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Many artists make a huge mistake with their email marketing:  they use their gmail.com, yahoo.com, hotmail.com, outlook.com or similar address when sending their marketing emails.

If you're doing this, you need to stop, immediately.   It will cut your open rate and sales in half. 

Yes, that's right, you could potentially double your sales just by using a better email address.

Here's a newsletter I received recently from an artist sending from a gmail.com address.

Yikes!

Who would open and read the message above? 

Who would click on anything it contained?  Almost nobody. 

Plus, when Gmail flags messages like this, images are all disabled.  So the recipient wouldn't even see your artwork.

The reason this message has the big scary warning is simple:  To prevent spam, Gmail attempts to verify that the message you receive came from an email server that was authorized to send the message.  And gmail KNOWS, since they own the domain "gmail.com", that you don't have permission to send marketing emails like this from their servers.  Hence they are warning the recipient.  This may be slightly annoying when you're the sender, but it's important.  It prevents spam and, importantly, it prevents people from sending nasty email impersonating you.

There is a simple solution to this: Send your marketing emails from a custom email address on your own domain. 

Instead of sending from [email protected], this artist should have sent the message from [email protected].

If you are NOT a FASO customer, you will have to pay a bit extra to do this (most platforms charge something like $5/month for a custom email box) and you (or somebody technical you know) will have to setup some fairly complicated records on your domain's DNS known as DKIM, SPF, and DMARC.  The good news is, it's not THAT difficult and you only have to set it up once.  That's a small price to pay to double your sales!

If you ARE a FASO customer, I have even better news - nearly all our plans include a custom email address and, even better, when you set up your email address through us, we automatically add all the proper DKIM, SPF and DMARC records for you.  Here's a link to an article that explains how to setup a branded email box on FASO.  And here's an article that shows you how to make sure you send newsletters from your branded email account.

That's right.  If you use FASO's art marketing platform, then we can eliminate that big scary message in about ten minutes.

So, please, before you send your next email newsletter, take the time to make sure it will send from a custom email address on a domain that you control.

Until next time, please remember that Fortune Favors the Bold Brush.

Sincerely,

Clint Watson

PS - We're continuing our series on email marketing.  Please hit reply (if reading by email) or comment (if reading on blog) and let us know what other questions you have!