BackStage at RB

hey this is GREAT !
well done.
im a member of REVERBNATION – and they have these widget things.
one of them has been fantastic for me – ive been able to set up a widget which links straight back to my bubblesite. hte widget has a pic of my bubblesite main page and it works great wherever i place it. more cool widgets please ! ones i can paste in emails AND on blogs/myspace etc.
:)

Having something to actually sell !!
_{sorry had to lol}
still patiently waiting for writer’s product =0þ

Having said that – here’s a thought -
Could the avatars linking to our writing pieces have a colour to them other than grey? something like a pale primary or secondary colour we can choose to promote the feel of our written piece
ie: red for passion, blue for melancholy, green for environmental, yellow for cheerful, etc
when you look at a gallery of a writer’s group (eg WMG) to see a page of grey boxes is very unappealing!

Just a thought!
☼ Happy Bubbling! ☼
Chookas! ♥

I’d share my work with the universe if I had its email address! I work constantly to broaden my audience – my friends, network, facebook friends and everyone are sick of me and my Red Bubble junk. lol. I need a fresh audience and don’t know how to get it.

Personally I do try and share my work with a broader audience i.e. friends and relatives, but I don’t try to push it too much because then it feels a little like spamming.

I don’t even know if it is possible, but it would be great to be able to inform those you have emailed once with a link to perhaps sign up to an update email that gets sent out once a fortnight (or something like that) with all of your new work. That way they are willing participants in receiving updates about a particular person and don’t actually want to create a Redbubble account, but are more than willing to spend money…

Did any of that make sense?

Being able to send such things out with your own art in the images would be a must have thing.

Excellent result.

Sounds great, particularly like the free shipping to family and friends.

Personally I prefer the 2nd e-mail (personal) looked great to send to friends and family

“still patiently waiting for writer’s product”

Books seemed so close for a while. Hold in there!

Really interesting. I’d love to be able to offer free shipping on my specific tees and the like. I do sell the occasional item to friends, so it would be nice to be able to reward them with something more. I also know I want to buy tees belonging to people I know and like instead of buying from department stores.

The ability to point people directly to the bubblesite via any promotion program RB is undertaking. The bubblesite is becoming an increasingly important area for me and I’d like to see development go into this area. I don’t want potential customers wandering off from my pages.

wow outstanding

i attempted to use the offer but was met with no replies to my 2 emails to RB about it. If you use it again, you should really try to get back to people because it cost me and you a sale.

jemimalovesbigted makes a good point, which I did raise via a different route at the time. This approach does encourage the sending of unsolicited commercial emails. I got sent such an email from someone taking part in this test and there’s no getting away from the fact that the email was unsolicited and of a commercial nature. It concerns me that this approach is almost akin to a spamming pyramid scheme.

Don’t get me wrong, I can see the point and the benefit. I can see that giving people the ability to offer promotions and discounts, under their control, is a good thing. But doing it in a way that encourages indiscriminate emailing (this was sold to the people who took part with the line “What about a free shipping email you can forward to all your friends and save them money on t-shirts, art and design from RedBubble?”—note “forward to all your friends”, not “forward to all the people who wish to receive emails of a commercial nature from you) can only, in the long run, give RedBubble a bad name.

Like I say, it looks like a good idea, but it could go really bad really quick and could tarnish the reputation of RedBubble.

What things would encourage you to share your work with a broader audience?

• Make portfolio and bubblesite management more artist-friendly. I’m thinking in-table editing (think of an HTML table with one artwork per row, and one editable attribute (markup, tags, title, description) per column, excel spreadsheet style.
• Provide google analytics access to bubblesite data (in theory you can share what you have already set up from the analytics site)
• Lots of web2.0 share links so people can facebook/tweet etc about their stuff (I have a script that posts a photo each day to redbubble, flickr and my own site , then brags about it on a blog, twitter and facebook)

Roger is spot on
I totally agree with him. On every point

I would not like receiving emails trying to sell something to me. I normally delete them as they clog up my inbox.

Peter – one thought: If my friends and family (some of whom monitor my work in RB anyway) would like to have one of my pictures, I tend to print it and give it to them for free. I don’t expect them to buy it from me. If I was making any serious attempt at making money from my work in RB I would definitely be looking for a market outside my close circle. Obviously this is different for T-shirts, but I’m talking specifically about artwork.

Heres a thunk why not rewards points?
for every 10 sales generated from your email post out you get x amount of points towards the purchase of your own choice – not aimed at yourself but at your friends sending the mails out further so they can get something for helping you?
Kind of like party plan hosting!
Have a ☼ “Redbubble party” ☼
- If someone [host] has a collection of friends who purchase sales from RB the host gets a thank you gift
Ok back in my box now! =0þ
Just a thunk!
Chookas! ♥

Backstage replied that “It’s a bit like a friend inviting you to an opening night of an exhibition.“

Sadly though, especially in the case of the email I received, it was nothing like that. It was unsolicited commercial email. And this came from one of your carefully chosen sample. If the intention is to roll something like this out to most users of RedBubble I see trouble.

Let’s be honest here: the main thrust of this was to generate sales. This journal is as much about the sales generated as anything else. It’s about commercial activity and increasing it. Nothing wrong with that. I’m just trying to point out that this could so easily go wrong and tarnish the reputation of RedBubble because it could be known as a source of unsolicited commercial email. I don’t want my work associated with that.

Dressing the problem up as “like an invite to an exhibition” is ignoring the problem and the possible consequences. I’m sure RB are more creative than that.

I’m with Tama, I too would share my work with the universe if I had it’s email! You lead, and we will follow! If there was a way for us to show our work to interested buyers, I would be there with bells on!!!! My trouble is I don’t know what the market wants…...

I have a bit of a different focus since at this point I only do t shirts. So what would help me promote more:

1) New product views!!! Which you seem to be working on, so i won’t harp on that anymore.

2) I got a nice little kick in sales from the 15% off promo from last month. I promoted it on Twitter and my blogs, and i would guess that a lot of it was form people on here who had put some of my stuff in their favorites or whatever, and then had an incentive to buy.

3) I agree with the others in that i am not wiling to email, even (and especially) friends, if it’s unsolicited, it’s spam. But i would be thrilled to have more sales and incentives to post on my blogs, Twitter, and other networks. That seems to work.

4) A big selling point, i would think, is at this point the differences in exchange rates. I’m American, so price in USD for the US market. This renders the pricing quite high in AUD i think, which is a big drawback, given that you’re Australian based and that’s a good chunk of your market. But quite low in EUR and GBP. A great deal lower than any of the other t shirt POD’s in those currencies. Which also renders my commission quite low as well, so i tend to promote my other POD t shirts with a larger selection of shirts and a much higher commission, because i do need to eat and pay rent. When RB first started, the pricing was geared to a very different world currency situation, and maybe that pricing structure ought to be relooked at, because i have heard similar things from others in the UK.

Just for fun – here are some comparative prices for a basic American Apparel tee from various POD’s. And the prices in AUD seem to be also a bit lower then i thought for RB too, compared to, say, Zazzle.

Zazzle
Light Colors – $25.75- 22.75GBP – 24.15EUR – 41.85AUD
Dark Color – $32.35 – 26.35GBP – 28.00EUR – 52.55 AUD

Spreadshirt USA
Shop – $24.00 Marketplace – $27.40

Spreadshirt EU
25GBP 30EUR

RedBubble

$24.99 – 15.13GBP – 20.53EUR – 31.33AUD

i’d like a widget for my bubblesite please.
oh, and a slideshow for my bubblesite.

I think the second sample is a good idea if you could add your own images…if you have a mailing list of friends and family who are interested in your work, and may have bought in the past, it won’t be spam…think of all the forwarded jokes etc. you recieve from the same friends…at least this would be more exciting…
I would also like to know how many visit my bubblesite…I promote it on Twitter almost every night, and would love to know the numbers and which pages they visit…so how about a button on the pages?..

I think an active attempt for our groups to locally have artshows and to show our local Councils what talent is available right in their communities. I tell everyonbe about red bubble and have convinced several people to join up, I think putting it out to our local communities rather than family and friends, cheers- Valerie xx

Peter, I feel that if I could offer some other things, like children’s tees, and loose prints, I would have more to offer, and a reason to continue to promote something new and different. That combined with free postage around Christmas time, when people just need an additional little push to jump in and purchase, that would be so fine :) thank you for all you do…

Artists being the best promoters…I dunno… I think I’m one of the the worst promoters of my work. I couldn’t sell discount water in the desert.

Great Peter, I think it’s always helpful to give customers reminders that your out there. I have lists I maintain from my galleries, and always send postcards for new shows there. I think if RB did that especially to people who already bought something, that’s a great way to keep the public thinking about you and your work.

By the way, I was wondering when the calendars dates would change for 2010, I already got one message from a customer that wanted one of my calendars with 2010 date not the 2009 date. When I told her that RB doesn’t change them until Sept. October timeframe, she replied back that she was buying something else. I feel bad that we are loosing sales because the date on the calandar is not something the customers can select it seem to me it’s an easy thing to customize. I know here in the states many people buy school calandars in August that go from September to September.. I think your missing a sales opportunity here, I know I did.

OMG! A 50% success ratio is astounding! There’s NOTHING you could do to better convince me to do the personalized method. I still feel the generic mail will be considered spam and dumped by either the recipient or the email spam filters. Which brings another point: how much of your mail was “confirmed” to be spam and nobody saw it? That 50% ratio is starting to look even better. :-D

Great news..Thanks

I know I used it and bought quiet a few items while the offer was on…..............you can send me one to send out, I would gladly use it…............I was sent the email from CT
xkc