Email marketing for artists! How to start and build an email list (MailChimp tutorial)

we should definitely own our own platforms and our audiences my email list has been the number one driver of sales get people on your email list give them a way to stay in touch with you have an email list okay so how do you actually do this email thing then hi i'm louise i am an artist and a course creator and an online entrepreneur and that means that i'm entirely dependent on other people buying my stuff on a regular basis whether that be paintings or prints or art courses and classes in the past where i've mostly been a writer and a freelancer i've also sold services and physical products and digital downloads and ebooks and i've primarily done it via email the introvert way i've mentioned email lists and email marketing a few times in my other videos like in my video about marketing without instagram in that one i talk about the many downsides of relying too much on social media and why a website and an email list are crucial components to have whether or not we use platforms like instagram i recommend watching that video if you haven't already i'll link that in the description but just to recap you should be using email marketing as an artist because number one you need to own your audience and not having it held hostage by some other platform where you can't reach them in a reliable way number two you want to be able to build a more personal relationship with your ideal clients and not just share a nice photo or a 15 second video amidst the chaos that is their instagram feed number three you want more control over the way your art is shown and talked about and more space to communicate without distractions email is the only way that i know of where we can do all of these things email is simple and straightforward and very flexible and it's frequently reported as the number one driver of sales for most entrepreneurs and creative business owners but it all depends on how you do it of course there are also many ways to fail at email so let's start by talking about what good email marketing looks like and how to do it and then after that i will show you how to actually set up your email list and start gathering subscribers and sending emails you have most likely been subjected to some really shitty email marketing we all have a lot of companies and entrepreneurs and content creators do email in ways that are very dissatisfactory and irritating and even illegal in some ways they email us without asking for our consent they email us so infrequently that we have forgotten who they are and so we feel like we're being marketed to without permission they email us way too often driving us insane they email us without a way to unsubscribe to their emails or they email us with nothing to say other than trying to sell their products this is the wrong way to do email and i don't think anyone of us want to feel like we're imposing or annoying or irritating our audience of course not that's always been a huge fear of mine i want to market myself in a way that feels good and authentic to me i need to feel like i'm giving value to people or i wouldn't want to do it at all this is important because there are so many ways to market yourself and every expert is preaching their particular methods but if we're gonna do any type of marketing in a consistent and sustainable way we have to actually like what we're doing doesn't matter how effective it is if it doesn't feel good and in fact let's not even call it marketing because i know a lot of us have bad associations to that word let's just call it sharing our work and our voice and keeping in touch with people who want to stay in touch with us and allowing them to buy from us when they're ready that's what marketing is and it can be done in a way that suits your personality and your style email marketing is not for everyone regardless of how effective it is it might not be ideal for you if you truly hate writing and you hate getting emails and you don't feel like you have anything to offer in that format and would much rather post to instagram or tick tock then follow your bliss really never feel pushed into tactics that don't resonate with you as a person just because someone like me tells you to that's never my intention with any of the advice that i give on my channel i prefer email marketing over social media because it gives me more control over the format of my content i prefer long form content over short form content i love writing it relaxes me i prefer to write one longer letter like once a week or every two weeks rather than crank out lots of little short snippets multiple times a week that stresses me out so i guess you can see why instagram has not been working that good for me i also prefer reading email newsletters over scrolling instagram i prefer to spend more quality time with fewer people by subscribing to their emails then following 300 strangers and only getting the highlight reel of their lives getting started with email marketing starts with thinking about the type of emails that you like to receive and if you're currently not subscribed to any newsletters email lists then i suggest doing so look up all your favorite artists or creatives or content creators or businesses and subscribe to their letters and see what they do see how they introduce themselves what they fill their emails with and how often they email you take notes of what you like and what you don't like and think about what would feel right for you and your business who do you want to write your letters to what is your ideal client or customer how often do you want to send emails anywhere between once a week to once a month is usually the sweet spot and what do you want to include in your emails personal stories or essays maybe links to content that you've enjoyed lately product reviews photos from your studio or maybe your travels things that have inspired you photos of works in progress or finished paintings or drawings maybe tips and advice and insights you've had think about the type of emails that you would really love to receive if you were your ideal reader since i mostly sell art courses and classes my ideal readers are other artists and creative entrepreneurs i write for people just like myself who have a creative practice and who are building a life where they can make a living on their creativity if i was mostly aiming to sell my art directly i would think about who the ideal buyer of my art is and i would have that in mind for my emails we always want to make sure that the people we gather on our list are the same people who would actually be interested in what we have to offer i choose to send emails two to three times a month when i have something to show or say and i like to start my emails with kind of a personal essay chronicling what i've been up to lately what i'm working on what i'm thinking about any learnings or tips or resources that have helped me that i can share if i have something to sell i will mention that and also links to all the new content that i've published since my previous emails so my new youtube videos for example that way it's easy for my email friends to stay up to date with everything that i do without having to check in on my youtube channel or my blog or my skillshare teachers page or you know a bunch of other platforms so when you have a grasp of what a good email looks like to you and how you would like to stay in touch with your ideal client or customer then it's time to take the next step and actually start building your email list and we do this with an email marketing provider there are many of those out there and i'll show you the one that i'm using which is called mailchimp i'm not sponsored by mailchimp it's just the service that i've used the most and that i like and recommend most of these services have a way to start building your list for free you should not have to pay anything when you're just getting started and have like three subscribers on your list and one of them is your mom you know that's where we all start out the mailchimp subscription that i'm on is free for up to 2 000 subscribers which is really generous so i'm not paying anything for my email list at the moment so let's just do this together right now let's start a new mailchimp email list then i'll show you how to create your opt-in forms and landing pages and welcome letters and all of that basic stuff that you need to have in place [Music] [Applause] [Music] and we are going with the free plan because 2000 contacts is more than enough for now [Music] [Applause] now this is the thing you need to add an address if you're gonna send emails to people it's like a legal thing and some of you are likely not gonna be comfortable with that i am not really comfortable with that at the moment since i am putting my email list out there more now than before so i am actually going to get one of those po boxes or whatever they're called just so i don't have my home address at the bottom of my emails [Music] all right so here we are we have created our account one thing that you need to know about mailchimp right away is that they don't have the best user interface in my opinion it's quite messy and it's really hard to get around even for me who's been using them for many years so if i seem a little bit confused when i navigate around here it's because i am so here i am with my little audience of one and that is me so let's look at some settings here we have and this is the like the name that i added when i signed up for this account but i could actually change this uh audience name if i want to like this is the list name so if i were to have several email lists under the same account i would choose different audience names for them and um form settings i would recommend to check both of these so this is so that people have to actually confirm that they do want your emails and you can't just add them without their consent and also spam bots can't add themselves to your email list campaign defaults this is what people are gonna see when they get emails from you so the from name and the email address that it's from and then you can also add like a default email subject i'm not going to do that because i prefer to choose that for each email that i send out and this is if you want like subscriber notifications and i like having that because getting a new email subscriber from me is still a huge deal and so i like to get an email telling me that yay someone signed up for my email list that always makes me happy so i usually just add my my email address here another thing that we're gonna do is to check this box because we want to send a final welcome email to new subscribers of our list and we're gonna look more closely at this later but for now let's just check that box so we have our list and we have made the basic settings for it now we need to integrate this with our website and we need to create a sign up form create a landing page or a signup box that we can put on our website and so that we have a link to send people to to actually sign up for our list and the first one that i'm going to show is to embed a form on your website the way that i have done on mine so you can see what that looks like here this is actually a built-in newsletter box um a function of squarespace because squarespace has a collaboration with mailchimp which makes it a lot easier so as you can see here this is all a squarespace block that i've added and you know all of all of the necessary texts here and on the storage tab you can see that we have mailchimp connected here so every time someone signs up here it adds their email address in my mailchimp account on this list right here so yeah so this is the easiest way to add an opt-in to your website if you have a squarespace site if you didn't have a squarespace site you could also embed a signup form by just adding some code on your website so let's look at that and this is the preview how it looks like and i'm just gonna make a super simple one you can edit all of these things right here like if you want to have their first name for example but i find that the easier you keep it the more people are gonna sign up let's just keep it like that and then continue and here we have the code so i'm just gonna copy this [Music] and i'm gonna go back to my website so i'm just going to create a blank page the block that i want for this is the code block html yes that is correct and i'm gonna paste my code here and ta-da here it is embedded so this is what it's gonna look like and you don't have to worry about this text or whatever this is this is just because we're in admin mode but a visitor to my website is only gonna see they're only gonna see this part here this little box and they can enter their email address so that's how you do it and of course it's gonna look different if you're using wordpress um or any other like wix or all the other website builders that are out there but most of them are gonna have an option like this to just add code like embed code but let's also look at how to create a landing page because that's maybe you don't have a website yet you're just getting started and you just want because i would argue that an email list is more important than a website if you have to choose one to start with start with the email list and maybe you use instagram or maybe you use youtube get your email list first and you can worry about the website later and in that case you might want to create an actual landing page so let's look at that i'm gonna just go to this page and here you can see there's a landing page option uh so let's go for that and let's just call it landing page let's begin and here we have fortunately some pre-made templates that we can use and i'm just gonna choose one that i think think looks pretty like this one and i'm not gonna switch anything out because we're not gonna waste time with that but obviously if i were actually doing this for myself i would maybe change the fonts and the logo and the pictures and everything but i do like this as a base mailchimp like squarespace is works with different kinds of content blocks so you can see here when i'm hovering that these are all different components images texts buttons and what have you so if i click on this i get this little box here where i can change the text and do whatever i want and you can approach your landing page as if it was like a mini website if you don't have a website yet because if you did have a website like i have my squarespace website i would want to create that page on my actual website and design it the way i want and then just add a sign up box but if you don't have a website then you can use this landing page as sort of a mini website you know a bit about you and the art that you make if you're an artist and what your email list is about and when you have done that you just save this and you will have a url for your landing page i would also want to change this page title because as you see this will appear in the browser's title bar so we might want to call it something else like for example because it is going to be seen by people and then you can also edit this url which might be nice something like that our landing page is done and we're gonna publish it and that's all there is to it it's pretty simple once you manage to find it in the in the mailchimp interface and now what we want to do is take a look at that welcome email once again so i'm gonna go back to this audience tab that we visited earlier and i'm gonna go back to the the audience name and campaign defaults page and here we have the final welcome email um and as we can see here that it can be edited in the audience forms designer and luckily they put a link there for us so just going to use that link here we can change a bunch of settings related to our sign up process so here's the form we're not actually using this form because we're using the landing page or we're using the the squarespace built-in function for that but we can also change a bunch of other parts of this sign-up process for example the opt-in confirmation email you might have noticed this too if you've subscribed to someone's email list in mailchimp that you first get this email you have to confirm that you want to actually subscribe and we can change how this email looks if we want to we can change the text and also the colors and a bunch of other things i guess i haven't really done very much but you can also translate this the setting that we're gonna look at is this final welcome email here for example we can use an image [Music] so i added my website logo instead just to customize it a bit and maybe here maybe you add a little text about you and you know personally welcoming people to your email list maybe you can add some links to your most popular blog posts or videos or whatever you want so that's it that's just a basic way of getting you started when you have this what you might want to do is create a template for the letters that you're gonna send campaigns is what mailchimp is calling you know the letters that you send the emails that you're sending out and under here we can see that we have templates option we have email templates so let's create a template for ourselves i'm just gonna choose this basic one here just kind of keep it simple here we have this drag and drop interface you know you can move around stuff like this and you can also add stuff if i click on this i'm gonna see a bunch of settings related to it so i'm gonna be able to change the size of it and add obviously add my my logo maybe i don't want it just that big maybe something like that and then here you can see you can't actually edit it in this view but you have to click on this and then you can edit it over here and you can add images and text and links and everything you're going to need and you can also change the font and if i wanted to add say an an image i just drag it from this part and just plop it down wherever i want it and and then i go here to upload my image and then obviously we can preview it and we can see what it looks like and we can also send a test email to ourselves which is very very helpful then let's just go ahead and save this and and just just call it if this is the template i'm going to use for my my weekly letters so here we have it and when i am going to actually send an email i go here and i click create campaign like this and that's gonna take me here i mean i have no real contacts in my list so that's why they're not showing here but otherwise i would just choose my list here and who it's from and my email address and then we have the subject line and the subject line is very important and you get a lot of help from mailchimp here based on best practices so for example i think my very first letter was just called my first letter to you and i think i also added my usual little black heart which is my favorite emoji and as you can see mailchimp approves of that it's short and it has one emoji and it's under 60 characters because ideally our reader would see the whole subject line in the little preview box in their inbox and i guess it's impressive let's just go with that and then we have the content and as you can see mailchimp is warning me that i have uh placeholder stuff so now that i've shown you the the sign up process and how to actually go about to create your list and create all the relevant settings let's log out from this account and let's log into my real actual mailchimp account um so here we are in my actual mailchimp account i have 90 subscribers it's very new this list i haven't built it for very long and we're gonna look at my welcome email that i talked about before and i have sold this in a different way on my account so the way i have this set up from for this list is um i'm not using this final welcome email function but instead i'm using an automation so here's my welcome automation and i did this because i was initially planning on having two audiences i was thinking about having an english speaking audience and a swedish speaking audience and so i didn't want the same welcome letter to go out to everyone i wanted to be able to choose which welcome letter to send and then i decided to just do everything in english anyways i don't actually have to use this automation but here it is so i'm just gonna show it you can do most of these same principles in the welcome letter function that i showed you before and i'm not gonna go into how automations work because that's way above what even i know how to use right now i'm just going to show you what the email looks like this is the actual welcome email and you can see that it sends to new subscribers immediately after they join and the subject line is well hello there it's keeping it simple you know welcome to the email club and then the actual email looks like this so it's just uh my logo and my face and a little intro text you know what this email list is gonna be about and what the emails are gonna contain and how often they will be sent out and just a final welcome and since my current welcome gift to new subscribers is this little mini course that i have this watercolor mini course here is where i provide the link and the password for that course and then you know pointing people in the direction of my youtube channel and my print shop and this will be different depending on what you do maybe you have a blog and then you can just showcase your your blog over here and link to it or maybe you sell originals on an etsy shop or something and then you would just put a link and write about that just pointing people in the directions of you know the various stuff that you do and then some follow links and then i put my little icon illustration right here and then all of this is just automatically generated by the settings so that's what my welcome email looks like and when i send a new email i'm usually just going to my most recent email and i'm clicking replicate if i were to send a new email today let's just see what that looks like and i'll take you all the way to almost sending an email but not actually sending an email i would of course switch out this name here to april 12th because that's today's date and then i would switch out the subject line for something else ideally something more interesting than that but you know just as an example and then let's edit the actual content oh i'm not gonna do that today i'm just gonna use the same email but instead of starting from scratch i would just switch out this text and maybe this photo and switch out all of the links here and i didn't actually have a news section in my latest email because i didn't really have any news um anything you know new launched so i just removed that for that particular email let's just continue with this my campaign is ready to send and i would not send it immediately i usually schedule my emails so maybe i will send it at 4pm and now it will be sent okay so now we have our list and we have our opt-in form and it's live on the internet now what how do we get people to see it and to sign up well this is the hard part unless you're already well known and established and have like thousands of instagram followers and get tons of traffic to your website it's not going to be quick and easy to build your email list it's gonna take time and effort most of us are gonna need a bit more convincing before we hand over our email addresses we need to be pitched essentially and we need to know exactly what to expect how often will we get emails from you and what will be in those emails and how is that of value to us so a very popular method of getting people onto email lists is called a lead magnet or a freebie or i like to call them welcome gifts offering something of value for free is a great incentive for people to sign up to your email list and there are many many many ways to do a lead magnet or freebie you could for example offer a checklist or some other form of list or a template or a worksheet or a workbook digital graphics that you have created a list of your favorite art supplies a guided meditation or video or audio training of some kind the options are overwhelming so let's just keep it simple think of something that you could create in a weekend that would really be of value to your ideal client or customer something that would inspire them or delight them or help them solve a problem or reach a goal a very specific goal just brainstorm a bunch of ideas and remember keep it simple more is not automatically better in fact more is often worse because it overwhelms people most people would actually prefer something small that they can get value from quickly when you have a good idea just create it and deliver it to your email subscribers when they sign up my email freebie right now is like a mini course that i have hosted on my website it's behind like a password protected page and when people sign up to my email list they get the link to that page and the password in the welcome letter in the past what's worked well for me are different types of downloadables i think i had a workbook at one time and an audio training like almost like a podcast episode the first chapters of a book i'd written and probably lots more that i'm forgetting now i've tried a lot of things and i think that's the way to do it you need to try out a bunch of different stuff because you don't know what's going to work best for your audience so don't overthink this too much done is better than perfect is my personal mantra for like everything in my life so now that your system is all set up you have your email list you have your opt-in forms you have perhaps your freebie all you need to do is to regularly talk about your email list and your welcome gift and make sure that people know about it put links in your bios on your website in your email signature in your youtube video descriptions or in your podcast show notes in your blog posts wherever and however you create content or show up on a regular basis make sure that people know that you have an email list and why they should sign up for it and then just start sending your emails even if there are only three people on your list start sending emails just for practice you're practicing on this really small but hopefully very loyal and forgiving audience so that when you have hundreds or thousands of subscribers you will be an experienced professional you'll know what types of subject lines work the best and how people respond to your content and that's it those are the broad strokes growing an email list is a slow game it's not something that happens in a few weeks or months it takes years and the pace of it depends a lot on what other activities you do on a regular basis you never know what types of activities are gonna draw a lot of people to your email list which is why it's so crucial that you have it in place as early as possible even if you don't know what to put in your emails yet even if you have nothing to say just get it up there and start collecting email subscribers i hope this video helped you i hope email feels less overwhelming and mysterious and more doable and inspiring if you have any questions whatsoever just ask them in the comments i'm here for you if you're an artist or a creative entrepreneur of any kind i would love to have you as an email friend and you can find the link to that in the description thank you so much for watching my videos and for liking them and for subscribing i appreciate you so much and i hope we'll see each other in another video [Music] you

Channel: The Calm Creative

Views: 21,093

Keywords: louise stigell, louisestigell, louise stigell artist, art by louise, mailchimp, mailchimp tutorial, mailchimp tutorial 2022, mailchimp beginners, email marketing, email marketing for beginners, email marketing tutorial, email marketing for artists, artist email list, how to start an email list, how to start an email list from scratch, how to start an email list for free, how to start an email list mailchimp, how to use mailchimp

Id: 1YvRavOQT1k

Length: 32min 45sec (1965 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 13 2022