mailing lists

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

Valerie Lorimer painting

The Art Biz ep. 142: Activate Your Marketing for a Bigger Audience

Marketing is more effective and more enjoyable when you make more personal connections rather than relying on posts and broadcasts. When you interact 1-on-1, whether it’s in person or digitally.

I call this activating your marketing. I have suggestions for how to do this when using social media, searching for venues for showing and selling, getting the most from exhibitions, and more.

The Art Biz ep. 142: Activate Your Marketing for a Bigger Audience 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

Dona Barnett collagraph

7 Ways to Segment Your Mailing List and Make It More Useful

Ever worry about bothering people with your emails or postcards?

You’re not alone. And there’s nothing wrong with wanting to do right by your trusted fans. You know what it’s like to receive tons of email and don’t want to contribute to the overwhelm.

Even though everyone on your list has opted in to hear from you, it still doesn’t feel right to email so many people so frequently. I get it. And …

There’s a solution to this dilemma: Send emails only to whom they are appropriate.

In other words, target your messages to the people who want and need to hear from you rather than sending every email to every person on your list.

Email marketing platforms like Constant Contact, MailChimp, and Emma have the capability to segment an email list. Depending on your platform, you might find these features under Groups, Segments, and/or Tags. Some platforms use multiple names.

If you haven’t used this feature, the first step is to research how to segment a list inside of your email platform of choice. It’s worth it even if you have to pay a little for it.

After you’ve done that, you can make your list more useful by segmenting it in multiple ways.

7 Ways to Slice and Dice Your List

Your list segments will vary based on the messages you are sending, but these are the 7 types of segmenting that I suggest frequently to my Art Biz Coach clients.

7 Ways to Segment Your Mailing List and Make It More Useful Read

How To Start Your Email List

“How do I start a mailing list?”

It’s a question that I’ve been asked numerous times in the past few weeks. Hmmm … Where to begin?

One thing is for certain. “Start an Email List” is an overwhelming project that might stop you before you’ve even started. Instead of looking at it as a whole, break it down into steps to make faster progress.

Here are the steps to take. They aren’t numbered because you can skip around until you get to the “Finally” section.

(If you have a mature mailing list and you don’t need these steps, please don’t go anywhere. Jump straight to the end and share your experience with others. Your insights and encouragement are sure to be valuable to someone else.)

Start With Who You Know

Make a list of everyone you know who might want to hear about you and your art:

  • Friends
  • Family
  • Neighbors
  • Colleagues at a day job
  • Other artists

Don’t discount anyone because you believe they’ll never buy your art. You never know how they can support you until you bring them into your art life.

Save the following information for each person:

How To Start Your Email List Read

The Only Gift You Need to Build Your Mailing List

What I love most about the holidays isn’t receiving gifts. It’s giving them.

I love everything about the process: from trying to find the perfect gift for a special person on my list, to wrapping it and watching them open it.

I throw parties and give “lovely parting gifts” to our guests (as if the party wasn’t enough).
I decorate envelopes to delight recipients.

The thrill of gift giving is sacred in my book.

Unfortunately, when building a business, giving gifts can be tarnished by the giver wanting or expecting something in return. It’s part of the list-building process.

In return for your email address, I offered 6 free video lessons or perhaps a checklist, special report, or webinar at some point.

These presents are easy for me to deliver because I offer a service. I have loads of content that will help you gain recognition and sell more art.

It’s harder for artists to offer gifts in return for email addresses.

The Only Gift You Need to Build Your Mailing List Read

It's All About Your Mailing List

Michelle, a woman in my mastermind group, marveled at my list size: How did you get that many people on your email list? It was easy for me, I replied, because I understood the value of a list when I started my business. I was fortunate to appreciate the importance of a list due to

It's All About Your Mailing List Read

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