I hear it all the time: “It’s was just so easy to set up!”
A favorite artist and friend of mine just reached out to get help with marketing. She had just bought the “Artsy Shark Success Guide to Email Marketing for Artists“. Great. She’s on the path to success!
Then, I viewed her website and my heart sunk. I was saddened to see that she had her work on a third-party site. I won’t name it, but it’s one of those “artist” sites where they give you access to pre-set templates to build out your own pages under their server.
She has her own domain name. So it looks like it’s her own site. But it’s not her’s and unfortunately using this kind of site creates many disadvantages. It doesn’t allow for control of her messaging. And the worse part of those kinds of sites: they are in it to make sales of any of the work under their server first and your site is a second priority.
This becomes obvious when you click on the link to join the artist’s email list. It will not give the artist control over the signup page. And, in this case – and in many other examples I have seen – the host site will super-impose the “opportunity” to join their umbrella organization – the third-party’s site owner’s master list.
Here’s a typical sequence:
And this is the beginning of the issues. You are not even gathering the person’s first name. This is against all best practices. It’s very important to your success to have that first name going forward. But it gets worse.
After entering my email, I get the landing page you see below. It puts the artist’s needs on the back-burner and emphasizes the hosting site owner’s agenda. The third-party who is running the show is setting the rules YOU must follow.
NOTE: The settings below are checked by default. To add insult to injury, they imply that you, the artist, is recommending your client signs up for these other emails.
Seriously? Do you want other artists images sent to someone you just enticed to join your list? This particular company will very aggressively market the entire site to your clients with daily emails. They will now send images of YOUR competitors art into your client’s inbox. And YOU will appear to be in complete compliance.
Can you tell this annoys me to no end?
It’s such a big deal and so important that you grow your list. It’s a big deal because you want people to eventually get to that head and heart space and level of a relationship with you and your art where they KNOW, LIKE, and TRUST you. Yet here you are; advocating that they sign up to get daily emails from someone other than you.
You are virtually creating a channel of communication they might not want, and that throws you under the bus… and…well…. all I can say is, please rethink your strategy! Just looking like you advocate for these other emails may make some people feel uncomfortable about you. It’s so corporate/slick feeling. Really the opposite of what most artists should be projecting.
And on top of that you are paying a monthly fee for most of these sites. The price is roughly the same or more than what you would pay to have a privately owned, individually influenced and personally operated site.
You work hard to get a visitor in front of your art
I am advocating that your hard work should send someone to your own website that you totally control. A website where you call the shots and where you collect email subscribers under your own terms using professional tools that you can’t get from these “baked-in” one-size-fits-all email systems that won’t even collect the first name.
Can you get around the system? Yes. I know from another client that some of the third party sites have the ability to be customized, but the amount of knowledge you would need to get out from underneath their default “built-in” email marketing system is formidable.
And frankly, you should want to have as much control as possible. You certainly don’t want to have your clients see marketing emails from a source you have no influence over. Nor should you grant permission for them to market to your clients and to use whatever messaging or designs they decide to use. It would be like having someone in your studio or at an art event representing you and finding out they were falling down drunk or walking all your interested buyers over to another artist’s work.
The Golden Triangle of Sales Success works when you are in control of each of the parts.
If you need a reminder, here’s the link to my article all about my “Golden Triangle of Sales Success“. When you can control the entire look and feel of your website, the entire look and feel of your emails and have all the necessary tools to measure and track your email activities and website traffic, you can control your destiny. Add to that a professional shopping cart (many options for this!) and you have closed the loop.
This is not hard, but it’s not always easy. However, using something that is theoretically “easy” – like a pre-set website template “just for artists” with a built-in email system, is simply not in your best long-term interests. It’s just as easy to use some of the terrific website builders that are available today and that you own and control.
Surprisingly, many artists don’t realize that they are using a “third party” site. Or if they do, they don’t realize how being on such sites can hurt their ability to control their own marketing messages.
If you are not sure if you have a “third-party” site, contact me for further one-on-one clarifications. Please include your website link in your email to me.
To be very clear: I have no agenda. I have no financial end-game here to get you to sign up for something that will get me a token fee. In fact, I am fully booked with website projects and email clients at this time. I plain and simply want all artists and any small businesses to be successful.
I want you to work smarter, not harder and use the right tools. I want you to control your financial destiny! Contact me!
Mckenna – how right you are! I am in the process of moving my website from a third party website such as the one you outlined here to a website building company.
Yes, it is much better – and more empowering to be in control of every part of my website. I guess the third party art websites have their place (when I started out about 8 yrs ago they were pretty much the only game in town) but times have changed and there are many terrific and EASY to use website building companies around now (one reason I changed was the third party website was cumbersome and very clunky to use).
In addition to the everything you mentioned in your post Mckenna- the biggest reason I decided to change was that I had no control over SEO of my website. This is crucial to people finding your site! Third party websites say they have it covered for you – but how can they? Every artist’s work and target clientele are different – with different ways that need to be used to attract your particular customers. It is impossible that third party websites have the ability to do for you in all of your uniqueness.
Take it from me – move your website to one of the website building companies – you won’t regret it.
I am elated to see you have left the “cookie cutter” site and now are in control of your SEO and message, Fiona! BIG hugs. You are going to rock online sales as this new chapter gets written. Congrats.
I know it’s a big change and takes a lot of work, but every day you stayed with the other site was a lost opportunity. And now that there are site building companies like Wix and Weebly which are drag and drop simple to use (and recommended by Google for SEO effectiveness) there is no reason not to make the move!
Please let me know when your site is completed and I will be happy to share it and your journey with my community.
It is quite easy for potential email recipients to opt out of all but the top option. That way, they will only receive emails from the artist they are interested in.
Well, of course, that is true. However, there is a distinct “invitation” from the artist – whether they want to be inviting these other email lists or not!
And quite frankly, people are zipping through pages. They may not even know they just signed up. AGAIN: why not have complete control over every bit of your marketing AND messaging to YOUR clients that you work hard to get to a website.
AND… the average person, may not realize that they are going to get information from the third party site owner. That reflects poorly when they get an email from someone they didn’t even know was “behind” the sign-up. It has the potential to make them feel USED by you to get this other COMPANY’s message in their inbox.
It’s just not good marketing, Deborah. It’s not allowing you to control your personality or the look and feel of your artistic presence to your clients at a VERY critical junction – gathering their private information.
It’s not YOUR site – it’s not the way to begin your journey with a possible collector.
Everything we do is about improving artists careers and marketing by creating connections between artists, collectors, art marketing professionals and galleries. We have the best interests of artists at heart, and have for over 16 years.
The automated systems we have created have benefited many artists and, frankly, do more to help artists market their art than any other website options that we are aware of. Just building a website doesn’t help sell art and, while artists must ultimately take charge of their own marketing, we have built many systems that can assist and accelerate those efforts. As a small example, we promote via email to over 25,000 subscribers, every new artist who sets up a site with us. I’m not aware of any other website host that actively promotes their artists in that way. That’s because we are an art company that achieves it’s goals through technology, not, as many of the big website builders, a technology company that happens to target artists (and restaurants, and lawyers, & accountants etc.) We are all art, all the time run by a group of artists and art fanatics.
Speaking of individual features, people should be aware that all these options can be enabled or disabled by the artist. All of our artists do have the ability to exercise complete control over the personality of their site and their marketing and the connections we have built also allow them to enjoy marketing automation in many ways that are otherwise impossible. As a quick example, all FASO artists who teach workshops automatically get their workshops marketed to over 55,000 subscribers of our newsletters.
Our mission is to inspire the world’s artists, collectors and art lovers by connecting them with each other and with great art. It saddens me to see some of our efforts being characterized as throwing people under the bus.
That’s seriously not an image we want and, I’d love to talk with you sometime and get further feedback and explore ways we might improve and ways that we might mutually support our missions of helping artists live their dreams.
Thank you for allowing me to comment.
Clint Watson
BoldBrush/FASO Founder and Art Fanatic
Happy to have your comments here, Clint. I did not mention your site, but if your members are not in complete control of their email messaging, then I stand behind my article – 100%. If they cannot Segment, Tag, gather their subscriber’s first names or do any of the other best practices in the email marketing industry, then that would be a place to consider improvements. And what about landing pages? I didn’t even touch on that important marketing tool.
Bottom line: if members cannot control the type of ACCESS that the “mother ship” has to their collectors, then that too is a concern. The fact that someone can send messages to my subscriber and I have no control over the content or messaging that my subscriber will see… Well, I see that as a problem rather than a benefit. Classes or art.
I am first to admit: I don’t know what your organization does or does not do, nor how your users can control their email marketing, so there may be systems in place that allow the artists to control their marketing. However, they are potentially using a turn-key operation to avoid having to “do” some of the stuff – email marketing included.
One suggestion off the top-of-my-head might be that you give them access to an online course specifically designed to help artists with email marketing. I am working on one right now with Carolyn Edlund and it should be released in a few months. Maybe we could work out some kind of offer to your members?
As you surely can tell, I share your passion to see artists live their dreams. I take it one step further: I want to find homes for art. When art is collected, we move closer to a world where minds and hearts find the universal messaging from the artistic “soul” in each of us. The more art that finds homes, the better.
This entire site is devoted to that principle. Devotees of mine who use my systems see real income with email marketing that is done right. Happy to discuss what “right” is at any time.
We started as a website company and later added email marketing. You’re asking about features that are typically what an ESP provides, where we are primarily a site builder. Our members are in complete control of their email messaging. We have some automation features which WE think are additive and help the artists (and most agree) but they are optional. We have a built-in email marketing system called “ArtfulMail”, which is under complete control of the artist. It’s kind of an art focused Mailchimp competitor. As for segmenting, our suggestion for artists who need that is to use our easy-to-use Mailchimp integration. However, we HAVE built segmenting into ArtfulMail for our own use and our roadmap has us rolling that out to our users this year. In fact we want to build in a number of art-related automatic segments they can use in addition to user defined segments. The reason we build automation into our product is that no matter how many times we, you, Carolyn, ArtBizCoach, Cory, etc tell artists how important email marketing is….a huge percentage just don’t do it. So we built some features that DO IT FOR THEM. No, it’s not ideal. Yes, it’s better if the artist actually does the email marketing themselves (and we encourage them to). But IT’S BETTER THAN NOTHING. And it helps build their newsletter lists even when they’re not using it….which helps them when they ARE ready to start their own marketing campaigns. As for landing pages, we don’t currently offer a specific “landing page” feature, although FASO allows artists to add unlimited pages to their websites, so any page on their site could be used as a landing page. I am open to adding a disconnected landing page feature though as we build out ArtfulMail. We do want to give them access to an email marketing course, in fact, we are working on our own. We’ve provided that information over the years via our newsletter and blog, FineArtViews and in our FASO member newsletters, but we are now organizing it into a course. We’d love for that course to be free for our members. Oddly, I just asked Carolyn if we could offer her email course (which I see now that you assisted with) and she said y’all were working on updating it. I’d love to offer that course to our members and our FineArtViews subscribers. I agree we share a passion, I don’t agree you take it one step further – we also want to see the art find homes. The more art that finds homes, the better, absolutely yes. As former gallery owner, I couldn’t agree more. BoldBrush’s first core value is “Art Transforms Lives” and getting artwork into people’s homes is a huge part of what we mean by that. Why don’t you email me (can you see my email from my comment?) and we’ll set up a time to talk.
SO MANY moving parts to being a business (and an artist, too!) “Art Transforms Lives” – nice…
I will email you. Thanks for your devotion to the artists, Clint! And… yes: Artists have been told by all the top marketers – SEND emails. But they don’t. Maybe with this last FaceBook change, they will finally be motivated.