which one to choose? Here at Creative Founders we use ConvertKit because it gives us a ton of flexibility, it is a paid tool, but for us it is totally worth it! If you’re starting from scratch and don’t have any budget to play with, MailChimp is free and also a fantastic tool. We invite you to check both of them out and see what works best for you.
 

2. Create an Incentive

 
It’s a nice idea to think that people are going to loooove your website so much that they’ll want to sign up right there on the spot, but the truth is people don’t just hand their emails out willy-nilly. You need to create something enticing to give your subscribers in exchange for their email addys. This is often called a lead magnet and it can come in the form of a free eBook, resource list, email course, discount, or even the chance to win a prize. One great way to create a lead magnet is a content upgrade, which basically means taking your existing content and upgrading it by expanding on it or reformatting it into something downloadable.

Check out a few of our lead magnets –>

Ultimate Hashtag Guide For Artists & Creative Entrepreneurs
The Art of The Perfect Blogpost Checklist
 

3. Use Your Lead Magnet to actually collect leads!

 
You’ve worked so hard to get people to your website, so now you need to make sure you keep these potential customers with you. Design a clear call to action on your website so that you visitors actually see the opportunity to get your amazing new lead magnet. Here are a few ideas of where you can place your lead magnets:

– In a pop-up box
– Included in your navigation bar like our ‘Free Resources’
– Opt-in forms on your sidebar
– Include content upgrades inside your blog posts
– At the bottom of your blog posts
– Social Media Bios.  (You can shorten the url with bit.ly or goo.gl)

So how do you set these up? These are a few tools you can check out:

– LeadPages (Paid)
– Sumo (Free & Paid Version. We use the free version!)
– ConvertKit (Paid)
– MailChimp (Free)

Having trouble creating your lead magnet? We usually go to Upwork when we need a little bit of extra design help but you can easily do it yourself on Canva too!!
 

CHALLENGE:

 
Today’s challenge is to come up with an idea for your own lead magnet. Think about what your potential collectors might need or want that would be useful for them. Maybe they would appreciate a free map to all the best art galleries in your city, a how-to guide on how to take amazing photos in low light, or the chance to win one of your limited edition prints. You can also take a look through your blog content and see if there is anything you can reformat into something useful that you can offer in exchange for those email addresses.

Good luck!