Multiple Price Points for Your Art

Why you need several price ranges of art to offer your collectors

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Today’s newsletter is brought to you by BoldBrush!

BoldBrush has three free live events this week: 

Tonight, 4/19, a class with Mario Robinson
(Focusing on underpainting and understanding chroma) 

Tomorrow, 4/20, 5 Steps To A Successful Studio Sale 
(We used this method collaborating with one artist and they made 65K in one month) 

Thursday, 4/21, How to Grow On Instagram 
(Focusing on Instagram as a business tool; you will learn the exact method we used to organically grow our own account by over 40K followers in just one year) 

All webinars are at 6pm est.

The recording of Mario’s class will be sent out with next week’s schedule 

You can attend any or all of them by clicking the button below:

If you have any trouble, here’s the direct Zoom URL:
https://zoom.us/j/98623996745?pwd=YlpBS3hqTHJqYmZmWGRMbWx2eGY1UT09

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Multiple Price Points for Your Art

Original art is, most of the time, necessarily, expensive. 

And that’s OK. You have to charge what you need to charge to be profitable.  But in this age of online marketing, it will greatly increase your marketing and sales efforts if you offer works at multiple price points.  You should strive to have something to sell in three main categories: inexpensive, mid-range, and expensive.

This might look like the following:

$100 - $500:   small field studies, sketches and demos

$500- $2,000: small to medium studio pieces

$2,000 - $5,000   medium to large masterpieces

Or maybe you can’t afford to go that low with your small originals. You could do something more like the following:

$100 - $500:   Print on Demand offerings*

$500 - $2,000   Limited edition prints and small sketches

$2,000+            Originals

As you become better known, and your art becomes more sought after, you can adjust the price points and even add higher price points.

Having multiple price points is important for you to maximize your sales, achieve sovereignty as an artist and, importantly, to have an entry point for people to get started with your work.  You can adjust the idea to your own unique situation but think things through so that you can offer something at each price point.

The most important price point is the inexpensive one ($100-$500 range in our example).

This is the price point with the least resistance.  It serves as an entry point for new collectors and it serves as impulse buys for past collectors.  You can sell $100-$500 pieces off social media fairly easily.  You’ll often have people DM you and purchase right from your social media post.  Send them a payment link and your sale is completed. (Note - social media platforms sometimes don’t like it when you include price information in your captions and, if you do so, some platforms will reduce the reach of that post. A better way to include price info with your post is to post a video of the art work where you narrate a voice-over track that explains a bit about the piece and you can, in your audio, give the price and payment instructions.)

If you develop “1,000 true fans” (and you’ll have more than 1,000 followers on social media if you follow the ideas in The Sovereign Artist), you could easily sell ten pieces a month in this lowest price range.  That alone would be $1,000 - $5,000 a month.

This multiple price point strategy is one reason, in the Sovereign Artist Era, you are better positioned than an art gallery to build a collector base and sell more of your art work.  Galleries aren’t generally interested in the art works that fall in the inexpensive price point.  They aren’t going to spend time marketing your open edition prints or small sketches.  They can’t afford to.  

But collectors love those inexpensive pieces.  Quick example: I commissioned a portrait of my wife a few years ago, and, as part of the process, the artist did four small sketches of her in different poses to help us visualize the different directions he could go with the final portrait.  And while I love the finished painting, in many ways, I enjoy the small sketches even more.  They hang next to my desk and I enjoy them every day.  

This strategy of “luring” fans in with small, inexpensive pieces and then, over time, helping them “graduate” to your more expensive works, is the best strategy to build your collector list.  And, ironically, it’s not the strategy art galleries use!  And that’s why, if you follow this process, you can sell more art than any gallery is likely to ever sell for you.

Clintavo

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Speaking of offering lower priced pieces on social media to move people from your social media following to your email list, and then ultimately to purchase, you may wonder how people extend the reach of their social media posts, how do you increase your chances of going “viral”?

We were asked that in our members forum and, here’s an excerpt from one of our members-only newsletters. One of the “secrets” to social media that most people don’t know, or don’t do is working together with other artists and colleagues. How do you think we grew BoldBrush from 19K to over 60K followers in just over a year?

Here’s the excerpt:

Connect with Promotion Swaps Ask six of your closest artist colleagues to do a promotion swap with you. (We let you know in the first article you’d need to line up six colleagues to work with) Here’s how that works: You post one of your favorite pieces of each of theirs to your Instagram stories and, in return, you ask them to do the same for you. The reason is two-fold: they will have followers you don’t have and visa-versa, so just by doing the promotion swap, you will get your work in front of new potential collectors, and attract new followers. This is especially effective if you followed step one (follow accounts in your niche) and these six artists are in or near your niche. This method is one of the best ways to get your work out there and seen by as many people as possible. As a tangent: It’s mind boggling to us that artists don’t collaborate and cross-promote more often, especially in a world with fewer and fewer art galleries.

If you’re not already a paying club member, consider joining now for less than $1.50/week: