Escape the Making/Marketing Pendulum Cycle
With Marketing Automation for Artists Available only from FASO
Let me tell you a short story about a fictional artist, let's call her Frida:
Frida hates marketing, so she spends most of her time making her art, until she is literally tripping over her artwork in her studio. Then she realizes, and feels guilty, that she hasn't done any marketing. She knows, at the very least, she should send newsletters to her email list and post something on Instagram. So she decides to switch to "marketing mode" for a while. So she sends a newsletter and a piece sells!
If Frida's lucky, after a lot of trial and error, she finally stumbles on some marketing methods that work. The marketing takes a lot of her time, but at least she's selling her art!
Then, however, she starts running out of art to sell. So, she decides to give herself a break and start painting again! Of course, now her marketing efforts suffer and soon her art sales stall and her inventory builds up again until she is, once again, tripping over her art again.
At this point, if something isn't done, the cycle will keep repeating itself until Frida just can't take it anymore.
This cyclic shift back and forth between painting and marketing is rough!
First, it's exhausting. It makes you feel like you're on a treadmill all the time and can never quite keep up.
Second, it takes you away for long periods from the thing you love the most, creating.
Third, and worst of all, it prevents you from growing your art sales beyond a certain point because you don't keep any sustained marketing going in a way that can build upon itself.
And Frida is one of the lucky ones who happens to stumble on something that works for her!
The Making/Marketing Pendulum
Does the story above sound familiar? Frida has fallen victim to what we, at BoldBrush, call the Making/Marketing Pendulum.
Don't feel bad, though. It's easy to fall into this trap. The good news is that there's a much better way to go about all this. One that we've seen work time and time again for artists just like you.
We get into a comprehensive way out of this trap in our marketing resources available to all artists who host their website with FASO Artist Websites, but today we want to focus on a key strategy that you might have heard of: Marketing Automation.
You've probably heard of marketing automation, it is actually exactly what it sounds like. Imagine if Frida, in the story above, had automated some of her marketing. She would have gained back some of her creative time, and that would help her paint more and avoid burnout.
Marketing automation is tricky, and might seem scammy if you've ever been on the receiving end of badly done automations. I certainly receive enough poorly written emails that just won't stop! But it's possible to be tasteful, and elegant in how you approach automation, if you do it in an art-first way and don't simply copy what works in non-art industries (another common mistake a lot of art gurus make, but I digress).
Marketing Automation for Art Done Right
So how can we approach automating art marketing in a more elegant way?
Consider that, everyone checks their email every day, and most people check their email over 30 times a day. So if you send someone an email, they are likely to see it in their inbox. While it's not the most exciting channel, email is actually experiencing a sort of renaissance in the past couple of years, but, more importantly, email gives you the best return on investment (ROI) of almost all marketing channels. It costs almost nothing to send an email, and you can reach as many people as you want, as many times as you want (within reason, of course).
Email is one of only three online marketing channels that you can own and completely control (the other two are your website/blog and podcasting). Nobody can change the rules of email on you because it's a protocol not a service. Google can change their search algorithm any time they want (and they have). Facebook also continually plays around with their advertising rules. Email is completely under your control.
So if email is so effective, why don't more artists do it? The short answer is, as we saw in Frida's story above, it's a lot of work. You have to come up with a topic, you have to write a copy, you have to add images to make it look nice, you have to proofread everything and you have to check every link to make sure that it works properly. All of this takes time away from what really matters, namely practicing and getting better at your art everyday.
The solution is to set up a way to market your art, via email, automatically.
That's why, a few years ago, we, at FASO Artist Websites, decided to solve this issue for our artists. You can certainly solve it yourself with other platforms by cobbling together two or three different services and using APIs to duplicate what we've done, or you can hire an assistant to do it manually, but I want to share with you what we build for FASO artists to give them more time to create, and to ensure that their marketing never stops so they can get off of the Making/Marketing Pendulum.
What we created is a new marketing automation tool, specifically for artists and we built it right into FASO. It's a tool that automates email marketing for you. It's called the "Artful Alerts" feature, and I'm going to show you how it works.
How FASO's Marketing Automation, Artful Alerts, Works
Every FASO artist website gets the "Get New Art Alerts" link added to the footer.
Here's an example from Jeremy Lipking's site. We've circled the link in red:
When collectors click on this link, FASO captures their email address.
Next, whenever an artist who's enabled Artful Alerts uploads new art, that artist's collectors automatically receive a gorgeous email announcing the new piece(s).
In fact, even if an artist DOES NOT upload new art, the system will pick an older piece approximately every fourteen days so your marketing continues, well, automatically. We call that option "Promote Mode." Since I'm a Clint, I picked this cool painting of Clint Eastwood by Michael Blessing for our example email:
What could be easier? And if our artist ever wants to commit the time to publishing his own newsletter, we make it really easy for him to do that with FASO's built-in newsletter feature.
Best of all, when a FASO Artist does decide to publish their own newsletter, they already have a list of collectors waiting for them who've been receiving Artful Alerts! That's because every time a collector signs up to receive new art alerts on their website, we also ask the collectors to subscribe to the artist's newsletter.
So what happens after we notify your followers that you've uploaded new art?
Results an Artist can Expect
We ask art lovers who receive new art alerts to (if they would like) to provide feedback to the artist. That feedback takes two forms: Likes and Sales Leads.
1. Example of a report an artist gets of all the people who clicked "Like this Artwork" on a particular artwork from the Get New Art Alert email, along with their email address and comments.
This report is aggregated and sent daily as in the following example featuring Poppy Balser's watercolors:
2. Example of a "Purchase Inquiry" (sales lead).
If a user makes a purchase inquiry, it is sent to the artist immediately, along with the user's email address and question, which is usually, "what's the price?" or "Is it available?"
So if you're already a FASO member, the "Get New Art Alerts" feature is already working hard for you in the background to keep your collectors informed of new art you have for sale as soon as it's available. Just keep doing what you normally do and upload new art to FASO as soon as you can. FASO will take it from there.
If you're not currently using FASO, what are you waiting for?
We've already shared with you how We Are In this Together, how we help you with promotion to 65K art lovers when you Launch Your Site, how FASO Protects Your Art from Unsanctioned AI Use, and many more features you won't get anywhere else. We're confident that you'll love your FASO website and all the great marketing tools like the "Artful Alerts" feature.
If you haven’t gotten yourself a FASO website yet, now is the time to do it! We’ve put together the best deal you’re going to see. We don’t put our services on sale very often, but this year, we decided to put together an insanely good deal for the holidays. With the risk of AI taking your art to train their models, and the problems with big tech companies not respecting the content created by artists, now, more than ever, you need to work with a company that is by artists and for artists. So, if you join before December 31st and midnight, here’s the offer…..
2024 FASO Holiday Bundle (70% Savings on Bundle):
Get A Year of FASO Gold Membership for $150!
(Normally $312/year)
You'll also get the following included at no additional charge:
$100 in BoldBrush Ad credits to help launch your site.
$100 Site Review by FASO to make sure your site is ready to launch
A FREE Holiday Preparation for Artists Guide
Full Access to our Marketing calendar, videos, and resourcesd
Access to our Friendly and Fast Support Team.
Automatic protection of your Art from AI bots
Software to Send Newsletters Included
Marketing Automation in the form of Artful Alerts sent to your fans
Access to our Private Art Marketing Center with playbooks, videos and a community to guide you in your marketing.
This offer saves you $362 compared to the normal price of these items.
* Site renews at normal price after the first year
Start a FREE Trial Today to take advantage of this offer!*
*Activate your trial site and become a paid member before December 31st, 2024 at midnight CST to get the special Holiday Bundle pricing!
Not Sure Yet?
If you have questions before signing up for the Free FASO Trial, please send them to clint@faso.com.
Creatively,
Clint Watson
FASO Founder
Creativity Fanatic