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Watercolor painting by Jane Fritz

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.

The Purpose of Your Artist Newsletter Read

Wall sculpture by Karyn Gabriel

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.

Options for Growing Your Email List Read

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.

How To Warm Up a Cold Email List Read

Artist Trudy Rice monotype printmaking Art Biz Success podcast

The Art Biz ep. 77: Growing Your Audience with Good Karma with Trudy Rice

I don’t know anyone who doesn’t think it would be great to attract more Instagram followers. More email list subscribers. More sales.

More of anything! Because it makes our efforts feel worthwhile. It seems validating.

But we’re often stopped in our tracks when we begin to realize what we need to do in order to increase our numbers.

We think we have to post more, research hashtags, invest in advertising, create a lead magnet, learn to write better copy, or forget about a restful night’s sleep.

Yeah, you probably do have to do some of those things in order to attract more followers and subscribers, but you might also benefit from being open to doing things a little differently to increase those numbers.

In this episode of the Art Biz Podcast I talk with Trudy Rice about how she has grown her Instagram and email list by cross-promoting other brands.

Trudy uses a platform called Ampjar, but the underlying lesson is to find like-minded people and share each other’s art, products, and services. Trudy refers to these as “shout outs” and loves this system because of the good karma it creates.

The Art Biz ep. 77: Growing Your Audience with Good Karma with Trudy Rice Read

Your Artist Email Signature Block

Your artist signature block is the text you add to the end of your individual emails, and it’s a free marketing tool.

What to Include in Your Signature Block

Your signature block might contain a mixture of any, but not all!, of the following.

  • Your full name (required)
    I have a policy against answering emails that are unsigned, and I’m sure I’m not alone. If you don’t care to tell me who you are, why in the world should I respond?
  • A link to a compelling page on your website.
  • Your location (You’re sending email all over the world. Tell people where you’re from!)
  • Your phone number
  • Your website address 
  • Select social media links
  • A tagline about your art
  • An upcoming event, such as a workshop or exhibition, you’re promoting

How Much to Include

Err on the side of brevity. The fewer words, and the fewer links the better in your signature block.

Your Artist Email Signature Block Read

Following Up After You’ve Sold a Piece of Art

People who buy from you once are more likely to buy from you again than people who have never bought from you.

And … It’s less effort to nurture relationships with people who already know, like, and trust you than to find new people to share your art with. Acquiring customers, in marketing terms, is a long and costly process.

Therefore, it makes sense to take care of the people who have purchased from you. Show them you appreciate them now instead of contacting them later only when you want something from them.

One of the biggest mistakes artist-entrepreneurs make is not following up with people who have given them money.

If you’ve been lax in this area, you might be leaving money on the table.

If you sell art from your studio, rather than through a gallery, you have no excuses for not following up appropriately. You have the name and contact information of your collectors.

Here’s a plan to awe your collectors–not just once, but over the course of your relationship.

Within 1 Week of Sale: Express Gratitude

Send a thank-you note in the mail. Use notecards with images of your art on them for all of your handwritten notes.

This is yet another opportunity to put your art in front of people who appreciate it. The cards, of course, have your contact info or website on the back.

Don’t exploit this as an opportunity to ask for anything else. Thank-you notes are for expressing gratitude only, not for additional sales or requests.

Two Weeks Later: Ask to Connect

In this email, suggest to your collector that

Following Up After You’ve Sold a Piece of Art Read

Vary Your Marketing Message

Your art exhibition, class, workshop, or event has so many facets that there is no reason to send repetitive emails and social media posts for your promotions.

You never know what it is about your work or offering that will be of interest to your audience. Hitting a different angle with each message makes it more likely you’ll pique the interest of followers.

Below are ideas for doing just that. Many of these suggestions lend themselves to emails, while others could easily be adapted for social media. Use your noggin to decide.

Exhibition or Art Event Promotions

There is much more to your art show than the title, dates, times, and location. And you don’t have to dig too deep to unearth a new perspective.

  • Rotate images of your art with short 2- or 3-sentence stories for each. People are more likely to get excited about a show when they know what they’ll see and the stories can help sell the work.
  • Mention other artists who will be in the exhibition and why it’s an honor to show with them. Explain what your art has in common with theirs.
  • Discuss the history of the juried show you’re in and why it’s valuable to be part of it. The purpose should come back to you.
  • Offer suggestions for nearby galleries or places to dine. Add your personal slant on these establishments: “Don’t miss the green curry!” or “The back gallery is showing X, who was featured in last year’s Whitney Biennial.” This is especially helpful for people who are coming from a distance and want to make the most of their trip.
  • Relate a particular piece in the show to

Vary Your Marketing Message Read

Master Your Subject Lines in 49 Characters or Less

Email messages are the steam engine behind much of your marketing these days. They’re cheap, they’re fast, and . . . they’re completely ineffective unless recipients open them and act on the message.

Recipients are tempted to open messages, in large part, based on what they encounter in the subject line.

Your subject line is almost more important than the content of the email. If the message is never opened, you might as well have not sent it.

To the point: The purpose of your email subject line is to get the recipient to open the email. It’s not a space-filler and should never be an afterthought. You can’t take a subject line for granted. Follow these 7 tips for better subject lines.

1. Make it personal.

Think about your subscribers and readers. Which ones are your strongest prospects? Which are your loyal collectors?

Write directly to these people as you’re crafting your message and your subject line by opting for the words You and Your over Me, My and Mine as much as possible. Write to them in a conversational, authentic tone.

The words You and Your are powerful. Did you notice how many times I’ve used them in this article? I’m writing to you, not for or about me. Examples of You-centered subject lines include the following.

  • It won’t be a party if you’re not there
  • Can’t wait to show you the 3rd photo from the left
  • Picture yourself sipping wine and looking at art

2. Be specific.

Don’t use the same subject line for every email to your list. If we see the subject line News from Diane Jenson’s Studio every month in our inboxes, we begin to think it’s the same message over and over again.

You want readers to know that there is unique content in each message. Using the same subject line for every email masks the value of the individual messages.

If you’re promoting a particular event in your email, use the location of the event in the subject line.

  • Just 1 of 82 artists in Breckenridge next weekend
  • Chocolate and art in New Orleans Nov 5

Or use the title of a specific work instead of simply acknowledging “new work” in general. These two examples use titles from real-life artwork.

  • Cake on Cake—the fat-free version
  • Dazed and Confused? There’s a painting for that

3. Use numerals instead of text.

The number 50 has more of a visual impact than the word fifty. Note, however,

Master Your Subject Lines in 49 Characters or Less Read

Why Nobody Came to Your Show

It doesn’t take a genius to understand why nobody came to your art show.

Let’s set aside the bad weather, natural disaster, flu epidemic, or major tragedy in the community. And not count people who are out of town or live too far away, or those who have tickets to the theater or are nursing a sick child.

We’re going to focus on the able people on your mailing list who would be most inclined to come out and support you. Except they didn’t.

The reason they didn’t come is because you assumed too much.

Let’s look at 4 ways this might have played out.

1. You didn’t tell them about it.

You assumed the venue would get the word out.

Oops! You’ll never do that again. Venues, regardless of the type of venue, have an entire program of artists and exhibitions lined up. Sorry to break this to you: you are but a small fish in their big pond.

What’s important to you isn’t always critical to them.

You can’t rely on the venue to get people to your exhibition.

2. You relied on a social media post.

You assumed people would see your invitation on Facebook.

You can’t post an invitation once or twice to social media and expect results (especially these days). I don’t know about you, but

Why Nobody Came to Your Show Read

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