Email is the most important channel to drive online art sales. Let’s look at the data on this:
| Platform/content type | Average reach rate | Average conversion rate |
| Instagram Reels | 30.81% | 1.05% |
| Instagram Posts | 13.79% | 1.05% |
| Email marketing | 48.01% | 3.50% |
Not only do emails help you in reaching a highly interested & engaged audience but they also get the highest conversion rates across the board.
Why email is so important
Email is effective because it is an owned channel.
In marketing, channels are a method of reaching people with your message, e.g. organic social media, email, paid advertising, paid social etc. Channels can be categorised as owned/organic, earned, paid. For example Instagram is a channel with both organic and paid reach because you can make posts for free, but you can also pay to make them reach specific audiences.
Your email list is an owned channel because it’s a direct relationship, and you have control the deliverability of the message. Therefore a solid email subscriber list is an asset of your business.
For artists, email can be used in two key ways. The first is to build a closer relationship with your audience, sharing your creative journey and narratives around your art. The second is to sell your work by announcing the launch of print drops.
Gaining an email subscriber costs money or time, but as a channel for selling email provides the highest returns. This is because you get multiple opportunities to convert an email subscriber to a buyer. So if you do monthly print drops, subscribers receive 12 opportunities to buy different artworks of yours. With paid ads where the objective is to drive someone to your store, you get only one bite at the cherry. If the site visitor leaves without buying, that will usually be the end of the sales opportunity. And yet the cost and time involved in gaining an email subscriber is not that much more that the cost of getting a store visitor using paid ads.
Brand new ways to grow your email list for 2024!
Given all the above, any method to grow your email list faster or cheaper has got to be interesting, right?
We recently came across 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.
Broadly speaking, there are 4 ways for you to grow your email subscriber list:
(A) Add subscribers from other paid and organic channels
(B) Get referrals from your existing subscribers
(C) Cross pollinate your email subscriber list with another artist
(D) Paid advertising/ endorsement in other people’s newsletter
There are many articles on how to do (A) effectively. We have covered this is our AMAs on our Facebook group, but also here is an article that sums it up nicely: https://neilpatel.com/blog/get-more-email-subscribers/
However what really struck us about Beehiiv, as opposed to other platforms, was that it is architected and designed to drive (B), (C) and (D), which we have not seen before. We are currently testing this with our own audience but we reckon this could open up new possibilities for email marketing growth. (Note: the email we sent out to promote this article was sent with Beehiiv and included our newly launched referral program)
Let’s look in more detail at these new options for growth.
Referrals from existing subscribers
Word-of-mouth has traditionally been a highly effective form of marketing, especially powerful in influencing purchase decisions. Beehiiv’s referral program systemises, removes the friction and rewards people who drive word of mouth growth for your list. It also allows you to track & review the referrals and fulfil the rewards, all from a single dashboard that looks something like this:
To get started, all you need to do is set up the rewards you want to offer your subscribers and create milestones through which they can be rewarded. There are plenty of ways to learn from your audience and understand what would entice them to recommend subscribing others.
Simply start by understanding why your subscribers follow you or sign up for your newsletter, and from there think therefore of what would be the most enticing rewards.
The setup process on Beehiiv is straightforward. You add each reward, define whether it is a physical product or a promo code and then establish milestones for your subscribers meaning how many referrals they need for each reward. The below screenshot shows how a typical referral program set up would look like.
So for artists, the referral program could include rewards like:
- Digital wallpaper bundle
- A discount on a print or something else you sell in your store
- Promo code for free shipping
You can set rewards up in a sequential way so every referral up to 5 referrals offers them a different wallpaper bundle and the other rewards can follow on after that. The rewards should reciprocate their efforts and be enticing enough for people to want to win them so for a higher number of referrals you can even add options like:
- An invite to an exclusive online talk with you, the artist, about your work and inspirations
- A free Patreon subscription or access to some kind of inner circle/ VIP community
- Exclusive invite to your next exhibition or any other special activities to keep it interesting.
Each of the rewards have a cost associated with them and the idea is to make sure that you do not lose money on any rewards that you offer. So with a free shipping code, someone would still need to pay for the print and you’d still make money out of that reward. This is especially important so you are protected against anyone trying to scam your rewards system. By default the referrals in Beehiiv are double opt-in to reduce such scams and to make sure that the emails are legitimate. But in the odd case that someone does try to manipulate the system, your rewards will ensure you make money out of every referral.
Once the referral program is all set up, you can easily integrate it in your newsletter with a single click so every email you send will include an invitation to make a referral, the recipient’s referral status, and the next reward they can win. It motivates them to share your newsletter with their friends and earns you a new subscriber, a win-win situation for both!
Collaborate & cross pollinate with other relevant artists
One way to get a bigger list of the right kind of subscribers, is to cross pollinate your email list with another artist whose work compliments yours. We see this tactic used effectively by YouTubers to drive subscriber growth.
An example of a good fit for cross pollination would be an astrophotographer and a space painter. Both of these artists are making work around the same subject and it is highly likely that if you buy a photograph of the moon that you would buy a painting of the galaxy. So, the profile of your subscribers makes a good fit. You should try to find someone with a similar number of average email click throughs as you, to make the exchange fair.
An example of how to implement this is to have a part of your newsletter talking about about how you came across the other artist’s work, why you love it and how it inspires you in your work. You could even work on a collaborative project together, ending in a print drop of a collaborative piece of work. This would give you multiple chances to talk about each other and maximise the cross pollination.
So how does the cross pollination actually happen, from a user journey perspective? Again Beehiiv systemises this type of cross promotion, removing all the friction from the process. The screenshot below shows the a magic link setup process. From the options, you can choose the platform on which the other newsletter is hosted where you want to add your magic link. So if your collaborator used Mailchimp, you can select Malichimp from the options and the link will now be customised to be used on Mailchimp.
You can also add advanced UTM tracking options so you know which newsletters you got the most signups from. Once all that is done you can just copy the link and share with your collaborators so they can add it in their newsletters.
Recommendations
Another interesting cross-promotion feature that Beehiiv offers is Recommendations. It is a really powerful growth tactic that helps in mailing list growth by creating a symbiotic relationship between different newsletters hosted on the platform. So when someone subscribes to your newsletter, they will land on a screen like this which will show them other newsletters from artists that you are recommending and why. All they need to do is slide the toggle on for the newsletters they wish to subscribe to and click on Subscribe for a simple, hassle-free signup process.
The first step for you is to add other newsletters that you want to recommend to your potential subscribers. It would be great to have a little group of artists of similar genres, adding each other’s newsletters to their recommendation lists so every subscriber gets the chance to join the other artists’ mailing lists too. It definitely builds trust since they are following an artist’s recommendation and is also great for email signup rates because the user subscribes to multiple newsletters in a single session.
All the newsletters hosted on Beehiiv can be found in the Recommendations section. Search by the topic tag like #art, #photography and you should see the relevant newsletters listed there. You can select the ones you want to add to your list, write a short description about why someone should subscribe to that newsletter and click ‘Add recommendation’.
In your dashboard, you will see a list of all the newsletters you are recommending along with the number of subscribers you have referred to them so far (screenshot below).
When someone adds your newsletter to their recommendation list, you will see it in the ‘Recommending you’ list along with the number of subscribers they have referred so far.
Why you shouldn’t ignore this advice!
Emails has been a little overlooked as a sales channel as social media has gotten all the hype. However with the rise of social commerce, people are starting to look at it afresh as it is the most important channel for conversion & revenue.
The transient nature of social media is great for building hype, anticipation and introducing newer ways of promoting your art but one of its downsides is that if you miss an update from an account you follow, you may never see it. The algorithm will not always show the same content to you twice. This is what makes email so important, as emails are far less likely to get missed.
The ongoing privacy updates and third-party cookie blocking has also forced people to realise the importance of owning their first party data, or rather the drawbacks of not owning it have become abundantly clear. Your mailing list stays unaffected by any algorithm updates and you can be well assured that you’ll be able to reach your customers at any point in time.
3 immediate action points
Social commerce is rapidly growing and you are still in the early stages to make the most of its success. So what can you do today to jump on the bandwagon of this opportunity:
- Switch to Beehiiv as your email newsletter growth platform
- Set up a referral program for your subscribers on Beehiiv and start promoting it in your biweekly/monthly newsletters
- Look for at least one artist with similar art & following as yours and pitch them the Beehiiv cross-pollination idea for subscriber growth
You can use our referral link to sign up for Beehiiv. Please note that theprintspace will receive a small percentage of affiliate income if you use our referral link. However, this is not the reason why we are recommending this platform.
At theprintspace, we are exploring Beehiiv features for our own marketing strategy. If you want to see the results, join our Facebook group where we share all the key updates and other growth tactics with our members exclusively!
