In other words, how do you create scarcity and urgency in your art sales to ensure that people act immediately and buy your work? The way we see most of the successful artists do it is through timed print sales. It has the language of scarcity & urgency built-in. By promoting that your artwork is available for a limited time only, and in limited quantities, you make sure that your audience knows that they need to make a purchase now or they would miss the window for decision making.
Here’s how you run a successful timed print drop: You announce that you’ve got a new project or a new piece of work. You do a few posts in the lead up to the drop. You talk about the meaning and the ideas behind it, you show the creative process, you talk about and involve people in the image, the artwork, the production, the conception, the meaning and then when you drop the piece you let everyone know by posting and emailing that the “Store is live”.
Before the store goes live, on every single post that you make about the upcoming artwork that you’re going to drop, you should say “Sign up to my newsletter and get an early notification or early access to my drop, to avoid disappointment”. Then the day before you’re going to launch the store, you send out an email to your subscriber base saying – “Here’s advanced access for my print drop. You get 24 hours to buy before anyone else”.
The next day you post the work on your special media and say the store’s live for everyone but act fast because it’s only open for a fixed amount of time, saying exactly what that amount of time is. And you have a timer in the store which is counting down how much time you’ve got left. This is our preferred way to create urgency.
You can also add “I don’t know when I’m going to make this print available again”. Or you can say “it will never be available again in this form”, meaning size, the framing option or the paper it is printed on so people know if they want it they’re going to have to buy it there and then because there’s a timer on the page that is actually counting down. That’s our preferred way of creating scarcity.
Another way to add to the scarcity is to make the edition small. Ideally when you go to someone’s site you want to see most of the stuff marked as sold out because then you know your store visitors’ will know they have to focus on making a decision there and then.
