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!
Sincerely,
Clint Watson
BoldBrush/FASO Founder & Art Fanatic
PS - To start your own email marketing program, if you're a FASO customer, we recommend you use the built-in ArtfulMail program. If you're not a FASO customer (or need more advanced features), we recommend ConvertKit. Help us keep bringing you great content by signing up for Convertkit with our affiliate link here.
