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What is Email Marketing


What is Email Marketing?

 

Put simply, email marketing is the promotion of your art works to your audience via email.

 

It's one of the most important ways to build your audience and to build trust with your audience.  Your long-term success depends, essentially, upon both of those factors:  building an audience of true fans and building trust with that audience.


In marketing, we like to think in terms of marketing "channels." 

 

You can think of email marketing as simply marketing using the "email channel."


Other channels would include Facebook posts, Facebook Ads, Instagram posts and ads, Google - both paid and organic, real-world galleries, magazines articles and ads, direct "snail" mail invitations and post cards, and art festivals.

 

As you can see, your marketing channels include a mix of both online and "real world" venues.


But email is the most important channel because it's "owned media."

 

Owned media means that it's a channel (unlike Facebook, Instagram, Google or others) over which you have control:  Control over when you send a marketing message, control over the platform you use, and a near guarantee that your messages will get in front of your prospects.  You don't have anywhere near this type of control with most other media channels.

 

Owned media is the holy grail of marketing, and, if you do it right, it will serve as your biggest marketing asset and will serve as "insurance" if any of your other channels disappear (an art gallery going out of business, for example). 

 

The power of owned media is one reason we, at BoldBrush, have spent over a decade building FineArtViews into one of the largest email "ezines" in the art industry.  Other examples of owned media are your website, a physical snail mail list of fans, a list of collector phone numbers (so you can call your collectors directly), and, of course, an open studio event.  (By the way, the other types of media are paid media, such as magazine ads and earned media, such as being featured in an article.).


Building a strong, engaged audience that you can reach via email is the most important piece of your marketing plan.  This is the pillar around which you can build everything else.

 

 

I plan to write an entire series about email marketing. 

 

I'd like you to reply to this newsletter and let me know the following:

 

1.  What would you like to know about email marketing?

2.  What questions do you have?

3.   Have you had any success with email marketing yourself?

4.  If so, what has worked well for you?

 

 

Thanks in advance for responding with your questions or success stories.  Your participation will help us build a better series that helps more artists learn to use email marketing the right way to live their dream and inspire the world!

 

Clint

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Comments

 

I have a newsletter for my website. 11 people. How do I get others emails. I ask, I used my IPad at shows and asked for them to sign up, Now my health isn't as good. No more shows, so I need to go virtual. SPAM. I am afraid of that 4 letter word. I've taken on line marketing classes, paid for my own Guy now I am with Faso. The only thing I've done right is to keep my domain name and use my name as my email. I have run out of questions because I cannot seem to understand the verbal language. I pray God has led me to you. Obiwan you are my last hope. I have much to offer. Help me to get the word out. Thanks Clint.

We will be posting a newer blog pretty soon that covers how to get people to sign up for your newsletter. Thanks for asking.

Clint, I agree that email marketing is very valuable since an artist is usually emailing to people who have purchased a piece from them. I also like the idea of having control of our own marketing rather than the platforms having control over it. I helped my late husband, Tommy Thompson, sell paintings by maintaining an email list of subscribers via FASO.com and disseminating monthly newsletters via the FASO system, which I think is the very best. It is so important to maintain a conversation with your collectors because as you have said so many times, you usually sell to the same 20 or so collectors. Tommy designed a way to print notecards using his paintings as the front cover (FASO also published an article that Tommy and I wrote about his notecard marketing idea; this is the link to Tommy's article: https://fineartviews.com/blog/14367/using-note-cards-as-a-marketing-tool). When someone purchased a painting, I would prepare a few notecards for the collector, place them in clear bags, and email them a link to the notecards so that they could print as many as they wanted. It was free advertising for Tommy because we included his website on the back. I have also found that writing a blog via FASO.com helped Tommy sell paintings several times. Once a guy from Michigan who was designing cars for GM at their plant near Nashville, TN, called to say that he had found my blog post about Tommy's TN landscape paintings. He commissioned Tommy to create a large painting of a scene near Franklin, TN. He told us that he had searched for "artists painting Tennessee landscape paintings" and found my blog post because I had included the keywords. That was not the only time that happened; it happened several times. Thanks again, Clint, for all you do to help artists market their art. You are the greatest! Clint, I have a question for you. Tommy's and my daughter, MichelleRideout.com, has a website via FASO also, which I helped her set up initially. She is struggling with marketing. I am wondering if it would be permissible for me to send out only one email newsletter featuring her artwork (to Tommy's email list) as a trial to determine if any of Tommy's collectors might be interested in paintings by Tommy's daughter. I would be sure that it would be only a one-time issue unless they wished to be added to her email list. Would that be kosher? Thanks again for all of your help.


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