20 Ways to Grow Your Email List as an Artist (Online and Off)

Introduction

0:00Coming up on today's edition of the Art Marketing Podcast, 20 ways to grow your email list as an artist, both online and off. And specifically today is all about email. You need to always be capturing email. So let's discuss and shore up your email capture strategy.

Cautionary Tale

0:30Welcome back to another episode of the pod. Fired up to have you with us. Let's start, you guys, let's kick things off with a cautionary tale, which I've been really hot on for the last couple of months, I would say. And, you know, the cautionary tale is really that the mass plus wisdom guided by experience of webinars with my customers and others tells me that you are going to be an artist for the rest of your lives, which means you will still be creating and wanting folks to see that art and ideally buy it for the next 10 to 20 to 30 to 40 to 50 plus years. If AI lives up

1:07to the hype, it might even be a hundred plus years for some of you. And so what we can't allow to happen is for you to reach one of those amazing ages, okay, without an email list, which is attention that you own and communicate with at your leisure, you know, as you desire that can be taken away from you. And as a result of listening to this podcast, though, that will never be the case. So this episode is meant to be a comprehensive audit for you to be able to, you know, ask yourself, how hard am I really

1:42working on capturing emails? Am I doing that daily? Am I doing that weekly? Am I doing that monthly? Then find out where your boat is leaking and shore it up and get it going. So I'm going to start with the online

Website Modalities

1:54modalities. I'm going to move into the offline modalities. I'm going to cover what this sort of looks like when it starts compounding anchored to some experts that I've talked about in episodes previously. And then, and then we can wrap it up. I'm going to start on the website. It all starts with the website. If you've been listening to this podcast this week, you know how important it is that you have a website. It is critical that you have a home base for a number of different reasons. And a primary one of those reasons is it affords you the opportunity for multiple different ways

2:25in which you can capture emails and get emails onto your list. Okay. This is so, so important. And look, we're going to be talking about the basics today. Okay. The basics are the basics. They're not sexy. It's not some shiny object. It's not some special, incredible hack. It's just the things that you need to do all year long. It's so few artists do. And when you do, everything starts compounding. So let me run through some options that the website gives you. Okay. And we'll start with basic and we'll, we'll, we'll get more and we'll kind of just grow as we go. Number one is the footer signup.

2:57Okay. That's the baseline. Every site should have it. Okay. If you don't have this, this is the first thing that you need to do. You know, your site has a footer, the very bottom of the page. You can put in a generic newsletter sign up there. Okay. You can put, get a, get a discount code. You can put some sort of a widget. There's a million different things you can do, but start with the footer. Okay. Number one, basic, simple, all sites have it. The next is the site-wide pop-up. Okay. All sites,

Site-Wide Pop-Ups

3:24you guys use pop-ups. They're very, very important. They just work, right? All sites, all industries. It's just, you know, don't fight proven. Don't fight what's working. This is something that just works. Okay. And the beautiful thing here is the 80, 20 of pop-ups is, do you have one? Do you have one when I land on your website that asks me for my email address, right? Like you're going to get 80% of the way there. And in future episodes, we can potentially talk about the trade craft, i.e. What are you offering? Are you just asking for an email signup?

3:58Are you asking people to get onto your collector list? Are you trying to be like an e-commerce site and do the spin to win, which sadly actually works? You know, we can get into the sweet spots in terms with timing and delay, but it just works and it just converts. Okay. So do the 80, 20 audit. Do you have a site-wide pop-up? If I land on your website, is a box going to pop up and ask me to give you my email address? Okay. Very, very important. That's number two of the website. Number three. Okay. And

Content Upgrades

4:31again, arguing for why you need to have the website, because it gives you the ability, the optionality, if you like, to be able to exercise some of these techniques and these tactics, right? And you can't do it if you don't have a website and if your artwork's on a gallery site or a marketplace, because they control the rules, right? So there's the whole argument of the same. And the third thing with just a website specifically is you can do what the industry likes to call content upgrades, right? And a content upgrade, the easiest way to think about it is just assume a landing page, okay? Where, you know, you can offer something for free that somebody would give

5:09up their email to download. And, you know, these abound in every single solitary industry, but, you know, the easiest, it's like, let's say I'm a coach that teaches meditation and I have my 12-step guide on deep breathing exercises. If you want that, put in your email, I'll send you this PDF, right? So what we need to do, again, proven, works, been working in marketing land for my entire career, these content upgrades, is we just take what's working and we skin it to what we do as artists,

5:40right? I'll give you three examples. You could offer 12 months of phone wallpaper packs, right? You have a landing page, you show off a couple of these, shoehorn your artwork into some creative way where it would display on a cell phone and you can Google, there are little apps that'll just do this for you. You can just give them your image and it'll do all the cropping. Or if you, if you want to be Photoshoppy or you like Canva, whatever you like, then use that. But make 12 of these things,

6:11put them on a landing page, you know, put three or four of them and say, hey, you know, I'll send you 12 beautiful, perfectly formatted, you know, nine by 16 images of yourself out of my art. Done. Okay. Epic upgrade. You could do the collector's list where you make a landing page and it says, join my collector's list. What do I get for being on your collector's list, Patrick? Well, thank you so much for asking. Let me tell you, you get exclusive emails to see my latest work

6:41before the general public and anyone else. Done. Great, great reason. Great reason there. A third example. Okay. That I really actually like is join my birthday club. Okay. This birthday club thing, it just works so well. I haven't talked about it on this podcast and I haven't even advised my customers to do it. And I realized I should, because here's the thing about birthdays. There are birthday people and there are not birthday people. Okay. I am squarely in the knock camp. I don't want anyone to know I had a birthday. I don't want anyone to know that I got a year older. I don't want to be celebrated. I don't want cake. I don't want cookies. I don't even want any plods.

7:15I am someone that does not enjoy a surfeit of attention. Okay. Don't worry about me because I am in the minority and the vast majority love attention on their birthday. They crave attention on their birthday. They seek attention on their birthday. Quick aside, but I used to, I get up really early and it used to be like the easiest way to get coffee was this Rouse supermarket by me. I live in Southern California and we have Rouse and it would open at five and you know, the coffee shops don't open until six. And so I used to go in there every single solitary day. And so it's like

7:48it became family with like a lot of the staff in there. And there was this one gal and she was, I loved my birthday. She dressed up special. Her grin was especially ear to ear. She was always effortless on her birthday and seeking attention and, you know, just flowers and the whole thing. And it's like, that is the avatar that I have, or at least people will do anything for some recognition on their birthday. And so you pick a carrot. It could be free merch on your birthday. It could be a discount coupon, which costs you nothing. It could be a custom birthday card that

8:21you make with your art on it and send it to it. Have them join your birthday club, right? It's a great content upgrade. And you throw that all on a landing page with your art and people, the birthday people will just opt in. It's a great one to put in your footer to join my birthday club. What's the birthday card? You know, and you put a little, you put a little statement for it. So the content upgrades are fantastic. They, they really just work extremely well. And these are three ways where you can open up easy email signups, right? You've got it in your footer. You've got it popping. Okay. Any landing

8:53page that they hit on boom, they hit the pop up and then contemplate what makes sense, the best content upgrade for you. And boom, there are three ways that you are capturing emails. Anytime you are driving traffic to your site, let's move to digital venue number two. And for this one, I'm going to

Social Media Links

9:10call it the socials. It doesn't matter which one they pretty much all afford you the opportunity for a bio link, right? Link and bio on the Instagram, Facebook gives you the opportunity to link to your website. YouTube gives you all your socials plus your website. You can do this with TikTok. You can do this with blue sky. You can do it with threads. You can do it with Pinterest. You can do it with anywhere. Right. And usually, usually what I find is most artists just point it to their website or point it to their other socials. Okay. And I think this is, this is sort of the compounding nature of like,

9:43once you have the website, you unlock the ability to properly leverage a link service. Okay. And what do I mean by link service? At our storefronts, we just build a custom one for our customers. And it's just a landing page and they can put whatever they want. And it basically works just like Linktree. But Linktree is a really popular one. Later's one. There's one called Beacons Stand Store. There's a bunch of them out there. There are free and they're paid options. They abound. I think they're awesome. And they don't get enough praise because essentially the way that it works is, and I'll give you, I'll give you an analogy of like how to think

10:17about it. But the first takeaway with them, and I should mention this is like, given that these links are going to be primarily on your socials, given that the vast majority of social traffic is mobile or, you know, sometimes a hundred percent, like you can assume 80 to 90% of the traffic that are going to be clicking these links in your various bios and social media profiles are going to be on a phone. So you need a landing page here, a link shortening service that is just custom tailored for mobile. Like it's not like, Hey, this thing needs to work on desktop and mobile. It's like, Hey, this

10:49is, this is for mobile first traffic and desktop, all other traffic secondarily. Right. So they're great in that analogy. But you know, the other thing that I, that I think about these, these link trees is like, sometimes I think of them as like an elevator where you're like getting the elevator, you're going to take it to the top floor and that's your destination, but it stops at the fifth floor and the doors open and you have the opportunity to get out. Or it's kind of like, you know, say you're going on a road trip and it's like a three hour drive and you know, you're going to stop an hour and a half in to stretch your legs at a gas station and go into the gas station. And you're kind of

11:19looking forward to that because you're going to get a snack and everything else. It's like a stop before the destination. Right. And you know, if I hit your social profile and I engage with your content and I like what I'm seeing and you, you certainly piqued my interest enough that I want to learn a little bit more, sending them directly into your website is a higher cognitive load. Let's say then sending it into your link shortener service, link tree or beacon or whatever. Right. I think you guys all know what these look like. It's a much less, it's a, it's, it's a, it's a

11:52smaller cognitive load and it is a smaller commitment, a smaller ask. Right. And you sort of like get a, give them a preview. That's even better analogy. It's sort of like a preview rather than sitting down to commit to for the entire movie. Okay. And so when you think about it in that analogy, it, these things actually play like a really, really valuable role, notwithstanding the fact that, you know, you, you start marketing as an artist and maybe it starts out one social media site and then you have three or four or five. Well, that's like watching three or four or five

12:24children, right. Or having to walk three or four or five dogs. That's a lot of poop eggs to take with you. Meaning if you want to change something or if you want to update something, you have to go to one, two, three, four, five different things, log in, remember where the profile is, edit the profile, change the links. That's, that's cumbersome, burdensome and a waste of time, quite frankly. So when you have one of these link tree services and you take that link and you embed it in all five of your social media profiles and maybe some other locations as well, you can put it in emails and such

12:55it, you know, in the third emails, then you only have one central thing to update. That's really convenient. Okay. You have one central little menu where you're updating all the links. And the minute you do that, it's automatically updated on all those other sites. I mean, that's hugely helpful. It helps you move quickly, right? Well, where it compounds with the website is let's assume that you've got a pop-up on your website and you've got a link in the footer and you know, you're doing the iPhone wallpaper pack and you're doing the join my collector list. And maybe you're doing the

13:27birthday club and you're doing take 10% off your first order for first time customers, right? You can have all of those links in the link tree, right? You can link directly to the birthday club thing. You can link directly to your, your iPhone landing page. You can link directly to the 10% off coupon, right? And it's all right there in that simple little menu, you know, it's, it's the appetizer before the meal and I can be busy and I can be on social media and I do not want a huge cognitive load. It's a long day. I just got my kids to bed. I'm sitting there with that glass of red wine. I'm

13:59kidding. I'm like, why? But you're sitting there with that glass of red wine and, and, and talking to your wife and you're just kind of thumb scrolling and I hit something and, and boom, if I'm a birthday person, I'm like, Oh, people celebrate me on my birthday. Maybe they go for the birthday club then, or if they want to be in your collector list, maybe I'll just quickly get on the collector list. Or if it's like, yeah, you know what? I would like my cell phone wall tape directly. Boom. They hit that. Right. And so it's a, it's an easy way to maximize the number of emails that you are capturing on any social visit. Right. And sometimes it's a lot less friction on a mobile phone. You

14:34guys to send them to that, then to send them to your entire website, right? Your entire website has to load a whole bunch of stuff, a whole bunch of infrastructure. Yes. You know, it's going to be mobile formatted in most cases, especially if you're, you know, ours are incredibly beautiful on mobile, but that's still just a higher cognitive load. So you end up getting a higher conversion rate when you have one of these link shortening services. And again, they're, they're about there's paid, they're free. There's some that let you do email capture directly in the app without going out. Do you by all means, whatever works for you, but you should do this.

15:05Okay. It's a, it's a very, very simple way to just pick up emails all year long as you're doing your consistent marketing. So we talked about the website. We talked about the link tree. They all just keep compounding. Okay. So now we are, we are moving from website to the link in the bio. Let's

Messaging and DMs

15:23just say the, the social links, right. To messages in DMS. Okay. Messaging is emerging as a very, very platform. Instagram is all about it and takes it seriously. Facebook takes it very seriously with messenger X.com. It's all about our messages are encrypted. People send a ton of messages that way. They all sort of have their own messaging platform. Okay. And very few people talk about how to actually maximize marketing ROI in these channels. Okay. And so if you are getting, it's

15:56very, very easy to do so. Let me, let me give you this super special, magical, technical, tactical playbook. Okay. Which is so hard to follow. When you get into a conversation with someone, ask for their email, imagine that, ask for their email and shut up. Hey, Patrick, thanks so much. Really appreciate the comments. By the way, you should get on my email list because it's awesome. Can I send you an email at such and such, or, or can I get your email and then shut up? It's that simple, right? Like you don't have to overthink it. It's not super difficult. You just ask, don't overcomplicate it. Don't overthink it when you're in a conversation. Okay.

16:29Yeah. Just ask for the email. Just ask. That's it. You'd be surprised what you can get away with with just ask. You also have the opportunity as these things continue to compound to throw the link tree link in there because almost all these messaging platforms allow for links to be dropped directly and they're clickable, right? Which is awesome because you can't do that on post. So just ask, just ask. That's it. Right. Very, very simple to do that. Very few people do that. But when you get in conversations, just ask, do you know how an email list is built? How's it built Patrick? One email at a time, one email at a time. You only need one email from the right person to turn a

17:05marketing campaign and do a $5,000 sale. It happens all the time, but it all starts with you asking everything that we do digitally is an opportunity to capture an email. Okay. Now I had been covering the basics and I've been very diligent on, you know, trying to do a reset this year with the podcast, trying to go back and cover all of the things while not the latest and greatest and tactical and shiny object in marketing land just are tried and true and they work. So I'm excited about this

17:35episode, but I'm also excited about this episode because once I feel like it's in the can, then we can start moving on to some of the crazy tactical stuff that is the shiny objects, the latest and greatest really working tradecraft. So this affords me the opportunity for the many chat teas. Okay. And I am committing to you guys to do a future episode on many chat. All right. It allows you to essentially put marketing automation into Instagram or Facebook or now TikTok at scale. So for now,

18:09if you're listening to this, just do things manually. I will cover in depth tactically what you can do many chat for a great many of you. It's, I mean, it's an incredible unlock. So we'll get into that in a future episode. Venue number four in the digital capacity, you guys. And this one's really just honorable mention, but if you are someone that is taking your social seriously and you are getting comments, that must mean you're not just machine gun posting your art all day. You are actually posting some cool stuff about you. You're in the comments, ask. Okay. Ask in there too. Thanks so much

18:45for the comment. You should totally get on my email list. Check out my link site in the bio. Check out my link tree in the bio. Check out my link in the bio. Check out my link in my profile. Right. And what's really interesting about comments. Okay. Is it's one to one and it's one to many at the same time. It's the overcook undercook. I love that clip. Anyone gets a reference. Anyway, someone interacts with you. They're like, I love this art. It's amazing. You reply. Thanks so much. You should totally get on my birthday list. Check the link in my bio. Right. You leave that comment and maybe

19:18they click, maybe they don't. Maybe they're like, and they never came back. They just left the one comment and they don't look at their notifications and they're not coming back. But everyone else that sees the posts also sees it and you're in there leaving the comment anyway. So just ask, just ask. It's honorable mention. It's part and parcel of just leveraging this strategy. We're always capturing emails everywhere all the time that you can. Right. Now I didn't mention, you know, when you actually get orders, right. But when you actually get orders, of course, you're going to

19:50get the email address. So that works. And once you have this system in place, you have like, you know, our, our broad base catch all email capture, you've got the things running on the website. You've got this special link tree or Lincoln bio, or I forget what we call our storefront. That's the name, Thornton, our software. A bunch of our customers use it. Anyway, once you have that all going on, you have the optionality of being able to deploy these anywhere else where you get any digital action whatsoever. Right. Somebody else mentioned you, gives you a writeup. You can decide what to

20:21do. Maybe you deploy the birthday thing. Maybe you deploy a 10% off coupon. Maybe you deploy the collector list. Maybe you deploy, you're just your link to the website when you can't control it. Right. So it, it, it all just compounds when you have the strategy going on. And then as you, as you are going about your day and your regular marketing and some things work and some things don't, and some things drive great traffic and some things drive onesies, twosies, and sometimes people just link to you, you don't worry about it because you are taking advantage of every single solitary opportunity you can to get people that are interested in your art to give up that email,

20:54right. To give up that email. And I should mention, you know, as I said on the, on the, on the previous episode, really the trifecta is email address, phone number, snail mail address, right? That's the trifecta of data points that we can have on our buyers, our collectors, and our potential buyers, our leads. So you want to try to be capturing all three of those all the time. But I realize, you know, setting yourself up for, for cell phone capture is, is a little bit harder, a little bit more advanced. Setting yourself up for snail mail

21:24capture is a little bit harder, a little bit more advanced, and you have to send things, but it should just broadly be mentioned. Those are the three things, the trifecta and, or the email address that we want to be capturing all year long in every single solitary online opportunity, online venue that we can, right. So really, really just important to mention that. Those are all the online ways. Okay. Let's just say for the time being, now let's focus on all of the offline venues.

Offline Venues

21:49Okay. The real world venues, the reality venues. Okay. Instead of the virtual world, the real world. And I get this question all the time on, on my webinars and such, and on my live broadcasts, it's like, you know, okay, Patrick, well, you know, how do you help us market? You know, is it just Instagram and social media marketing? Because I know that doesn't work. It's never worked for me. It's not going to work for me. And I'm like, no, it's not just Instagram. It's everything. Okay. I always answer the question the same way. And it's the nuance and

22:23the answer that's so important because platforms, outlets, opportunities, social sites, charity gigs, this, that, and the other, they all come and they all go. They all, they all flow. There's some things that stay permanent, like your website, right? Which you own, it can't be taken away from you. And then there are other things which are utterly, totally, and completely rented. Your social outlets, a one-time gig, you do it at charity, you sponsor your team and you get a link that way. It doesn't matter. To me, it doesn't matter what it is. The key is getting the basics

22:55done, which is strategy where you are attempting to capture emails every single solitary place, right? It doesn't matter if it's online or offline or midair on an airline flight. When you lean over and tell this person that you're an artist and they're like, Oh, what kind of art do you do? And you're like, Hey, give me an email. I'll send you some of it, right? It just always be capturing emails, always be capturing emails. So in the, in the real world, okay, I'm going to give you some techniques and tactics. And the first is really just at any in-person event. And this is like the most classic and, and we can get into it. But I, uh, if you are someone that does in-person,

23:29anything shows and fairs, a co-op gallery, you got into a restaurant, you got into a retail store, you got into some sort of a charity raffle off, whatever it is, there's a basic playbook. And I wrote an episode and a blog post a couple of years ago now called the ultimate guide to shows theirs. I will make sure that that gets linked up in the show notes. Uh, go read that if you've not read that. Right. But all the, all the traditional ways of capturing emails, capturing leads that work for a great many businesses in the offline world work fantastic. Okay. In the real world as well.

24:03And if you're in your booth, these are things like put a clipboard down. Okay. It's paper, a ballpoint pen, you know, a couple of dollars in tools, 150 year old play, join my mailing list, right? Name an email. You can do the fishbowl, drop the business card in there, right? Not everybody has business cards this day. So that doesn't always work as well as it used to, but it still works for some people. Drop your business card in free print drawing at the end of the month, right? You can do the iPad technical POS receipt opt-in point of point of sale opt-in, you know, a number of different

24:38e-commerce sites have this opportunity. We have it as well. It's like, look, just, just here's the iPad, put in your details, get on my email list. I'll send you a sudden such and such, right? You can have a door prize at entry fairs, right? Like enter to win the door prize, right? This is like where giveaways and in person, anything can be leveraged to get on a list to potentially win something or not, or to just get on your list. But the key is, is that you don't let any in-person opportunity go where your artwork is on display, where you can potentially capture an email list.

25:09And each venue has different rules. You know, some shows and fairs let you do the clipboard, but they don't let you do balloons. And here's the print that you can win, winner announced at the end of the show. And some allow the fishbowls and some are going to say, I don't want you capturing emails, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, all these things. You, you, you just comport to whatever the in-person venue is, how you win at this is you think about it ahead of time. And you're like, okay, I'm going to do an in-person such and such. What is going to be the easiest mechanism that I can use to capture emails and get people on my list and ask. It's

25:41as simple as ask, writing it down on your phone, sharing a contact on the phone, having the clipboard, having the fishbowl, cover this a bunch. It just works. Okay. It just works. Let's get some,

QR Codes and New Tech

25:52let's get into some new tech from here. So the new tech from here that I love, and I've talked about on episodes previous, but not enough artists are leveraging it, not enough businesses period, quite frankly, are leveraging it because they think it's hard and you don't realize how easy it is. But I am talking about QR codes. Okay. The little codes with the little bots, the little dots all in some pattern, and you hold your phone up to it with the camera and it automatically scans it and boom, you can send them off. And again, at Art Storefronts, we integrate this into our software. So you don't need a third-party app, but third-party apps absolutely abound that allow you to do this. There's free ones, there's paid ones,

26:25it's no different than the link shortened services or the link tree services that we talked about earlier, right? Later, we can all that. So you can Google and find whatever you want, which one to do this. There's, there's even ones that will incorporate your artwork now, but they work. Okay. These things, these things work. You can set them. They're infinite. They never expire. And thanks to COVID and thanks to restaurants deciding that they don't want to print out their menus or deal with menus anymore, which, which I'm kind of old school, kind of like a menu still. But during COVID, I feel like there's so many restaurants where you're like, you're sitting

26:59down, you're waiting to get service. You haven't gotten service yet. You're like, what am I supposed to be looking at? And it's like, oh, it's on the table. Right. Or if you go to Vegas or you go somewhere like that, and it's just a QR code, or if you're like, you know, a swimming pool at a hotel or whatever, and they're like, scan the thing right there. Right. So pretty much everyone knows how to do this young handle. You hold the camera up to it and click a couple of buttons and you get in there. And so there are so many different ways that you can deploy this. Okay. And really the way to think about it is if there's going to be someone in the real world that is going to potentially see

27:31this and have their phone on them, it's a great place to try it. It's a great place to try it. So it works on the back of any printed material whatsoever. Right. And that could be posters. That could be business cards. That could be a postcard you send out. That could be a placard talking about your art in the doctor's office, in a cafe, at a, at a, at a booth, at a local Thayer show on the side of your booth at a local Thayer show. And you can put these things

28:03anywhere. Okay. You can put them anywhere and you can direct that traffic to any of the places in which you have your email capture, or you can direct it directly into an email signup box. There's just so many different ways to do this. And you know, so many creative ways to leverage it. And you, one of the ones that, that never gets mentioned that I think is absolutely awesome. And I love magnets on your car, not kidding. Magnets on my car, magnets on any car, quite frankly. Okay. Put it on your significant other's car because he drives around all day long.

28:33And it's very simple. It's like 30 to $45 for a pair of 12 by 18 door magnets. They're 30 mil, 30 mils thick. Okay. They just stick right onto your car and you can just drive around and see what happens, right? You could put it on someone else's car and tell them you'll pay them $5 a day if they're driving around all day long. And it's simple. You put your art on it. You put a QR code on it and you see what happens, right? Like if that car is sticking and stuck in traffic all day long, and I'm sitting in my car and I'm just inching along in the metal

29:06coffin on the 405 South. I live in Southern California where traffic is an absolute disaster, especially, you know, give me something to do. Give my passengers in the car, something to do. Show something beautiful about the artwork, make a provocative statement. Want to look at some art while you're stuck in traffic? Scan the code, right? And you can direct that link to absolutely anywhere. So I think, I think the, the cars are just absolutely hilarious use case, right? A hilarious use case. You could be in your window, right? If you live on a high traffic street,

29:37you could put two giant pieces of your art, one on an easel and one with a QR code and put it out on your driveway, right? There's like just so many different ways to get creative with it. And, you know, vendors, if you want to look into this sticker mule, I know, does it, this different does it magnets.com does it. There's something called banner buzz that does it. So very inexpensive, totally reusable. Okay. And, and totally a valid way to be capturing. And everyone has different circumstances. Some people live in Alaska. Okay. And you're not going to see a lot of foot traffic. You don't even see a lot of people, probably not the best use case for you,

30:11in case you do, unless you do direct mail, but for anyone that's in any high traffic area, any urban area, any creative, anything, it just works fantastically well. And there's going to be a lot of times where, you know, you get your artwork somewhere. They don't necessarily want you putting a clipboard out there, but the QR code just sort of solves for it. So it's just absolutely a great, great way to go with it. And, you know, it really unlocks anytime someone would do direct mail. And if you listen to this podcast for any period of time, you know, I've done an entire

30:41episode on direct mail. I think direct mail is fantastic. And I think even if it's not direct mail and you could find a kid on rollerblades, I think rollerblades is the ultimate way to do it. In fact, why are more people on rollerblades not doing this? And like, they need to, because I see these people, you know, and they, they pay minimum wage and they get these like outfits kind of like, it looks like like newsboys used to wear, you know, like a giant pouch in front and pouch and back. And they pay these people just to walk to every door, like get a kid to do it on rollerblades.

31:13You know how many houses they could do? You don't even have to pay for postage, but you can get like literally a thousand postcards. There's, you know, this to print is famous for this. There's another site, excuse me, called got print and they do it too. And I think it's like 40 cents a piece. If you do a thousand, which is a really, really good deal. And so that's like $400 and you could potentially have your art in a thousand mailboxes, right? Like think about where you live, think about where the high-end neighborhood and homes are, right? Or better still, where a brand

31:49new community just got built because you know, there's going to be a bunch of people moving in or had just moved in and are looking to decorate their houses. Find a kid on Craigslist that's willing to do, you know, 10 cents a house or whatever. You know, somebody that moonlights and plays roller hockey and spend the $400 and do it. Not only will you probably ROI on the entire marketing effort, but with the QR codes on those postcards, you're probably, you're probably going to get a ton of emails and a couple of sales every single solitary time you do that. Why doesn't anyone do

32:22that? That's a fantastic marketing technique, right? You know, it also works. I'm not opposed to guerrilla marketing tactics. Okay. And before you ask, I'm talking about guerrilla, you know, camo fatigues, black stripes under their eyes, guerrilla marketing. And, you know, I used to give this advice all the time to the folks that are in like the pet niche, right? And the folks that are in the pet niche, this is definitely a little bit guerrilla because it requires you putting stickers on things, but you know what? I'm not going to, I'm not here to weigh morally on the ethics of all of

32:57that, but I'm in the pet niche. I do pet portraits. I'm going to every single solitary dog park I can find, going to get a sticker with a QR code and jam it onto the little fruit poop bag stations, right? Like a QR code. If you're doing pet portraits on every single solitary dog poop bag dispenser at every dog park in your whole town, how many people are going to scan that? How many people are going to scan that and get on your list, right? So the QR codes really open up a way to think creatively

33:29about how you could capture emails in the real world. And it works so many different ways and it's inexpensive to leverage. And so why aren't you doing that, right? Why aren't you doing that? And I use that whole list, okay, to illustrate how many different ways that you can potentially be creatively captured in emails. And really it's just about nailing your digital foot, print, thinking through every scenario and getting creative with what you're doing in the real world. And then telling yourself to always have the temerity to ask in any in-person face-to-face,

34:04just get the email address. Because the email address means you're still in the game, right? And, you know, it's like, I love, I love the analogy. I love the analogy. I always think of like, I don't know, I always think of Goodwill hunting when I think of this, because it's like, you know what, he's supposed to go to the, the, the Robin Williams, he's supposed to go to the World Series game and he meets his future wife in a bar, gets her number and sits down and talks with her, slides the ticket over. But it's like, think about the, the, the, the future love of your life that you met somewhere, right? And you have this great interaction and you caught each

34:34other's eye and it was amazing. And then they're about to walk off and you're about to walk off wherever you were. Maybe it's inside of a coffee shop, right? Just ask, ask. The worst that can happen is they say no, right? But just ask like, Hey, Oh, thanks. Yeah. I am an artist. Oh, you know what? You should get on my email list. Let me get, let me get your email and then just shut up and see what happens. If you can just train yourself to do that, the sheer number of interactions that you end up having and the sheer number of conversations that you have, okay, where you're actually being real

35:05because you're not just going art, art, like everyone does in the socials. Like just ask, you guys just ask if you can just train yourself to do this and then think about how things compound. Okay. Things will compound so quickly. Nobody does this. If you start doing this, this is how you go from hobbyist. This is how you go from talented artist making amazing art. That's a hobbyist or talented photographer. It's taking amazing pictures, but hobbyist into aforementioned talented artist, aforementioned talented photographer that is running an art or a photography business.

35:39And if you think back a couple of episodes, who did I feature? I featured Weiland and I featured great mail. Okay. Stop the podcast, go to their websites and go opt into their email list. See if either of them have a pop-up, by the way, see if they've got an offer in the Twitter, see if they've got custom landing pages, spoiler alert. Of course they do. They have links in their bios. They have all the things that I'm talking about. And then some, but go get on their email list because I want you to see what these people email. And I want to see, I want you to see the frequency of how they email. Yeah. And you know, again, all of us have studied the masters of our craft. Why have we not studied

36:14the masters of business? It's such a reaffirming thing when you do it. You're like, oh, I see. So there are these basic things, the biggest art sellers in the world, which deep down in my heart of hearts, even if I don't get to their level, I want some modicum of that success. I want to say that I'm selling on a regular basis and just go and get on their list. Okay. But let's just do some compounding math. Right. And let's say you listen to me in the earlier episodes. And instead of just

Compounding Math and Email List Growth

36:44having an artwork in your lineup, you now have your pricing and lineup sorted. You have prices that start at 25 or 35 or 45 or 50, and you go all the way up to like $5,000, let's say. Okay. And let's just say for the sake of this compounding exercise that your AOV, which means your average order value is $90, which is not atypical for an art business that has a huge lineup, right? Because you get a bunch of people buying a ton of stuff at the lower end of the range, you get way less people buying a ton of stuff at the top end of the range. And then you get some

37:17people in between, you know, prints and limited editions and bigger prints and cheap originals, but mostly merge and not wall art stuff, right? So your average order value is $90. And let's say that you send two emails a month, which is light, but two emails a month with offers in them, right? Buy this, buy that, special on this, BOGO, whatever it is. Okay. Let's, let's just do the math, right? And let's say that you bolted in as much of what I just advocated you do as possible. And for instance, you know, you're getting 20 emails a month in your website footer.

37:52And you do one art there per quarter and you get 50 emails each. So that's 17 a month. You put the QR code on the side of your car and that's giving you 10 emails a month. And, you know, you have a studio where you do studio visits or co-ops and that's giving you five emails a month. And you're doing Instagram DMs, getting people on the birthday list, and that's four emails a month. And you decided to do a direct email postcard because you're like, I want to do that. The kid on Goldblades just did it. And that's giving you five emails a month,

38:23right? So let's just say that you are now capturing 600 emails a year, right? 600 net new email addresses per year, depending on where your, your email list started. Okay. All right. I'm doing the math really quickly in my head. Bear with me. So your AOV is now 90 bucks. Okay. You have a lineup. You've got 600 emails on your list. Usually what's going to happen is 1.5% of your list. If you're emailing two offers a month is going to buy at that $90 AOV. Okay. Let's say you start year

38:59one with 200 emails on your list. Yeah. End with 800. So on average, you're emailing 500 people. That's $8,100 a year. Okay. In revenue from that list. So you started the year with 200 emails. You ended it with 800. The average was 500. You emailed it two times a month with offers at an AOV of $90. That's $8,100 a year from that list. You don't have to have a big list to start bringing in money. Year two, you're going to end the list. Let's say with 1600 emails and the average you've

39:35been emailing all year is 1200 emails. That's $19,400 a year at that $90 AOV. Year five, you're going to end with 6,500 emails on your list. Okay. That's $89,000 a year at an AOV of $90. Year 10. Okay. You're going to have 16,000 emails on your list. That's going to be $226,800 a year at an average AOV of $90. I want to do year 10. Year 10 is between 800K and 1 million. Okay. That's, that's

40:08the trajectory. That's the business. That is how much money you can make as an artist that if you work on capturing emails all year long, that is what the business looks like. And those are, those are relatively conservative estimates. 1.5% of your list buys a month at a $90 average order value. So you see like when we, when we cover these basics and we break down like the fundamentals of this business, you see how all of these things compound on top of one another, right? They all just start compounding. You've got the website, right? You're doing the basics on the

40:43website, everything that we've talked about. You're capturing emails everywhere that you can. You're marketing regularly and consistently. You've got your lineup and range of pricing because you've unlocked POD. Then it really just becomes a game of pressure over time and being consistent. That's it. And the maths compound so quickly. If you do this, they compound so quickly, but you have to have all the pieces of the puzzle in place for it all to work, right? So keep in mind

41:13with emailing you guys, you don't own your followers. You don't own your social site. You own your website and you own your list. All roads lead to email where we are in 2026. This was true basically since the advent of the email up till today, right? Because before that we have phone numbers and snail mail and the basics are just the basics for a reason, not sexy. Okay. Not particularly exciting, although fun. They just need to be done consistently. That's it. And when you bolt a number

41:45of these different things, as you audit what you are doing and what you currently have in your business, don't get overwhelmed. Just make the list. Start adding them one at a time, right? Start adding them one at a time. Because when you have that, the optionality is there. You have multiple ways to win, right? And you're just going to keep doing you. You're going to keep behaving like the artist that you are in both the online world and the offline world, except you're always going to be asking for the email. Just ask and then shut up. The majority of the time, these people will say yes.

42:19So always be gathering emails and always contemplate leaving me a five-star review and or comment. If you're getting value out of these episodes, I have really been enjoying your feedback. And as always, thanks for listening and have a great day.