selling

Email marketing is a powerful tool that should leverage your existing relationships with family, friends, previous customers, clients, and acquaintances to create awareness and sales.

You can also purchase email lists that are targeted to people that are apt to buy art or apparel (corporate art buyers, retail shop owners), however, the fastest way to lose credibility is to send a bulk email to strangers without providing context, purpose, and pointing out an immediate benefit to the recipient.

Always ask yourself what job the email is doing for the recipient. What’s the benefit?

OK, you’ve decided to send a mass (aka bulk) email. Now what?

1. Identify your mailing list
Your list can be your webmail contact list, an export of your computer’s address book, Apple or Outlook Address Book, Palm Contacts, etc. Members interested in buying lists should ping me via Bubblemail. Don’t be dissuaded by a small list of just a few people; email marketing works based on list quality and not the total size of the list. Email marketing can be as simple as sending an email to previous customers from your Gmail account.

2. Segment your list
Divide your list in order to test several groups. You can segment the list by sales potential, e.g., purchased from you in the past six months, inactive for six-plus months, new prospects (new to your list and never purchased art from you), etc. You could add a second qualifier if you have the patience, e.g., purchased a t-shirt from you in the past six months… or you could just go the full monty.

3. How will you mail?
This is the juncture at which you will decide if you’re going to send the email from your webmail, personal mail, or if you’ll send email using a bulk email tool.

There are many free and pay-per-use bulk email tools online. A few names include Constant Contact, Campaign Monitor, Campaign Master, SubscriberMail, ExactTarget, etc.

Look for a service that does not charge an up-front fee, little or no monthly fee, and that charges less than a cent/penny/pence per email sent.

Why use a third-party email tool?

a. You preserve your personal email address’ white label status (favorable view) with Internet Service Providers – making it unlikely that your address will be blocked due to an email blast.

b. These tools provide templates that make email creation very easy. Some tools make adding content to an email as simple as “drag-and-drop.”

c. The third-party will manage your unsubscribe and spam lists, so you won’t need to remember who wanted off the distribution list. Similarly, some services allow you and interested parties to add subscribers using a form; you won’t need to manually add subscribers.

d. Third-party tools often include reports that will show you how many people opened your email, how many clicked through (and on which links), as well as unsubscribe and “spam” rates.

4. What to write?
Perhaps you dislike the “hard sell” and choose to send an editorial email that targets everyone in your list. The content of this newsletter could focus on:

a. New work
b. Artwork in process – a behind the scenes peek at upcoming work
c. News about you and your work, e.g., recent shows, groups, charity work
d. Photos of you and your studio – or other personal images
e. A short, witty anecdote, etc. lead-in

If you’re interested in creating a merchandised (sales-y) email, consider:

a. Keeping the copy short and the calls to action obvious. Don’t make clicking through to your RedBubble page hard for the reader.
b. Capitalize on seasonal trends or life cycle events. Holidays are a great reason to talk about your work.
c. Readers love of collections, e.g., art for shared spaces, pop culture t-shirts, landscapes, etc.
d. Show lots of pictures, but keep the file sizes small. If you use Photoshop, use the “Save for Web” function and tweak the JPG quality so that images are small yet attractive.
e. Make any incentives obvious and put them in both the Subject line and at the top of the email newsletter. E.g., if you’re having a sale, offering a free item with purchase (free digital downloads are nice; e.g., wallpaper, printout), etc.

5. Subject line time
Subject lines make or break the number of people opening your email. You can get crazy and send the same email content – using different subject lines – to similar audiences and then measure the different open rates (the number of people that opened each email).

My best advice is to include an offer in the subject line (if an offer exists). Otherwise, keep the subject line short and to the point. Humor and personality helps if it’s not obscure. Want to know if your email subject line is too obscure? Send a test to a few friends in the target audience and ask for their opinion.

6. Prepare and test
You’ve got your list, created your email message, and chose a distribution method. Next, paste your message into your email client. If you’re using a third-party tool, load your content into the template you’ve chosen.

The only other note I have here is to send a test email to multiple email clients. For example, open a Gmail account, employ Apple Mail, Outlook, Yahoo Mail, etc. if possible. Send your test email to make sure that you like the way it looks in each email client. Some third-party tools will show you a preview of your email in multiple email clients (for a small fee).

Here are the email clients used by RedBubble members:

25.0% use Yahoo! Mail
15.0% use Outlook 2000, 2003, Express
13.0% use Apple Mail 3
10.9% use Hotmail
9.6% use Gmail
5.8% use iPhone 2.0
3.1% use Apple Mail 2
17.5% use All others combined

7. Time to send
Good luck. Spell check, recheck, and check your copy again. Then push that send button and be sure to record the results. Basic stats include:
a. Emails sent
b. Emails opened
c. Clicks from the email to your artwork
d. Number of sales – both transactions and total dollars

A next step would be to monitor the lifetime value of the customer, e.g., how many sales, dollars, etc. started with that one email.

I’ve probably rambled on far too much, but I hope that this article got you started and provided a few new thoughts, tips, and tricks that you’ll test in the near future. If you use email marketing to sell your art, please Bubblemail me or add your anecdotes or pointers below.

Oh, one last thing. If you have blog, you might want to look at FeedBurner.com as way to automatically email people each time you post a new blog entry. Feedburner provides the opt-in (sign up) form and automatically distributes the email for you. I can see that many members also use Feedburner through Blogger.com, and feature a link to these feeds and newsletters on their RedBubble Profile Pages and personal blogs, e.g., Jordan Clarke / thickblackoutline / and Stephen Mitchell among others.

If you already create articles about selling art, please point us to them below. More information about selling your art can be found under the Selling member name.

Regards,
Jason