Cultivate Collectors with Email Marketing

Email marketing is a fantastic way to keep in contact with collectors and to grow a contact list of people interested in your work. With so many ways to reach potential collectors – such as through the web, Facebook, Twitter, blogging, art shows, workshops and more – if you can ask people for their email address in all of your marketing methods then you can send information directly to people’s inbox. Through website, Facebook and blog activity you can track how many visitors you get and where they are from but you don’t know for sure who they are and what their interest level is. Having people’s email addresses puts the control in your hands rather than putting your information out there and waiting to see if people come to you.

It’s like handing out a business card without receiving contact information in return. You don’t know if that person will ever visit your website, or they may forget they have your card and remember to look you up six months down the road when they happen to find it again. Do you want to leave that all to chance or do you want to be able to email them right away and say how pleased you were to meet them and to be able to keep them up-to-date on what you’re doing on a regular basis? What do you think will be more effective in getting people engaged in what you’re doing and possibly getting a sale from it?

I encourage you to use an email marketing program if you are ready to start sending newsletters or if you aren’t currently using one for your newsletters. There are so many benefits to using an email system such as Constant Contact, MailChimp, GoDaddy’s Express Email Marketing, etc. I have used most of the popular systems available and my favorite is MailChimp. I will tell you why:

• It’s FREE! – If you don’t mind having the little MailChimp logo at the bottom of your newsletter then it is free until your list grows to include 1000 emails.
• It’s easy to use – It comes with a lot of templates already set up for you that include links to social media, forwarding to a friend, etc. All you have to do is choose one then change the pictures and colors.
• It is automated saving you time! – Once it is set up and you have the signup form on your website, people simply fill in the information and click submit. They are automatically added to your list in the system for the next time you send out a newsletter, and it gives people the option to unsubscribe (a legal requirement) or to update their own information.
• It has autoresponders – Rather than people having to wait for your next newsletter, you can set up an email to automatically be sent to people a day or two after they sign up for your list, such as a welcome email with some helpful or interesting information about you, info about a contest or giveaway, etc. It’s a nice way to welcome people without having to manually send something yourself.
• Everything can be tracked – This is one of the best parts. After you send an email you can check back a few days or a week later to see how many people opened the email, what links they clicked on, if they forwarded it to a friend, etc. You can try different things and track it to see what works and what doesn’t.
• Integrated with social media – In mailchimp you can link to your Facebook and Twitter accounts so that when you send an email you can choose to automatically have that same information posted to Facebook and Twitter. A great time-saver!

And last but not least, when you are logged into MailChimp there is a monkey at the top of the screen that displays different comments such as “I like your shirt today!” How could that not make you smile?

Tags: email marketing, engaging art collectors