 Well, hello and welcome to this video where I'm going to be talking about three topics to talk about in your marketing emails. Now, I get asked this question all the time, Sophie, what on earth should I talk about in these marketing emails? Well, don't worry. I've got you covered in this video with three things that you can get started with straight away. So once you've got your email list all set up and ready to go, then of course you're going to want to start building trust and awareness with your new subscribers. And you want to be doing that by sending out regular emails through your email marketing platform. So in this video, I'm going to be sharing those three topics that you can talk about in the emails, but I'm going to be breaking them down into real examples that you could take away today and apply to your own email list and make sure to watch right to the end because I'm going to share a bonus topic that's really, really super important that you are talking about in those emails as well. Now, if we haven't met, I'm Sophie, artist, entrepreneur and art business coach, helping artists just like you to build profitable business from your creative passion. Now if you find my videos useful, please do give them a thumbs up and consider subscribing to my channel so that you don't miss out on any future content. So first off, I want to clear up a couple of things that can put you off emailing all together. And if this is you, please say yes, it's me in the comments below this video. Number one, you're slightly concerned about sending too many emails out to your brand new audience. Number two, you are afraid of the unsubscribes. What if I send an email out and a whole load of people unsubscribed from it? I'm going to be too terrified ever to do that ever again. And trust me, when I very first started out with marketing and email marketing in particular, I had those two concerns. Was I sending too many emails? Was I not sending enough emails? What am I going to do if people unsubscribe? And then I look at those figures, oh my God, I've had five unsubscribes just from that one email. What did I do wrong? And you can end up going down a fear tunnel that's completely and utterly not necessary. So let's just answer these two fears straight away. Number one is people have opted in to hear from you. They want to hear from you. They don't want a deathly silence. They want to make sure that on a regular basis, they're getting news and updates from you. Can you send too many emails? Listen, we're not one of those big businesses that you sign up for where you get the emails every single day. That's a different type of strategy. While you're promoting something, you're probably going to be sending daily emails, but you're likely going to let the audience know that that's happening for a short period of time. And I reckon anything from one to maybe even three emails a week is definitely around the number that you want to be sending and definitely not too many, right? And the second thing is the unsubscribes. Listen, people are going to unsubscribe. They sign up for a variety of reasons. One, you have a freebie. They want it. They don't want anything else. They got your freebie. They're going to leave. Number two, they've got your freebie. They perhaps haven't cluttered inbox. They've forgotten why they signed up in the first spot place and they leave. Number three, they've discovered that you're on YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, and they're like, you know what? I've got a lot of emails. I'm going to follow you on that other platform. And the last one that I think is the most important one is they're not quite the right ideal client. Now really what you want to make sure is that kind of, what do we call that marmite thing happening, the love or hate? You want the people who are on your list who love you, who want to hear from you, who don't mind how many emails you send and the other people who are like, okay, this is not for me. The message isn't right. The product isn't right. You know, yeah, maybe they grabbed the freebie. Maybe they didn't. Then you want to make sure that it's okay and it's great that they unsubscribed. The people that stay on your list want to be on your list. Those of the people over time may very well become customers and even raving fans of yours. So I hope that's got you feeling a little bit better. I've got a video coming up shortly about the mistakes that you can make on email marketing. So make sure that you're subscribed to the channel. You've hit that little button below. You subscribe because you won't want to miss that, especially if you've got those fears. I'm going to share seven mistakes that are commonly made with email marketing. But today, let's get down to the topic in hand. And that's three things that you can actually talk about that's going to engage your new subscribers and your ongoing subscribers and keep them interested and looking forward to the next emails that you're going to be sending. Now, in a previous video that I'll link up here, three steps to social media content planning, I asked you this question. What are your audience looking for exactly? Then I gave you a list of examples and the examples go like this because I've got them written in front of me just to remind me. Number one, are they looking for inspiration? Are they looking for how you do what you do? Are they looking for that sneaky behind the scenes? Or perhaps they're wanting to solve a problem or they want ideas for a presence or gifts or perhaps they want they're doing some home decor shopping and they want some ideas around that. Or maybe they're looking for your special offers. Maybe they're looking for something else, but you're going to get the idea. There's a few examples there of what they might be looking for. So my three topics are based on these ideas. So number one, your story, the behind the scenes of your art journey. Now, which one does that fulfill? It's definitely how you do what you do and it could also be a bit sneaky behind the scenes. It's also a great way to start for new subscribers. They may have found you on social media or on your sales platform or a third party platform. They've joined your email list, but they're not up. 100% sure exactly who you are or what you do. So sometimes actually you can even set up a sequence for people who've just joined where you educate them a little bit on who you are. But for starters, if you're brand new to your list, or maybe you've had an influx of people, this is a great topic to kind of say, hey, if you're new here, this is a bit about my story. So for example, maybe you grew up painting for when you were really, really tiny. So my example was I was given a paintbrush as soon as I could stand, walk around. My mother was an artist and I kind of grew up in her artist studio. While she was sitting at her big easel, my father made me a small easel and I sat next to her and I copied her painting. So that's part of my journey. So if you've got something similar, people love that. And even better, if you've got a photo from when you're a child, I wish where you're perhaps, in my case, sitting next to your mother painting exactly what they're painting, that sort of thing is inspiring for people. They want to know, wow, they were given a paintbrush age three, four, and off they go. But perhaps you're the other end of the spectrum. Perhaps you're somebody who's wanted all their life to be creative and they were told, you know, you need to go and get a proper job. Who here recognizes that? Give me a shout out in the comments if that's you. You're told to get a proper job and it wasn't until you retired or you've been made redundant, you've left that job later in life that you're finally picking up the passion, the thing that you always wanted to do. Now that's also an inspiring story for somebody who's maybe joined your community is thinking, that's kind of me. And what if you teach art, you know, for somebody to join and realize that it's not too late for them, that they could also learn, they could follow in your footsteps. It doesn't matter that they're 60, 70, 80 and they haven't picked up a brush since they were little. They may be going to be inspired. If they don't know that piece about your journey, then that's an opportunity for rapport building that you've really missed. Or maybe you're somebody that travels the world with your creativity. Maybe that you go from town to town, from country to country and you gain your inspiration and you're traveling as part of the business. Now again, that's also very inspiring for people. It's interesting. We can be a little bit nosy. Where are you this month? I popped up in Rome. I'm in Rome and I'm sketching this or painting that. No, maybe you're doing buildings and so there's some architecture and then next month you're in, I don't know, South American. Here you are getting inspiration from the colors. People would like to know that sort of thing. Now the caveat here, if you're none of those things and you're thinking to yourself, I don't really have anything that stands out from my story, then don't select that off the list. Or maybe wait until you realize that you do actually have a story. Most of us have a story in there somewhere, right? Something along the way about your artistic journey. But if you're watching this and you're thinking, nothing really jumps out, then obviously don't use this topic. But right now I'd like you to pause the video, grab a notebook and pen and go right back to when you were very first a child and think about things that perhaps you've forgotten about. You know, my mother grew up during the war and she showed artistic talent from a very early age would do things like she would sneak into her parents' kind of library of books and she would take that blank page from the back of the book and she would tear it out and she would get whatever pencil she was given at school and she'd draw on that piece of paper. Now her art teacher at school got her a scholarship into an art college, but her parents told her she couldn't have that, she couldn't do that. She needed to go to university and learn English and history and she went on to be an English and history teacher until at some point in her life she went, you know what, I need to paint. So the story there, right? So wherever you are in your journey, stop and think there might just be something in there that you've forgotten about that's interesting to your new audience. So you write those ideas down and doesn't have to be one email, by the way. Don't overload them with your entire story. Tell them a little snippet. Make it last over a number of weeks. Or maybe every month you tell a new little piece of your story. Number two, how, where, why, what, you gather your inspiration, right? So it's all about inspiration. Where are you getting that from? So people who are not artists are interested in where us creatives get inspired from. So again, this is a whole list of topics. So think about where do you get your inspiration from? Are you somebody who creates Pinterest boards? Maybe you've got a lot of secret Pinterest boards and you've got lots of inspiration that you've gathered on there. Are you somebody that, that's me by the way, takes loads of photos? So if you were to look at my iPhone, you would see I have over 55,000 photographs. Yes, I do. And sometimes I know people say to me, couldn't you delete some of those? Do you ever look at them? Yeah, I do. I look at them all the time. I scroll back through them. I use the various searches I can use on my iPhone to narrow it down and look for things. I use them all the time. They're my primary form of inspiration and they have been since I first started out. I am always taking photographs. Now you might say to me, perhaps you should have been a photographer. I don't really have that skill. I take a lot of photos. They're perhaps not great photos, but they're reference photos for me. So is that something you do? Do you take a lot of photos? Do you have that Pinterest board? Do you do a lot of sketching? Do you look back through books? Are you more intuitive? Do you find that actually your work just comes from somewhere and you perhaps meditate to be inspired? So again, if this is you, pause the video, grab your notebook and pen and write down where do you get your inspiration from? What is it? What triggers it? How often do you need to get new inspiration? This is again, fodder for many, many emails. Please don't put all of it in one email because you've probably overloaded your subscriber, but not only that, you've wasted the opportunity of making that into 10 different emails. One tiny thing is usually enough for one email. People don't want a whole host of things crowned in there, right? All right, so topic number three. This is around actually positioning art in a space. So maybe you're particularly interested in interior design. Perhaps what you do is actually 2D art and what you wanna do is educate your audience on where to hang it, how much to hang it, how much light do you need? So you might find that you write a blog article, you create some content around hanging art in overly light spaces or overly dark spaces, how to light the art effectively. So it looks correct and the colors are correct. What to do if you have a small home, a big home? What size work should you put on a wall? You know, if you've got a large warehouse building and you put three small paintings on there, they'd be a bit dwarfed. There's a number of pieces of content that you could create in order to add value to the audience. Perhaps you wanna give them some interior design tips. Again, if this is something you're interested in, but most importantly, you know it's a topic that your audience are interested in, maybe those Pinterest boards will come into use after all. You could write some simple content or tips around latest interior design ideas, latest home looks, latest colors, trending colors, why particular one particular artwork would look good in this particular situation. What about putting paintings on a colored background? When does it work? When does it not work? So there'd be a number of things that you could create videos about. You could create Instagram reels or YouTube shorts or YouTube videos or blogs or podcasts, some form of content that you can then share in your emails. So really think about your ideal customer and what are their interests. And then again, if this one is lighting you up, pause the video and write down some ideas. What could you do? 10 ways to do this. How to hang your artwork in this particular place. What if you create sculpture or things for the garden? You could just do that for a garden setting. What if you create digital art or downloads? Maybe you could make a whole piece on actually how to correctly print at home digital artwork, useful or not useful, very useful for your audience, especially if that's something that you predominantly do. People might have some questions. Well, if I buy a digital sort of file for a poster, how do I know I'm going to get that printed correctly? What if you wrote a really simple article on how to do it or a YouTube video on how to print at home correctly? People could then follow that. By the time they've watched that, they might think, oh, now I'm really inspired to go back to your Etsy shop or your website and buy a whole load of things. And of course, if you create content, you could always put a little offer underneath there. See how it all kind of weaves together. Okay, so you're ready for your bonus topic then. I bet you are. I'm hoping that you're a bit excited by some of these ideas. Now we mustn't forget, of course, that you are an art business and that whilst creating content and building rapport and actually sending out consistent emails is super, super important, so is making money. So one topic that you want to be doing and of course on a fairly regular basis, not all the time, but on regular basis, is promotions. So you want to make sure that in your artist business plan, so we're assuming by now you've been watching this channel, you know that I talk about, that's your foundational document, that's the thing you need when you start any business, particularly your art business, you have your artist business plan and in there, you're gonna say, well, you know, that in this three months, I'm gonna have two or three promotions, this is when I'm gonna have them, this is what I'm gonna offer. And then your emails can be a sequence of emails making that offer just over those period of days. So it's very important to mix it up, otherwise you'll send great emails but you'll never make any money. All right, so, and again, you don't really wanna mix them, if you're sending a content email, it's a content email. If you're sending a promotional, hey, it's Easter weekend, get 25% off my whole website or 20% off my Etsy store using this code just for five days, here's the countdown timer, and all of those good things, then you would be doing that. Now, people are gonna feel very, very happy to receive that because you've been sending out these valuable emails before. If all you ever did was send promotional, promotional, promotional, promotional, suddenly you've become one of those, you know, the big superstores that we end up being subscribed to and they bombard you with emails every day. Promo code here and get this and free shop shipping we're not those people, we're individuals, we're artists, we're creatives, we need to build that bond with our audience first kind of in order to have the right to then send out the promotional emails but you must do that bit, all right? That's super, super important. So think about when and how often on what you could do and again, if you haven't got an artist business plan yet, then check out this video here, that's seven steps to building your artist business plan. I also have a foundational course, build your artist business plan that you can watch all the videos in three hours and have your plan done super quickly so that once you've got that, then you can be really clear when you're gonna be sending out those emails. So links to the course, links to the video, everything you need up below this video. I think I've got a checklist as well, business planning checklist. So I've got variety of videos but especially that key one. I've got a free checklist and I've got a course, everything you need to build your artist business plan. So there you have it, three topics to talk about in your artist marketing emails. I hope you've really enjoyed this video and your creative juices are flowing and you're super excited about writing down some topics and getting emailing. Look out for these mistakes that I'm covering in the next couple of weeks as well plus some new interesting topics that I haven't talked about yet on the channel. So if you haven't already, make sure to watch this video. That's about getting set up correctly, set up and growing your mailing list because obviously in order to send the emails, you need to make sure that you're set up correctly. So check this one out next if you haven't already and I'll see you on another video. Thank you so much for watching. Bye bye.