How to create an amazing email marketing campaign for your artwork 

Creating an amazing email campaign to promote your artwork can feel like a complicated task if you are unfamiliar with this type of marketing.  

Have no fear though! Your Art Empire will continue to grow if you learn a little more about how to create an effective email marketing campaign with our helpful guide.  

How to create an effective artist email campaign 

Professional email marketing campaigns aren’t usually the finished article the first time that they are created.

You need to test, adapt, test again and keep doing so until you get the maximum response rate from your mailing list.  

This means trialing all of the following elements in order to discover what works best for your artwork email campaigns. 

Testing email subject lines  

Your subject lines are the first thing that a potential customer will see when they receive your email.

If the subject line isn’t interesting to the customer, they are not likely to click on the email and view the contents.

This is why it is important to split test your campaigns with different subject lines and establish which option potential clients engage with the most.  

Good examples of subject lines you could try include:  “Is this of interest to you?”  “Your invitation to X” 

Depending on the data that you have and how well it is populated, you could even include some personalisation using merge tags of the person’s name or surname.

This has been proven to increase open rate, so try and fit it in your subject lines if you can.  

Another more recent development that is worth testing on your artwork email campaigns is the use of emojis.

There is much debate about how effective this is as some audiences react positively whereas others are completely put off by them. However, you will never know unless you try it for yourself! 

Testing email content  

When you have managed to create some effective subject lines for your artwork email campaigns, you will need to focus more on your email content.

To do this effectively, you should ask yourself a number of questions: 

• What is your objective?  
• What does your email need to include?  
• Where can you direct customers to that is likely to result in further engagement with your business?  
• What will your call to actions be? 

The aim of doing this is to try and work out what gets the highest number of clicks to your destination page, so create a couple of different options and test them against each other to see which is most successful. 

Elements to test in your artist email marketing campaigns 

As you can gather, different audiences react to different things and there are a lot of options you can include in your artwork email campaigns to inspire engagement.

To give you a little bit of inspiration for what you could potentially include, here’s a list of some ideas that you can try.  

• Your brand: You want customers to be able to recognise your business, so including a logo at the header of your email or a watermark on any pictures that you include is really handy. Make sure that you keep your branding consistent on all of the emails that you do and soon your audience will start to identify you a lot more easily. 
• Pictures: Including pictures of your greatest artwork in your email campaign is a great way to engage with customers. However, you need to make sure that you choose which images to include tactically and not overload your email. This is because too many pictures increases the file size of your email which can increase load time and also result in your email being caught up in spam filters. There is no point having an amazing email if no one is going to get to see it.  
• Articles: For a slightly more longtail approach, you could create a promotional campaign for your artwork that includes a blog and email combination. This is a great way to inspire engagement, but it does mean that the number of clicks that your potential clients have to make to get to your purchase pages will be higher. If you choose to do this then you need to ensure that there is a clear pathway for clients to follow and that your email and blog work together harmoniously to avoid drop-offs.  

• Promotions and sales: Everyone loves a good discount or something for nothing, so if you’ve got a great offer or promotion then shout about it! Be cautious with the language that you use though. Email platforms are becoming a lot more analytical, meaning that they are more easily able to pick up heavily sales focussed emails and file them away in spam folders. Be genuine, create value and avoid being too much of a salesman. 
• Social links: Social media is a powerful tool at your disposal, so make sure that you include your social page links on every email that you send. If a potential customer isn’t in the purchasing mindset, this does not mean that they will not follow you or like your work. They might just not be in a position to buy yet, so you need to give them the option to stay updated on the latest developments and offers in your business.  
• Reviews: Collecting reviews is fantastic, but using them to grow your business is even better. A lot of people do not trust businesses when they say they are the best at what they do. People need proof from unbiased third parties to really believe that you are what you say you are, so collect them all and use them to your advantage.  

Artwork email platform options 

Now you have learnt how to create an effective email campaign for your artwork, you need to think about which platform you are going to choose to send your emails from.  

There are so many amazing options, each with their own features and price tags.

The best option for you entirely depends on how active you’re going to be with your email promotions and how technical you are as each platform requires a certain level of skill. 

To help you decide, we’ve compiled this list of the top three email platforms that you can try: 

1) MailChimp: This email platform is very simple and easy to use. It also has a range of billing options that can depend on the number of subscribers you have or the number of emails that you want to send.  

Setting up emails is easy due to the drag and drop design features of this platform and MailChimp will generate handy reports for each campaign you send to help you with testing.  

2) Mailer Lite: This is an email platform that you can sign up to for free!

It is very simple and easy to use with a drag and drop style template builder, so you don’t need to know how to use HTML.

It also has the ability to help you build landing pages and automation sequences with ease so that you can create a more diverse range of campaigns for your audience.

3) GetResponse: Advertised as “The world’s easier to use email platform”, GetResponse is great for beginners who haven’t tried email campaigning before.  

Here you can create responsive emails, do A/B split testing and create auto responses for replies to your emails.

It also allows you to send targeted emails to specific segments of your data lists, so you can market your artwork to a much more specific audience.  

We hope that all of this information has helped to paint you a clearer picture of the possibilities when it comes to creating your artwork email campaigns.

We wish you all of the luck in the world in promoting your business and growing your network – Good luck! 

If you want to explore a world of marketing beyond email, you can learn more about different promotional techniques for your artwork here.