By Daniel Grant

For many artists, selling art is an improvisational affair — trying things out to see what works. What about pitching your work to a commercial gallery, art fair, sidewalk show, pop-up gallery, or an open studio event? Another thought is posting images on Instagram, showing artwork at a café, bookshop, winery, or a bank. There is something to learn from every success — such as do it again and go bigger — and also at every failure, such as choosing the wrong venue, date, clientele, prices, colors, or the wrong art.

Try a road a bit less traveled

Erin Ashley, an artist in Boca Raton, Florida, who creates moderately priced ($300-$6,000) abstract paintings, has done a lot of the standard things that artists do — exhibiting in galleries here and there, as well as soliciting commissions from private buyers and corporate clients. However, from time to time, she also ventures a bit outside of the norm, holding what might be considered online open studio events. Ashley’s emailed announcements and promotions on social media and other websites resemble those of Bed, Bath & Beyond, My Pillow, and other retailers, with specials such as “take 25% off on all original art,” “offer ends midnight Sunday,” and “enter promo code: VIPSALE”. The artist usually sells between two and eight paintings during these time-limited offerings — typically in the $600- $700 price range.

Lowering the price by a quarter also acts to spur sales, since “everyone wants to feel like they are getting a special price,” Ashley attests. These sales take place three times per year, with April/May and November/December being the most successful for the artist. She says summer events are the most challenging, since many prospective buyers are away on vacation, and even if sales are limited, they “remind clients of your work and make them have a look at your site once again.”

She added that “you don’t want to have them so frequently that you come across as some bargain commercial artist.”

From our sister site Smart Retailer: How to Build an Email List

Promoting Art Sales through Emails

Certainly, many artists hold open studio events from time to time, and probably the same times of the year as Ashley. For these events, the artist sends out approximately 600 email invitations. However, her studio is in her home where she is raising two children. Opening up her home to visitors makes her feel uneasy and she questions, “How do you make the kids disappear for all that time?” The online realm offers a solution for these issues, as does the example of retailers that hold short term sales with their promo codes.

Lacking, of course, is the personal connection of the open studio — the face-to-face chatting, the behind-the-scenes look at how an artist works, or the anecdote that visitors are apt to be told in-person rather than read online — that may turn an investment of time into one of money. Perhaps the most important element to making Ashley’s event a success is her email communications.

She uses MailChimp, one of the top brands of email tracking programs, which counts and identifies the recipients who open emails and who downloads the message, rather than just who hits the “delete” button. MailChimp also tracks how many recipients clicked on the link to her website where they can see more of her artwork.

That enables Ashley to know which of the people receiving her announcement are showing real interest, and this helps determine who might be an ideal person to receive more targeted offerings at another time. MailChimp, Constant Contact, and other email marketing services do not, however, provide information on how long someone who clicks onto one’s website stays there or what they look at on the website. Other programs, such as Google Analytics, https://analytics.google.com, help with that. The cost of MailChimp ranges from free to $199+ per month, although most subscribers go with the $10 per month plan, based on the tools they seek for their online marketing.

The benefit of email marketing

Email, which has been available for a quarter century, may strike some as an “old-school method,” replaced as a form of communication by the seemingly more direct social media world, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and SMS texts. However, Ken Mahar, chief executive officer of Email Broadcast, a west coast design and marketing firm that focuses solely on email campaigns, noted that “emails are 40 times more likely to lead to a customer than social media. The ‘cool kids’ are on social media, but they look at social media for entertainment. People look to emails for information that they can absorb.”

Email Broadcast, and other firms like it, work with individuals and with larger companies to craft marketing campaigns that determine how often email announcements should be sent out, the content and design of the messages, and who on an email address database should receive specific messages. That last area is referred to as “segmented campaigns,” in which recipients are sent different announcements based on what is known about them. MailChimp provides some information to subscribers, but it may take more experienced marketers to turn what one knows about the people on a database into an actionable plan.

“Say, one-third of the people on an email list have bought your work, but two-thirds haven’t,” Mahar questioned. “Why message all those people the same?” He added that other ways of segmenting one’s database may be on the basis of location, gender, or the price levels at which they have made purchases in the past.

The cost of Email Broadcast’s services range from $500 per month to $10,000, but Mahar said that clients “should earn three times what they’re paying us.” The automated tools provided by MailChimp and others like it make it possible for subscribers to save some time. However, he said, email marketing “is really hard to do effectively, and the likelihood of an accomplished artist being a professional designer, copywriter, developer, manager, and strategist is very low. Bottom line, use MailChimp, save a little time, get a little bump in results, hire an expert to use MailChimp for you, save a ton of time, and get big-time results.”

For more information, visit www.mailchimp.com, www.constantcontact.com, https://analytics.google.com, and www.emailbroadcast.com