Even though social media gets a lot of attention these days and people love to talk about what is new and what is next I believe good old fashioned email is the best way to keep in touch with your collectors and your fans.

AN EMAIL LIST IS TANGIBLE

Let’s look at two lists, a Facebook fan page list and an email list.

You decide to focus all of your attention on Facebook and build up your fans on there. Over time you get 1000 people to click your “like” button. You can now communicate with 1000 people via Facebook. Yeah! Great way to use the power of social media to promote you and your artwork.

Another artist you know decides to focus on building up an email list in order to keep in touch with folks who have shown interest in her work. Over time she build up a list of 1000 email subscribers and can now send messages directly to her fan’s in-box.

Who has the more valuable list?

You guessed it right, the email list.

Why is that?

There are many reasons. First and foremost the email list is an actual tangible list that you can download and keep on a spreadsheet and move to other email services if you need to. There is no way to do that with the fans of your Facebook page.

Email is also more valuable because anyone who connects to the internet has an email account. It is the very basic reason people use the internet. I know people who do zip on the web except check their email once a week or so. Despite Facebook’s high user number email’s use will always be higher.

And email will still be around long after Facebook is gone.

Email the right way

I could keep going but hopefully you get my point and have decided that you are going to work on building your email list. To do that you are going to need an email service. Plugging a bunch of email addresses into your Gmail’s “To:” and “CC:” field is the wrong way to use your list. Don’t do it!

Sign up for Mailchimp and set up a legitimate professional email list system. The people on your list will thank you for it. Mailchimp is FREE so you have no excuse. There are other such email services such as Constant Contact, aWeber, and iContact, but Mailchimp is the only one I know of that is free to use.

Okay well it is free up until you reach 1000 subscribers on your list and or you send out over 6,000 total emails a month. That is a great deal. They don’t even ask for a credit card on the free plan. Once you are over 1000 names on your list hopefully you are in a place where you can afford the $30 a month for the service.

Having a service like Mailchimp is a great way to manage your email list. It keeps it clean by weeding out old email addresses, it lets you know how many people opened the email and what they clicked on. It also keep you in compliance with the CAN-SPAM Act.

So there you have it! Free internet tool #1 Mailchimp.

If you have any questions about Mailchimp ask them. If you have any questions about email marketing ask me or better yet ask in the comments.

You can also download this free email marketing guide offered by Mailchimp.

Mailchimp Email Marketing and List Manager is a post from: Art Palaver The Artist Marketing Resource.

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But I know many artists who use WordPress never get around to activating Akismet because they get confused when it asks for a WordPress.com API key.

What is a WordPress.com API key and how do I get one?

Basically the API key allows your blog access to Akismet’s service to check if the comments appear to be spam or not. There are two simple ways to get your key. You can go to WordPress.com and sign up for a username only account or you can go directly to Akismet’s site and have them email you a key.

Does not really matter which route you take, they are both very simple. But I highly recommend that you do take this step of getting that Akismet plugin activated. It will save you a lot of time by weeding out the real comments from the ugly comments.

WordPress For Artists | Stopping Spam Comments On Your Art Blog is a post from: Art Palaver The Artist Marketing Resource.

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Yes I said illegal. You see when you send out an email like that 9 out of 10 times it does not conform to the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. The biggest reason for non compliance is there is no easy way to opt out of the emailings. To comply with the CAN-SPAM act the professional artist will turn to an email service to handle their mass mailings.

There are a few to choose from but only 1 that I know of that lets you run a list of under 500 addresses for free, that service is MailChimp. I’ve been using MailChimp for six months now and I highly recommend it to any artist looking to have an easy to use professional email service.

That’s really all I got for you today. If you’ve been thinking about using email to market your work start with MailChimp.

Cost Effective Email Marketing For Artists is a post from: Art Palaver The Artist Marketing Resource.

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