What you want from your newsletters is that your subscribers should open it and take the intended action, whether it is reading your blog, visiting your website or signing up for your exhibition. Getting to a consistently good email open rate is important and you get that only from making good content. If people know that every time they open your email it’ll be something good and not spammy or salesy but you’ll give some genuine value then that’s where you build up your open rates.
So don’t always just send emails about buying stuff. Most of your emails should be about content you can’t see on your social feeds or anywhere online. It should be special content that you only get from subscribing so it might be about providing more background to a project, some initial sketches for mood boards, location recce if it’s a photographic shoot for the piece of work you’re talking about. It might be a photo diary of making that work. It might be your inspiration. It might be an exhibition you visited that has influenced a piece of work. Keep it visual. You can have text as well but you definitely need to have visuals. When you add value with your emails then you get good open rates which will be above 40%.
The second thing is email frequency. We get a lot of questions about how often to send an email? Should it be monthly, weekly, quarterly? There are no rules other than when you’ve got something interesting to say. Ideally that should be monthly since you’re an artist and you’re constantly making work or thinking about making work. The reality is you’re going to have lots of interesting things to say so just keep a note of those thoughts, inspirations, influences that you like that’s going to feed into your work. Make sure you document it and when you actually have the time to write the newsletter then you will have lots of interesting things to draw on.
So the frequency is how often you have things to say but if you have things to say all the time then it should be once a month ro slightly more often. When you have a sale on it will be more frequent.
