In this constantly evolving social commerce landscape, if you are not actively growing your mailing list, you are losing out on art sales. For all of our top selling artists, the average conversion rate from email clicks (that is sales as a percentage of traffic) is 5.39%. This compares to 1.32% for Instagram traffic. So a click from email drives 4 times as many sales as a click from Instagram.
In addition to that, owning your mailing list data keeps you protected from any social media algorithm changes that might affect your account. So your email list is your biggest asset in growing your art career because you can reach your true fans at your convenience and talk to them anytime and anywhere.
Your social media strategy should constantly focus on: 1) engaging new and existing followers and 2) converting them into email subscribers.
This article will talk about the second point, converting your existing followers into mailing list subscribers. There are many ways to encourage signups, we list them below starting with using compelling CTAs.
(By the way, the best way to reach more people and grow your followers is by making good reels with interesting hooks and narratives. We have written detailed articles about how you can make amazing reels, you can find them here and here.)
Compelling CTAs
Every image or reel that you post on social media should have an objective or an intended action that you want your followers to take. Asking them to take that action is called call-to-action or a CTA. It could be anything; share this post with your friends, tag two people, follow me for more such content, visit my website, join my mailing list, pre-order my book, visit my upcoming art show or anything else that you might be promoting at the moment.
But in terms of your social media strategy for promoting timed drops, every post needs to have a strong CTA. Depending on your print drop schedule, the CTAs can be either of the two:
- If you do not have a drop live: Join my mailing list via the link in bio
- If you do have a drop live: Visit my website via the link in bio
On every post where you don’t have a print sale running or something else really pressing to promote, your CTA should be to join the mailing list. When you do have a print drop running then of course your CTA would be to visit your website and buy a print.
Good CTAs to join the email subscriber list should help to maximise your email capture rate, which is your email signups as a percentage of traffic. Here are a few other pointers to keep in mind when writing your CTAs:
- Always vary your CTAs and be creative with them. Make them relevant to the subject of the post, and create some urgency around them. For example if your post is about an image or project, say “Sign up to my email subscriber list now, and get the email I am just about to send out showing the inspiration behind this project” This gives people a clear value proposition for signing up.
- Don’t use repetitive CTAs as people stop noticing them over time. It’s almost like banner blindness where your brain consciously or subconsciously ignores anything that looks like an advertisement on a website.
- Do not bury your CTAs in your captions. If the CTA fits nicely into the middle of your caption, do not be afraid to repeat it at the beginning or end. Make it stand out by using caps, spacing, emojis, or all of the above.
- If you tell engaging stories about your art, you can also work the CTAs into the post captions in a nice and natural way, i.e. by mentioning them in the context of the caption and what you are talking about.
- In order for people to see the CTA, they need to read the caption. Therefore it’s important to have some intriguing text at the beginning of your caption because that’s the only content that’s visible when people are scrolling through their feeds. If that text captures their attention, there are higher chances they click to expand & read it. We wrote some examples below, but bear in mind how much text usually shows without the caption being expanded:
- “My biggest challenge with this image….”
- “This image started out in a completely different way, it was…”
- “I never intended to make this, but…”
- “There’s a funny story about how this came about…”
- “Last night, I was pondering my art career and….”
- “You wouldn’t believe who I found this location…”
- “My sketchbook is a mass collection of…..”
- When people do visit your feed, make sure they can instantly see where they sign up or how they can visit your print store. Keep the text and visual language as similar as possible. Use clear links and text in your profile bio to let people know how to sign up. Here are a few examples of the text you can use:
- “Sign up to win a print”
- “My most detailed moon shot is now live!”
- “My largest ink drawing is now available as a print!”
- “Sign up to know more about my creative process”
- Make your mailing list signup as the top link in bio so it’s clearly visible. Don’t keep it hidden between multiple links.
- Respond to every comment or DM that you get. Acknowledged followers feel heard, valued and connected to you and are way more likely to join your mailing list and reciprocate and support you by buying your art. When responding to a question you could always say “…and I often go into more detail about this kind of thing in my newsletter, so please sign up to get a more detailed response” the chances are way more than the questioner will see this response of yours.
- Following on from the above point, if anyone asks whether a certain image you have posted is for sale as a print direct them to sign up!
CTAs are a good habit to acquire! Every post without CTA is a missed opportunity. It is easy to think that people reading the post will think to themselves “I must join this artist’s email list” but only a much much smaller fraction will think of doing this without the presence of a CTA. And if the post or the reel gets high engagement or goes viral, then you would seriously miss out on gathering a significant number of subscribers.
Special giveaways
It’s really vital to have a good email list and to do that you need to work persistently to grow it. But if you want to really give the email subscriber growth a shot in the arm, then you should run a giveaway, where you give something special away to someone chosen at random from your subscriber list.
How do you define something special? It could be anything that has a story attached to it and something that you can make content about, like:
- A signed sketch from your book
- A polaroid of any exciting shoots you went on
- Work in progress sketches of your favourite artwork
- Postcards from your most successful shoot
- A signed print that has never been sold and never will be
The idea that you give away something that has emotional or sentimental value that money cannot buy comes back to the scarcity model. The cleverer you are about coming up with something unique, the better your campaign will work.
The two important parts to running a successful giveaway campaign are: 1) Social media promotion and 2) A high-converting signup page
The way to maximise the effect of your giveaway campaign is by getting the most traffic to the signup page. And how do you do that? Through engagement. Remember our article on hooks? That’s really important advice to keep in mind every time you post on social media. A hit Reel could lead to thousands of new email subscribers.
You should run the giveaway campaign for around 7-14 days during which you make 3-4 posts about the giveaway. Make sure that each of these posts have really strong CTAs (read the above section for CTA tips). Keep the posts varied in terms of what you talk about, here are some examples:
- Announcement post for the giveaway
- What’s the story behind it
- Why is it special for you
- Short video of you signing the print
- How did you make that sketch or print, work in progress images if you have them
- Behind the scenes of your shoot in case of photography
The other posts that you do during the duration of the giveaway should also have an indirect CTA for the giveaway so someone who engages with that post can also sign up.
Remember to change your link in bio to the email signup page and a little header text about the giveaway with some interesting emojis to encourage clicks. All throughout the giveaway posts you will ask people to click the link in your bio so it should be very clear what link they need to click on. Minimise the clicks it takes for people to sign up successfully.
In terms of building a high-converting signup page, we have a template on Shopify that we use for our clients. It’s clean, simple and highly optimised for sign ups.
We advise creating a single page with no scrolls. One good idea is to use a nice picture of yourself with the print or the thing that you are giving away to build trust and personal connection with people who land on the page. Or you can use one of your amazing, recognisable artworks as an image for the page.
Add a simple sign up form with three fields, minimal text and a bright CTA. Make sure it autofills so people do not have to type out their details. Do not clutter the page with popups or unnecessary information.
Once the giveaway campaign ends, let your followers know that it has ended and announce the winner. Send an email to all your subscribers thanking them for signing up and make the winner announcement. Most of your subscribers would be new so you can include a little backstory about yourself and your work. And have a little text on the lines of, “If you did not win this print, don’t worry because I have a print drop coming soon!” and share the details.
Missed traffic = lost sales
There are a lot of people who miss signing up during an email capture campaign or visit your website in between print drops. Or there are other pages on your website that regularly get traffic, like your blogs or other product pages. It is a missed opportunity if you do not collect their emails at that point.
There are a couple of things you can do to capture those emails:
- Email signup form in your website footer
- Signup sections or popups on your blog pages
- Holding pages for your print drops
We’ll focus on holding pages because the other two are relatively simple and almost all ecommerce platforms provide the options to set up signup forms.
Holding pages are built for your timed print sales. They are similar to your signup pages in all aspects except two important things. They have a countdown timer and a teaser image/video of the print sale artwork.
The purpose of a holding page is twofold: 1) Build hype about the print drop and 2) Capture emails. The intriguing teaser image and the timer counting down seconds to the launch builds up people’s excitement for the drop. They wonder what the final artwork will look like and want to sign up for early access. The signup form eases that process.
When the timer runs out, the page switches to your landing page where people can purchase your prints. The landing page again has a timer counting down to the time left till your print drop ends. And when the sale ends, the page changes back to a holding page to capture emails of anyone who missed the drop.
Newsletter growth
If you’ve read this far, you know how effective email marketing is. But the thing that will greatly help your email performance is selecting the right email marketing platform.
We recently wrote about Beehiiv, a highly recommended newsletter platform used by successful publishers all around the world. The platform is built with the sole purpose of growth, providing users with the best tools to do so. Read its most interesting features here.
Customer lists
If you have your customer lists from your previous sales, you can add all of your buyers outside of the EU (to be GDPR compliant) to your mailing lists. Email addresses outside of the EU do not require a positive opt-in which means you can add them and they are free to unsubscribe when they receive your email.
Offline sources
Anytime you interact with your potential customers in exhibitions, art fairs, galleries, pop-up shows or any other offline events, make sure you have a process of collecting their email addresses. You can have a short signup form on your iPad that they can fill, or you can have a QR code that they scan and fill the form. Don’t miss the offline opportunity. Think of cool, interesting ways to capture emails there.
Like we said at the beginning of this article, if you are not growing your mailing list, you are losing out on art sales. So implement the above advice today and see the difference in your art sales!
For more questions on art sales, do join our Facebook group where we review your art sales strategy and offer advice on what you can do to improve your results.
