Benchmarking is the main way to inform yourself of how well you’re doing, and to help you understand the problem areas and figure out the improvements you need to make in the way you are marketing your art or in your ecommerce store design. So that’s the first step to working out how to increase your online art sales.
Measure and analyse your existing art sales results against the benchmarks, i.e. theprintspace’s published average traffic and conversion metrics that will tell you the areas you need to work on. There’s various factors that go into improving your art sales performance. Firstly there’s traffic which is a function of your following on social media, your ability to get that following engaged in the particular piece of work that you’re selling and to get your followers to click the link in the bio. That creates traffic. Then how well do you convert that traffic? That’s the conversion rate and we do that through scarcity marketing and through running timed drops.
The objective is to get your conversion rate up to a minimum of 1.7%, ideally up to 2.5% and then grow your following. So once you get your conversion rate right, you start putting more traffic into the store, and then you should see your sales grow. Somebody with a lot of traffic can still sell with a suboptimal conversion rate. For example, in some of the print drops that we’ve been doing for our clients, they’ve been selling hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of art a year, but we’ve doubled that with timed drops. So they were converting at 0.5-0.7% and what we’ve done with timed drops has increased that conversion rate up to 1.7%. A caveat is that conversion rate drops a little bit when a piece that you do goes really viral (which can happen sometimes). But in general, you should be aiming for 1.7% conversion rate.
You might have a situation where you’re doing very well, selling $50-100k worth of art a year. The real question is could you sell more and the way of finding that out is by looking and benchmarking the conversion rates. So if you are selling $100k worth of art and your conversion rate is 0.6% then potentially you could sell three times as much art if you get that conversion rate up to the target benchmark. This is how we look at timed drops and this is what we recommend when you’re trying to improve your art sales.
