 Now, whether you're a regular here or not, I'm sure that you're aware that as an art business it's really important to both set up and grow your artist mailing list. Without which, you're going to be constantly trying to sell to a cold audience over and over again, which quite frankly is going to be frustrating, annoying and even a little bit soul-destroying. So in this new video, I'm going to share six steps to getting new subscribers who will just love to be on your mailing list and who can't wait to hear from you every time that you send out an email. Stay right to the end too because I'm going to share a huge mistake that you're likely already making that's going to be impacting those mailing list results and of course how to solve it. Now, in case we haven't met, I'm Sophie, artist, entrepreneur and art business coach, helping artists just like you to set up, market and grow a highly successful business doing what you love. Now, if you love the content on this channel, please do consider subscribing and if you like this video, giving it a thumbs up really helps YouTube to push it out and be seen by more artists just like you. Okay, so here's how to start and grow your mailing list in 2023 and these six steps that I promised to share with you, including don't forget that huge mistake as well towards the end. Now, step number one is to set a goal specific to your mailing list. So for me, any good strategy needs to start with a goal, right? We need to know where it is you want to go. You've got to be clear of the end in mind because if all you do is set up a mailing list and you don't really do any activity to track it and you don't really have a goal, I could be asking you in a year's time, well, how many subscribers have you got in your list and you might look and say well, Sophie, 20 wandered on and 10 have unsubscribed and I'm left with 10 people on my mailing list and that's not what I want for you. All right. So what is a good goal for your artist's mailing list over say the next six months or 12 months? Do you want to add 100 subscribers, 500 subscribers, 1000, 3000, 10,000? Do you want to get clear on how many people you want to sign up to your mailing list because then you really have something to work towards. So I would just grab a notebook and pan and go ahead and jot that right down now. So number two is getting your email list set up correctly. Now I know this can be a little bit tacky and for some of you, it's probably the last thing that you want to do. Maybe you signed up for some email marketing software once. Now you're not quite sure where those login details are. Maybe you logged in, you've had a play with it. You sort of put a few settings in there. Maybe even you started to set up a sign up form and you weren't really quite sure how to use it and so you abandoned it. So let me know in the comments if you are somebody with some abandoned email marketing software because trust me there are ways to solve that. Stay right to the end as I've got a solution for you. If necessary allocate a serious chunk of time to just get it done from start to finish. Now you might say okay I'm fairly good with this stuff. I'm going to set aside a couple of hours or maybe you say I need a whole morning or a whole afternoon or maybe tech isn't your thing at all and you just want to cross out everything from a whole day and just say I'm just going to get to know this. I'm going to watch a few YouTube videos. I'm going to watch some instructional videos. I'm going to get the hang of my email marketing software. Whatever you do, you need to choose an email marketing provider and then you want to make sure that you set it up correctly. So you want to make sure that inside there that you have a sign up form and ideally a landing page. So what does that mean? A sign up form literally is where somebody is going to pop in their name and email address. You don't need to collect anything else. You just need name and email address and then that landing page which will ideally have the form built in. Luckily that's all dealt with within the software. You don't have to worry about that. That's the page that you're going to use the URL from to put out into the world. So people can see that see what you're offering. They can join your email list and suddenly there they are there's a name sitting there as a new subscriber. Pretty exciting right but it's important that you go through all the steps until you've got it working properly. You want to ask some friends to test it say I'll set it up can you just see if it's if it's working properly. By the way you will be on my email list if you do that or maybe like me you have lots of email addresses or you can set up a test email address in gmail and test it yourself. So as I mentioned I have a free resource that's going to help you do this. It's a 10 day artist mailing list challenge. Now it does deliver an email a day so it's not going to enable you to sit and do the whole thing in one hit but if you're somebody that likes to chip away at it or if you sign up and in 10 days time you'll have all 10 emails sitting there then you can sit and do the whole thing. But each day it gives you a different task to do in the process towards setting up your list. It even takes you to look at well what exactly do you want to achieve with the list who's it for etc etc. So you can join now and have your email list fully set up 10 days time. I will put the link directly below this video where you can join it now. Like I say it's totally free just you need to look for those emails every day with the separate tasks in it. Step number three you want to provide value for your audience. So here's now where you want to be thinking about your subscriber and what are the reasons that somebody might want to join your list. So I can tell you now some of the things that will put people off is if you say on your website or social media join my mailing list join my email list get my newsletter. All of those things sound like like they're going to clog up your inbox right and unless you're really clear on the benefit that you can give your customer I would just wait maybe take the challenge because that's one of the questions and think about what it is you can offer people in exchange for their email address. So for example if you teach let's use my usual example maybe you've got that watercolor for beginners course and you think to yourself wait a minute what would somebody be really interested in having if they're on that route to learning watercolors they might want a simple materials list of where you get your materials from. Super simple free PDF that you could put together and give away on your site. Get my free materials list by signing up here. All right so actually what they're doing is they're gaining something of value from you and of course it's very clear because it's written underneath that they will be joining your mailing list. Pretty simple right what if you have 2D art I hear all the painters and sculptors calling out well what about me what do I do Sophie. Well if you can't create or come up with a PDF then what about a discount voucher or a free downloadable piece of your art. Something that you can give away that doesn't take any of your time or preferably none of your money either that you can gift in exchange for their email address. So we're thinking about the audience and the value that you can provide for them and then of course the last piece to this is instead of using that newsletter mailing list email list word you want to come up with a nice title. So it could be Sophie's Studio VIPs or it could be something else using your name your studio name or something that's relevant to your business that makes it sound nice people know it's a mailing list but I think that nobody really wants to sign up for something that says mailing list it's just a little bit of a turn off. So use your creativity come up with a great name ideally come up with something that's in exchange for that email address and you're good to go. Number four you want to commit to an emailing routine so you've gone to all that hard work you've set up your opt-in form your landing page you've populated out on your website on your social media at the bottom of your email signature wherever you want to put it and people are beginning to join. Now the last thing you want is to build up subscribers and not be communicating to them no matter the number of subscribers you're going to start emailing them once a week regularly. Pick a day pick a time and start and commit to a regular routine. All right it doesn't have to be a huge long email in fact ideally it wouldn't be and I've got other videos on topics such as what to put and how to write your email etc etc and this is something that I teach much more in depth inside my art business academy too so there's only so much I can share on the youtube channel if you really want to dive a bit deeper into how to put that email together and how to really communicate with your audience check out the links below to my art business academy membership the doors open at time of recording this video. So you want to keep your emails value-driven and probably short until you've kind of built up a bit of a routine and you've got large numbers on the list and then you can find out from your subscribers you know actually do they want a longer email do they want multiple pictures do they want links to things so they want special offers what do they actually want in that email so step number five you want to choose your promo strategy now here comes the huge mistake as I've sort of hinted out already so many people go through the process of setting up the mailing list and then do nothing all right maybe there's a link on the website maybe there's a link on instagram but there's no activity sending people towards that link because a bit like everything else that you do when building a business here you can get so far but then you really have to do that ongoing marketing activity to drive people to where they can make the choice to sign up right a lot of people will look at your landing page but not all of them will sign up so we need to be choosing a promo strategy to get more eyeballs onto that landing page because if you don't then you're not going to grow that list and we all know that a majority of your sales are going to come from your mailing list so that means in the end that the sales are going to be down on where they could be if you just done this little piece of work here so how are we going to go about doing this you can use pr you can use blogging you can use youtube if you make youtube videos podcast if you have a podcast you can run competitions both online and offline use Pinterest and use real physical events too there are a number of ways that you can use in order to grow the list I've got other videos on diving a bit deeper into that but at the end of the day you need to choose one two three of those strategies and do them consistently so that you are building up the list because it's not just about setting it up it's about consistently growing it right so step number six you want to take consistent action so you want to make sure that you're doing that promotion at least every week or every other week now here I often have a saying don't be selling all the time that people often ask me Sophie what do you mean by that so if you're using social media as one of your marketing strategies you don't want every post to be about join my list join my list or join my VIP news or whatever you're calling it you don't want that constant thing but one in six or seven posts totally okay if you did a post a week or a story a week or a real a week that gave the benefits of why people should join your list or maybe you try a competition strategy and you use that on social media or maybe one week you use PR you get a press release out and you do that another week you use an event you want to be keeping it in mind that each week you want to be doing something that's actively going towards growing that mailing list so as you know each week I publish this video right on my youtube channel and below the video what's below there there's a lot of information links to other videos and of course links to resources which sometimes I mention in the videos not always as you know if it feels appropriate it's going to help you move forward then I mentioned that resource like I've mentioned the 10 day free mailing list challenge for you so there's a link below that now what is that doing when you click that link you're of course going to be joining my mailing list which you can unsubscribe from at any time but for me I am adding value for you guys by creating all these free things that are useful resources for you so for me it's a fair energy exchange right and once you've joined the list I'm going to send you emails maybe about these videos maybe about things that are happening maybe some behind the scenes stuff that you don't hear about anywhere else so you can follow my strategies especially if you're on youtube and I get consistent subscribers through and really apart from creating this content I'm not really doing anything else so what promo strategy are you going to be using how are you going to get some sort of consistent routine make sure that you let me know in the comments below what it is that you're doing and if you'd like to join my free facebook group over on that platform the facebook platform then I have a business for artists facebook group it's kind of been a bit dormant the last couple of years I've just been focused on other things but I'm getting it sort of back and alive again and there are people in there I just did a Q&A the other day that was a lot of fun so if you want to join a community where you can share a little bit more you've seen a video this is what you're doing you have a question then do feel free again you can get the link below you don't join the mailing list by joining the facebook group although guess what I do ask you if you'd like to be on the mailing list so there's another strategy so again you see you could always be thinking of ways of getting people onto your list so all the links to things I've mentioned are below this video up next I suggest maybe you might want to watch something about email marketing just dive a little bit deeper into how to structure those emails what to talk about so one screen now you can check out my email marketing basics for beginners video I hope you've enjoyed this one I hope you've got something out of it and look forward to a few more videos on building the mailing list this year as well thank you so much for watching and I'll see you on the next one