 The moment I start talking about email marketing as an artist, I get a big groan and usually I get some of these responses too. Oh yes, I must set up that email list or I've got mine set up and I really perhaps should start sending emails through it or do I really need to do this every week Sophie or what about? Well, I just don't know what to talk about. Now I've got you covered there if you check out this video and three topics to talk about in your artist emails that will get you inspired and give you some practical ideas that you can start sharing in these emails. Now it's such an enormous subject and so many artists are still not tackling it even when it's the golden route to your art sales. In this video I'm sharing seven email marketing mistakes and of course what you should be doing instead so that you can start to build your successful and profitable art business. Now in case we haven't met, I'm Sophie, Artist, Entrepreneur and Art Business Coach, helping you to build a profitable business from your creative passion. And if you find my videos useful, don't forget to give me a like and perhaps consider subscribing so that you don't miss any future content. Ready for those mistakes? Don't forget to give me a shout out in the comments if you relate to any of these. Number one, not using a professional email marketing program. Yes, it's still happening unfortunately. It is vital to set up with a professional email marketing program such as MailChimp, MailerLite, ActiveCampaign and many, many others. And essentially it doesn't matter which one you choose, you just want to choose one of them. There must be that unsubscribe option. People must be able to unsubscribe, change their options, read your privacy policy, all of those good things and that email marketing program does all of that for you, right? Set it up once and it's good to go. You can't send group marketing emails from your regular email platform, so for example Yahoo! Gmail, etc. It's against their terms of practice. So what should you do instead? Choose one, sign up today and why not also sign up to my free 10 day artist mailing list challenge where you will go through the steps that you need to every single day from signing up to having your email list ready to go and ready to send out those emails to your subscribers. There's a link below this video for you to join that 10 day challenge. Number two, being afraid of sending too many emails. I think there's still this fear that, oh my goodness me, I'm going to send out too many emails and I'm going to offend somebody. So this is really only going to happen if you have the wrong audience on your mailing list, right? And then obviously that's not going to work or you're not sending out high value emails or you're trying to sell way too early before you've earned that right to actually make people an offer. So what should you do instead? Be very, very clear from the onset what people are signing up for. Send regular, valuable content that's pertinent to your target audience like blogs, top tips, videos, etc. And only then would you be sending out some type of sales email with an offer in it. Number three, not sending out regular, consistent emails. And this is usually because of mistake number two, right? There's that fear, oh my goodness me. And then it just becomes super irregular. So perhaps you only send an email when you think you've got something to say or worse still you've got a show coming up or a workshop that's going to be available. So what happens is somebody joins your list as a subscriber. They don't hear anything for six months and suddenly they get a series of emails telling them about a workshop. Huge, huge, huge mistake. Biggest way to lose all your subscribers by the way. So consistency of course is key. Consistency is key across your entire business and it's consistency that's going to win the day here as well. If you don't send regular emails people are going to simply forget who you are and then when you do send something they'll be like who's that from and they'll unsubscribe. So actually the biggest problem that you can really do is be not be sending the regular consistent emails. So what should you do instead? Pick a day of the week that you're going to consistently send out the email and that you know in your marketing plan it's like Wednesday is the day I'm going to send out the email. Friday is the day I'm going to send out the email. Saturday works best for me. Saturday is the day. Doesn't matter which day it is. You've got to sometimes try it at the beginning. Send on a few different days, a few different times to find out which one your audience is going to resonate more with. But once you've got an idea of when people prefer to receive your emails you stick to that one day and preferably the same time of day as well. You plan out your content in advance. I've got other videos on that that I will link below here that will help you in terms of planning out your content. And of course you can write the emails ahead of time and simply schedule them in your email marketing provider. Mistake number four, making the emails all about you. We've all done it. It's me, me, me, I, I, I in the email. Occasionally you'll want to tell them parts of your story. It's one of the strategies I teach. But then you'll want to link it back to your audience somehow. Honestly there's no faster way to lose subscribers than just constantly making it all about you and not thinking about the person that you're actually writing to. What should you do instead? Make sure that you have 100% clarity on your target audience and work out what it is they actually want to hear about in these emails. And then just do that. Focus on your audience 100%. Now if you're not really sure what it is they want to hear about, you can of course always survey them. You can survey them to the list that you have already. You can survey on social media or other platforms such as YouTube or Pinterest, wherever it is that your audience hangs out. Mistake number five, over-cluttering those emails. Listen, you've got 52 emails that you're going to write in a year typically. You've plenty of time to spread out what it is that you want to talk about. I think you really want to avoid sending that newsletter type of email where there's endless, endless different things for people to read. We've all had those sort of emails. My question is, do you read them? Do you skim or do you bin them? It's typically that old school, like I said, newsletter. Great for a summary, maybe once a month or once every two months, but it's definitely not what you want to be sending out consistently. So what should you do instead? Focus on one item per email, whether that's a content piece, whether it's a special offer, whether it's something specific that you want them to go and look at or a poll that you'd like them to fill out or a survey, for example. One thing in the email, that's it. Keep it clear and away from the old clutter. My favorite one, number six, and that is using a creative font or color in your emails. Purple, green, orange writing, I have seen them all, trust me, and they're really difficult to read. What about those creative, swirly fonts or something that you really like the look of and you think, wow, that's amazing, I'm going to write my emails with that font or how about combining them both? A purple scripted font, right? It might look funky, you might really like it, but it's absolutely not what somebody needs to receive, especially if they're trying to read your email on their phone, which let's face it, is where most people read their emails these days. It's very hard to read and quite frankly, just looks super unprofessional. It's an absolute hard no, I'm afraid. So what should you do instead? Use a clear and simple font like Arial, maybe in black or just dark gray with a font size of say 14, 16, preferably, or even 18. And make sure you use small paragraphs which are easy to read. Again, I've got a video on email marketing, which I'll link up here, and that takes you with more specifics of what you should be focused on when you put together your emails. Mistake number seven, not having a call to action in your email. So ideally you don't want to be sending an email just for the sake of sending an email. You're going 52 weeks, I need to send something out. Here I'll write something and send it. Because at the end of the day, you don't know if that person actually has read the email. The email marketing program will tell you it's been delivered or read, which means perhaps it's been opened. We've all done that. You've opened an email, but you haven't actually read the contents of the email. You've gone, oh, yeah. If it hasn't grabbed you, chances are you've deleted it. But the platform thinks it's been read. You don't know unless there is some action to take in the email whether somebody's actually read it. So you want to make sure if you're investing time in your emails, you're doing it correctly. Having no links in an email gives them no action to take. And that's really not a habit that you want to foster if you think about it with your audience. So what should you do instead? Plan out the emails like we've said already. Get clear on what action you want them to take in each specific email. So for example, if you've written a blog article, then you might want to talk in the email about what's great about the blog article with a nice picture and then a clear link of where they can go and read the whole article. So it's very, very clear. There's the content and there's what you want your audience to do at the end. I hope you've enjoyed these seven mistakes or perhaps not enjoyed, but I hope your eyes are opened by these seven mistakes and you're gonna make sure that you avoid all of them. So take to heart all the items, the instead of items, what you should be doing instead and start getting yourself in a really good habit, getting consistent, thinking about your content, focusing on your audience, making a better job of leading towards all those fabulous sales that I know that you want. So next up, why not watch this video on here? And that's the email marketing basics video that I've already mentioned a little while ago in the video. It just walks you a bit through what you should be doing in terms of email marketing and putting together that email. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you on another video. Bye-bye.