Patrick: Happy new year to all of us here from Art Storefronts, this is the very second live webinar we've run. Calling them office hours and let's go over the webinar outline. So I wanna talk briefly about office hours, I did this on the previous webinar to kinda introduce it, but I don't think most people have seen it, so if you did it, if you were on our first one, it might be a little redundant, sorry about that, but I wanna give everybody kind of the broad vision for what we have with these office hour webinars. Then we'll get into announcements, and then we're gonna dive right into Valentine's Day email strategy which is the main subject of this webinar.

We've got Kimberly on. I've got her muted right now, but we'll bring our copywriting expert Kimberly to go over that. And then we want to jump into the Q and A, so you can go ahead and ask whether you submitted your question earlier or if you got one as the webinar goes along, just go ahead and fire them into the questions box. I think there's a questions box or a chat box and somebody's throwing aloha in the already, probably you Randy. How you doing Randy? So you ask those throughout the webinar and we'll be happy to stop and get into them.

Okay, so office hours, what are they, what is this webinar all about? Why should you care? They're gonna be live webinars just for ASF customers, obviously just like the one you're on now. We're gonna do them bi-weekly to start, so every two weeks. Weekly if it makes sense and depending on the feedback. You know, we're really new to these so we're just trying to kinda, you know, get our feet wet so to speak, and figure out what works and what's the most valuable for you guys. Oftentimes I'll include updates on the software, what new features are in development, what's coming down the pipe.

We're gonna offer marketing insights, strategy and tactics. We'll have in house staff as well as experts, like we have Kimberly on today, and then of course, there's gonna be the customer Q and A. You could submit that early and we highly, highly encourage you to submit them early because it gives us a better time to prepare a really good answer for you. But you can, like I said, throw them in during any point in time if anything's confusing or if you have a follow up question or whatever the case may be. You can fire them we go through. And I think the biggest question that we design these office hours around is what I like to call the now what question.

So, say you come onto Art Storefronts, you've got your site up, you followed some of the success plan, and you're ready to take the next step in terms of your online business and where do you go for that coaching, right? Especially if you've finished the success plan and you've done the basics. You're set up, so it's really a venue to provide ongoing coaching in webinar format, which we think will probably be the most effective at kind of outline the tactics and most importantly the focus that we want you guys to maintain going forward for 2017. So that's hope then to answer, these webinars, and yeah we're excited to get into them.

So let's get into the announcement portion. On the first webinar we talked a bunch about the new features that are coming down the pipe and we've got some really exciting ones. If you have not seen that yet, encourage you to do so. We'll include the link to where you can find that video in the webinar follow up email that you guys will all get. But, the one thing that I do wanna talk about is, we do have a podcast coming up. I'm assuming we're probably gonna launch it either next week or last week at January. We're really toying with this idea of doubling your art business in 2017, how we can help you focus on doing that and you know, understanding that, especially with this double the business technique that you're not gonna become a millionaire overnight.

Everything takes hard work, but if you focus and do the work and follow the plan, you'll get there and you have the ability to double your business and probably significantly even more so for some of you guys that are just getting started. But we're gonna cover marketing topics on the Podcast and get into absolutely everything. I know there's been tremendous demand for some in depth Facebook tutorials and in Facebook advertising tutorials and how best to advertise on Facebook. So, definitely gonna tackle that on the Podcast, too. I personally love Podcasts. I hope you do, too, or will if you haven't yet, but you know, there's only so many blog posts you can read and so many hours in a day.

So the podcast, especially the audio, you know, whether you're on a commute or you're working out or you're driving in the car and you've got the phone connected to Bluetooth, it just gives you another venue where you potentially wouldn't be able to focus on educational material to grow your business, and so we're hoping it provides that. So we're really gonna get into focus, into traffic, what your daily, weekly, quarterly steps to take should be and ignore all the rest, right? All about focus. So in this portion let's get into the Valentine's Day email strategy and a few points on this and then we're gonna bring in Kimberly which is the resident Art Storefront's copywriting expert and I'm sure she's really thrilled with me that I have this gigantic thumbnail of her face on there.

How do you like that, Kimberly? I'll unmute you in a sec. Overall vision, discounts, you guys just simply work. You know, I've had a chance to audit and go over all of the sales volume that everyone has done on the Art Storefront's platform. And it wasn't incredible for everybody, you know, some people struggled, and some people didn't send out any discounts or any emails, but for those that did, we saw a real jump, a real real jump and it was by far the busiest month, the most art sold through the platform that we've ever seen. So we were really really encouraged to see that.

And again, for some people, they went from selling nothing before to selling three or four pieces on the top end of it. You know, and some of our biggest sellers which, you know, a lot of them unicorns, they came in with really good pre-established businesses, sold 50, 60, 70 pieces the month of December. So, we thought that was really impressive and the biggest takeaway is discounts work, but you need to do them intelligently which is the whole point of this webinar, right? You gotta send romance emails and you send them most of the time, but when a holiday is on, you go for the kill, you go for the jugular. So the key is to do the work ahead of time and send them emails.

So what's the playbook? Email a discount and a lot of this has been detailed in the Art Marketing Calendar and I'll speak to that in a second, but email a discount, you have to use scarcity, which means you have to have an expiration date on it of some kind where the discount expires to motivate them to take action. You've gotta be resending your email to un-opens. You've gotta send the deal is about to expire email and we're going to put all of this, all of this, all of this in a detailed blog post with a lot of the stuff that we're gonna be addressing today on the webinar. So this is more just to hit the high level conceptual kind of stuff and then as the follow up, you'll be able to jump right into the blog post and get the detailed info. So 33 days. 33 days until Valentine's Day to get this done.

So there's plenty of time to get it done and you know especially with the launch of the art marketing calendar, we thought we did a decent job on it, but we weren't ahead of time enough, right? Like a proper holiday emailing strategy starts a month and a half ahead of time, ahead of Thanksgiving, ahead of Christmas. Getting it in your email service provider, MailChimp for most of you guys. Getting the emails written, figuring out what your discounts are, the more you can get ahead of this, the higher chance it stands to get done. So, it's really just plan, form, craft the emails, schedule them, and win. So let's talk through these things conceptually and again, we're gonna have the detailed blog post to follow up. Alright, so I'm gonna go ahead and unmute you Kimberly, are you still on?

Kimberly: Yep, I'm here.

Patrick: So far, so good. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about the introduction of Valentine's Day, you did some, you know, studying the market, and came up with some stats. I thought the interesting ones was at the last year the average spending for Valentine's Day was around $146 per gift per person, which is pretty decent. It's pretty high I thought.

Kimberly: Yep.

Patrick: Yep, eloquent in its brevity In your notes you went over the top five most purchased items, none of which were art, but go through that list quickly.

Kimberly: Yeah, so the top five most purchased items for Valentine's Day, greeting cards 65%, date night 44%, candy 38%, flowers 32%, and gift cards 19%. Those gifts will be forgotten one or two weeks later, but art is the gift that keeps on giving forever. So you have a big advantage here.

Patrick: That's the mindset that we wanna stay in as we get into the meat of this and recommend it. We really do think art, despite the fact it's obviously not in the top five is a great Valentine's Day gift, and if you market it appropriately it will be. And then, the other bit is, and especially with being ahead of time, great time to play to the procrastinators. Most males, I put myself near the top of this list, always end up procrastinating these special days, these special holidays.

The gifts that need to go to the wives and the girlfriends and you can speak to me at a certain level and say hey, procrastinator, moron, you got yelled at last year, you got yelled at the year before, get your butt in line this time. Buy something, have it show up at the house for Valentine's Day, be a hero. You're really gonna appreciate yourself if you do and I'm sure your wife will appreciate it. So there's a great opportunity to play to the procrastinators. So Kimberly, why don't you walk us through conceptually the first email and just kinda hit some of the high points?

Kimberly: Okay, all right and like I said before, if I'm getting too in the weeds and too detailed, just stop me, but I will run through this. Email number one is the warm up email where you announce your offer for the first time. You wanna let them know at Valentine's Day is coming up so they don't, like Patrick was just saying, procrastinators, people are gonna forget. You don't want them to miss the date.

So it's also a good idea in this first email to share a gift guide or even just a simple list of gifts suggestions of things that you have. You can offer an e-gift card, or you could promote wishlist ideas in a pre-Valentine's Day email, so that your subscribers can point their significant other to the right gift. And then you want to share your offer, whatever it is, you know, original paintings, or prints, or whatever you're offering, plus the scarcity, urgency element. You know, how many you have, what the expiration date is.

So general subject line tips, you know, if you use the framework and again, there's gonna be a detailed blog post about this so you don't have to remember this right now, but deal plus scarcity slash urgency framework which is Valentine's Day sale on select art. 25% off until tomorrow at five p.m. eastern standard time or art makes an unforgettable Valentine's Day gift. 25% off for the next 24 hours only. And other just general subject line tips in your subject line, you wanna make it clear that this is a special Valentine's Day promotion.

Experian marketing services did a study and found that the highest performing subject lines feature gift and card ideas, personalized greetings, a heart symbol, or the word sweet. And you can also use words like perfect, ideal, gift, or other similar words in your subject line. Just so that you're indicating it's a holiday promotion and if it's possible in your email program, I don't know if most people probably use MailChimp, I think you can do this in MailChimp, but if you use a heart symbol to make the subject line stand out. Is that possible Patrick?

Patrick: Yeah it is and we've got a blog post on how to do that that we can include. Taylor, include that in the show notes, but we can even do another one, too, how you mix in some of the kind of the romantic emoji into your subject line to really make it pop.

Kimberly: So then some subject line examples, now some of these that I'm gonna read off are kind of long and shorter subject lines tend to work better, but that all depends on your audience and how engaged they are. So you may, and these will be in the blog post to follow. So no worries if you don't remember any of this. For example, the heart symbol and then 2 14 is coming, another heart symbol, and then 20% off select gifts for a limited time. Or memorable Valentine's Day gifts, 25% off, and then enter your time element for 24 hours, 48 hours, til Tuesday at 3, whatever.

Art makes an unforgettable Valentine's Day gift, then your percentage off for a limited time. Art makes the best Valentine's Day gift, percentage off through and then enter the date, you know, the Valentine's Day gifts you really want. Sweet savings on Valentine's Day art gifts. Love is an original art gift and then your timeliness and scarcity element and things like that. So there'll be a few more examples in the blog post that follows and so you know, using scarcity and urgency phrases like time sensitive, ends tomorrow at noon, last chance, last day, final hours, expiring soon, this deal expires tonight, and that kind of thing. Again, the blog post will have more examples of those scarcity and urgency phrases that you can use.

Patrick: We talk about how critical the scarcity is in the subject lines and you know, I'm subscribed to many of our customer's email lists and so I get to see the stuff that they send out and we have a lot of people that didn't add that element and you know, I think there's a little bit of hesitation there, like a little bit of fear among some people that that's just not my personality to throw that type of type of stuff in there, and you know, I just don't like doing that.

And I'm telling you, everybody's gotta get over it. The way the human brain is wired, if there's not any urgency to it, there never will be any urgency. So you can either put it on there and sell or not, but yeah. So, we'll definitely continue to beat that drum throughout the rest of the year and every time that we do one of these on, you know, one of the big holiday discounts. But yeah, let's talk about body copy tips.

Kimberly: Yeah, yeah, and to just go back to what you were just saying about procrastinators, I mean people need that. Like I don't, I get hundreds and hundreds of emails a day and I don't get upset when I get an email from a retailer whose list I've signed up for, who I wanna hear from. So when they send me emails that say 20% off through tomorrow only, that doesn't upset me. So, if you're sending to people who are on your list, you know, especially if you were sending the romancing off to route, they're not gonna be... I mean generally they're not gonna be offended by that.

So with things to write, you just have to get over that. So anyway, onto general body copy tips, as I was saying to you, Valentine's Day gift ideas right in the email or you know, click over to your website where you give some suggestions, because that is one of the best ways to add value for your subscribers because lots of them don't have a clue what to give, which is why they fall back on the, you know, the lame flowers and candy thing. So, art is much more memorable and special, so you wanna highlight that in your email. I mean giving gift suggestions is a wonderful way to do that. So you could put that in your first email.

You wanna promise timely delivery, that's important. You wanna add a P.S. that we iterate your offer and the expiration date, because some people only read the P.S., because they've been trained from reading so many marketing emails that the important bits will always be repeated there. So it might still redundant. I know some people have some pushback to that, but a P.S. is just throw your offer again and the expiration date in there. And then, some body copy examples, I'll just be really brief here, because this will be in the detailed blog post. But you could do some variation of this, like anybody can give flowers and chocolate, but you're not anybody.

So this year give the gift he or she will never forget, a one of a kind piece of art, and then maybe you could say, need some ideas? Check out the gift guide I made especially for you at my website here and then link to a page on your website that has your gift suggestions or just throw them right in the email and then add your offer plus the time, scarcity urgency element, then your sign off, and then a P.S. that reiterates your offer and the expiration date. So that's one. The blog post will have sort of three variations of that theme, so it can be brief. It can be short, but you know, giving some suggestions of gifts in that first email you send, it's just a really good and helpful thing to do. So that email-wise.

Patrick: I love the first line of that P.S. that you used.

Kimberly: Anybody can give flowers and chocolate, but you're not anybody.

Patrick: I would guys, I would straight jack that one and run with it. I love that line.

Kimberly: Yeah and then in the blog post we can say a couple more like that, but the other one I said that I like, too, is because flowers die, chocolates get eaten, but art lasts forever.

Patrick: The both of those are solid gold. Honestly, steal those and run with them, folks. Those are both really swell. Those are way better than some of the emails that we're sending. But to slap a bow on the P.S. thing, I nerd out on the stats and in Art Storefronts we send a tremendous amount of emails as I'm sure you guys are all aware. I mean we're hammering them all the time and we see absolutely fantastic results from the P.S.

The P.S. just works and it's absolutely something you guys should experiment with. It works just as effectively in a discount email as it does in a romance email as well and a lot of times, I agree with Kimberly, you'll get people that are just gonna read that. They don't have time to mess around with anything else. Oh there's a P.S. let me just read that. So, I think that's a fantastic tip. Let's get going to email number two.

Kimberly: All right, so email number two is sort of a recap and reminder and I know that you say you all say at Art Storefronts to you wanna send this one to un-opens that didn't, so I know that that is sort of your protocol. So when I was writing up these notes for the webinar I didn't include that.

What I actually said is like, you know, pay attention to how many sales you got from your first email and if you got a bunch you can use the same language again in the second email or you can change it up if you didn't get a bunch of sales. But if you're sending to un-opens, that might change slightly. So 'cause if you're sending to un-opens obviously you can use exactly the same message you used in the first one if you want to.

Patrick: We'll have detailed information on the sending to un-opens as well and you know, I would just say that there's a concept in marketing called effective frequency and it basically means how many times you've been exposed to a message until you make a purchase. And in most cases, and I would say in most cases there's golden goal to what the number is, but it's usually much more than one, right?

So, when we talk about sending the emails to un-opens, it's just so insanely powerful. I mean, it's another one of those things that's terrifying for people like oh my gosh, people are gonna unsubscribe. How many emails am I sending? I'm completely blowing up this person's email box. Why would I do this? They didn't see your first email. They didn't open it and in many cases what people don't realize and you don't hear a lot of people talking about, if they don't open it, whether it's a situation they didn't see it, or not, all you really did with that email, was you had a tiny little billboard on the side of the freeway. And in this case, it was just your name and the subject line 'cause that's all they saw, right?

You're motoring through your email box and all they saw was your name and the subject line. So that was your first shot, right? And when the un-opens comes in, it just gives you another shot and in many times, they actually end up appreciating you for doing it and again, the stats are incredible. I mean every time we do it at Art Storefronts we just see tremendous tremendous results. So, again, detail that on the blog post, but why don't you give us your version of email number two?

Kimberly: Yeah, so what I said for email number two is to, you know, just do the same deal as before. Just use one of the messages from the previous examples which will be detailed in the blog post like three variations of that first email. You can just do, in case you missed it, and then paste in the body copy from the email you sent the first time. Email marketers do it all the time. I get emails all the time that's exactly the same as the first email they sent me and the only thing that's different is at the top of the email it will say in case you missed it, or you can say wanted to make sure you saw this, and then paste in the body copy from the email that you sent previously.

Now, that's what I was saying before. If you got a whole lot of sales from your first email, that second message could be virtually identical, but if you didn't, you could switch up your messaging on the second email, but to speak to sort of what you were just saying, Patrick, is that your Valentine's Day sale is gonna be competing with hundreds of other deals people are getting in their inbox. So because if they didn't open the first one or maybe they opened it but didn't click through or read all of it, that doesn't mean they're gonna be upset to get another email from you. And in fact, people are trained when they're on enough marketing lists, they know they're gonna get two to three to six emails about the same deals.

So they often won't and I know I do that, I don't even pay attention to email number one, 'cause I know I'm gonna get it again. I'm gonna get either that same email, or two or three more emails in the same sales sequence and I know that's partly because I'm a copywriter and a marketer, but if you just pay attention to your inbox, you'll see that as well. So, you know, you have to send that second email and if you use the same language that you used in the first email it's not a big deal. You know, just prime it by saying in cased you missed it or wanted to make sure you saw this. So that's generally what I do in my second email. As far as changing the language, if I don't think it's a huge deal if you don't do it, what are your thoughts on that?

Patrick: I think, you know, knowing most of our customers and where they are in their journey, I'm willing to go for the low hanging fruit. Send emails, please, send them. All right, I'm happy to just start there and I'm so encouraged when I see them show up in my box. Rather than getting bogged down and is this the right subject line or is that the right subject line, follow what we do in the blog post, don't get too far into the weeds on it and just send them and send them, right?

I mean that's literally the key. So let's go right into 'cause we're about 11 50 with our audio issues and Murphy coming to harangue us. So let's talk briefly about email number three and then we can finish up the last few minutes with any additional questions. So if you guys have any other questions for me or Kimberly, throw them in the questions box and we'll deal with them as soon as we get through email number three.

Kimberly: Okay, yeah, so email number three is really simple, can be really short, it's just a reminder email that the deal is expiring. You know you wanna let people know your offer's ending ASAP so possible subject lines or last day for free shipping on select Valentine's Day gifts or last day for percentage off, whatever you're offering on select Valentine's Day gifts. This deal goes away at 11:59 p.m. tonight. V-Day sale use code LOVE20 and check out for 20% off, ends tonight at midnight, those sorts of things. And then, you know, the body copy can be really short and to the point.

It's a third email, so they likely at least glanced at one or two of the previous two emails or they've at least noticed the subject line coming from you in their inbox. So, you know, the entire email could say something like ends today or any other scarcity elements or phrase. Special Valentine's Day sale and then tell them what you're offering again and then your call to action like shop the sale, click to buy, buy now, and then reiterate the expiration ends two 12 at midnight or whatever your cut off is.

You know, it could be longer than that, but basically you simply need to reiterate your deal, when it expires, and how to get it, and you need to make sure that the web page your call to action takes visitors to on your website is crystal clear about what your special offer is, when it expires, and how to get it. The path to buy needs to be super clear and easy, easy enough that a monkey could do it, because what often happens is you send someone to your website from your email and they get there and there's no language on the page that reiterates anything you sad on your email and that's confusing and will cause people not to buy. So just make sure that there's that connected path from your emails to your website.

Patrick: Yeah, totally agree with that. That in and of itself should probably be some video content that we make. You know, some things that you generally wanna avoid, but if you're linking directly to your category, page, or you know, the main page or your store where they're looking at everything if it's store wide. You should be pretty good on Art Storefronts, but we can delve in some further topics on that and I think, you know, to sum things up and I think we're learning on these webinars, right? One of the huge things is I think it's important to be able to hear us talking about it and I'm hoping that the people are getting value out of it, but a lot of times it's difficult to have the live video streaming and really be able to show everything.

So I think just hearing about it conceptually is good and then I'm really encouraged to, you know, hammer home some of these subject materials and some of those great copy lines that you had. But, you know, to reiterate it's, we're gonna find out, and this will be at the top of the blog post, I think this is really important. We're gonna find out what that average shipping time is so that people can get it, they can get the order in time for Valentine's Day. We're gonna work backwards off that date. We're gonna give you the detailed schedule of when these emails should go. You gotta send that first email and that first email can be the deal itself, it can be letting people know the deal is coming.

There's a couple of different ways you can play it. Again, we'll get into it, but it's send the first deal with the discount, make sure there's scarcity in the subject line. Resend that email to un-opens. Send the final email that says the deal's about to expire in 24 48 hours. Make sure you order before Valentine's Day cuts off. So that's the basics of the plan and you know, if you can have one takeaway until the blog post is published with the detailed stuff is think about what you what you want to do as a discount, whether you want to run that on your entire store, store wide, or just specific items or whatever the case may be.

You can start working that up and then we're gonna get the detailed marching orders and if you guys have questions, and I see a couple of questions that are in here already, then I'll address those and then I'm just gonna go right into the ones that were submitted ahead of time. Okay, so the first question that we got ahead of time was from Karen Mayer and this was at the savvyartmarket.com. And she's worried about unsubscribes right? “I lost quite a few subscribers to my email list in December. I wondered if it was because I sent out too many emails about the pricing deals.”

This is a super common one. This comes up all the time and let me tell you, do not worry about unsubscribes. If they are gonna unsubscribe, they don't wanna hear from you, they don't wanna be on your list. It's a vanity metric at the end of the day and it is so easy to get caught up on worrying about it. One thing I will say that I think is important is, and Taylor, Kimberly's calling me on the other line, can you mute your microphone and call her? See if we can't get her back.

One of the things about unsubscribes and an important thing about unsubscribes, no don't worry about them. Keep moving forward. But, but, but, right? The but, but, but part is a very important thing that I want to address and it's not so obvious, right? We're advocating that you send you these discount out emails and these discount emails are critically important and they will lead to increased sales, but, here's the but part. They have to be in addition to regular romance emails that you send all the time, right? If you're just discounting all the time, then absolutely you're gonna burn your list and you're gonna get unsubscribes, you know, unless you're a daily deal site or something like that, or they're expecting it.

I mean, sureart.com does that all day long, but that's what they're expected to do. They're just like a daily deal site really at the end of the day. So, we do advocate that these discounting strategies that we're going over are in addition to your regular romantic emails that you're sending out. So, to put a bow on this one and specifically answer Karen, as long as you're doing both, do not worry about unsubscribes. There's a million different reasons that it happens. Do not focus on it, do not let it get you down in the dumps. Just keep rolling and stick to doing what you're doing and you're totally gonna be fine.

Okay, Daniel Sussman from danielsussman.net wrote in, he said let's talk about sex. That's actually, I threw that title in there. “Who buys more, men or women? And should I be marketing directly towards a particular gender or be gender neutral to the extent possible? How strong a role should sediment play?” It's an interesting question. I think unless you have a big list, or you have a product that you know is really only geared and when I say product to subject material, for whatever reason, it's really only geared towards women or men. For instance, if all of your artwork is of AR 15s and machine guns and nine millimeters or whatever, probably gonna be mostly to men, right?

If you're painting, I don't know, princesses. You're gonna primarily geared towards women. So, aside from that, it's the wrong thing to worry about and the wrong thing to focus on, especially when you have a small list. I think, just email market to everybody and don't worry about this. This is just a detail that you don't need to get worried about. Don't worry about whether it's men or women and tailoring your message in that regard. Worry about growing that email list and getting it bigger. Worry about driving more traffic to the site. I think those are the critical components.

Okay, next question comes from Sonia MacNeil and their website's miketaylorphoto.com. They've got a question about about romance emails. Do you recommend any specific type of romance email? Images, messages, no pun intended Valentine's Day be sent prior to the Valentine's Day email authors? And great question, absolutely I do and I wanna talk about it. In, you know, and I think we owe you guys way more material on how to send better romance emails and how to expand upon it, but I think my favorite marketing guy that I think just describes this so succinctly with just a great analogy is, he's got a book and it's Gary Vaynerchuck and it's called “Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook.”

And the concept there is the jabs are the romance emails. So jab jab jab, the right hook is your big discount email and so what is he talking about? The jabs are what you throw out all the time and you know what they have on them? They don't have save 10% on them. They don't have buy now on them. They don't have come immediately to my website and buy now or any that type of flash language that you normally see. They're just great content for the sake of great content. They're not overtly discount emails. Let me get some examples.

If you're a photographer, take some pictures in your studio. Take some pictures of your process. You're a landscape photographer, so let's say for some you here, and Mike Taylor Photo, he's a night photographer, he takes pictures of the sky and the Milky Way and they're long exposure and they're amazing. His process I know is really difficult and complicated about how he blends the exposure and how long he kept the shutter open and what F-stop was he at, and what lens was he using or what tripod? All of those can be included in romance emails. Fantastic romance emails. So you can talk about your setup, talk about some photos, post some photos and really just anything about your process, your fans will end up loving it.

Just don't go for the jugular in any of those emails. If you're an artist, same situation, same situation. Talk about what you're working on. Talk about what you're inspiration was for a particular piece. Talk about why you wanted to paint it. Talk about the process. Show some photos of a particular artwork in the various different stages. Yeah, again, show your studio. So it can be anything, anything. It's really the most critical aspect of it is, again, that you don't go for the jugular unless it's the holidays, right? Unless it's Valentine's Day and I think that's the key.

But I really do wanna delve into some more really concrete examples of what this could and should look like going forward and we will have some more blog posts talking about it and I'll probably attack it on the podcast as well, some more creative ideas about what you could do, but, you know, you guys are all in the image business and you have fantastic imagery to show off and there's a whole bunch of different ways to do it. So that's literally the critical thing that you need to do.

So, Todd Starks, “Art Marketing Calendar, reason why I signed up for the Art Storefront's marketing calendar, I haven't gotten any emails yet with the timing, content guidelines.” You're on the list Todd. We've been lagging. The New Years was crazy for us, too, but this is kind of the first kick into it, this webinar right? So we're gonna get you warmed up for Valentine's Day. We're gonna continue to give you guys more information on the romancing emails that you should be sending, especially frequency, so don't worry, that's on us. We are definitely gonna get rolling.

Okay so one of the questions that we got early on is, can we offer gift cards or certificates. If so, how? You can, I'm not even sure on the software side of things how we can potentially enable that, but I think... I'm not sure if we've got gift card or certificates. Chris, are you on? I'm gonna unmute you. Do you know if we have that technology capable right out of the box, right now?

Chris: I have seen someone that's doing them. I'm not sure, I wanna check on how they're doing exactly, but I know someone definitely just sold the other day a couple of gift cards. So, that's definitely an option.

Patrick:Yeah, so we'll have to circle back, and email you directly. If you can re-ask your question with your email address so we can send it to you, but I think, you absolutely can and those are great opportunities to offer a price point that's a little bit lower, you know? And I think one of the critical things that gives me an opportunity to talk about something we got into last week which is we're seeing some customers have a tremendous level of success in selling calendars.

And I said on last weeks webinar, I mean, I don't think I've had a calendar on my wall, ever. I mean maybe when I was like six years old. But for whatever reason, I don't understand is what I'm saying, but for whatever reason, they sell. And they're selling really well. I mean we have some people that have sold hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and if we leave the concept of what that is, the calendar on the shelf for a minute. Let's talk about the concept that I think is critical in this and it dove tails, with the gift cards or the gift certificates, right? It's important to try and have in your store some lower price point items and the calendar absolutely covers that as well as gift cards or gift certificates, right?

And, you know, you've got people that are following you that are invested in you. They know, they like, they trust you, they like your work and maybe they're just not ready to make a huge purchase yet and that's okay, right? You still just wanna get the purchase. All the statistics and eCommerce, all of them show the people that have made a purchase, I like to think of the people that pulled out a credit card are far more likely to pull out the credit card again after they've done it the first time. And so a calendar, a gift card, a gift certificate is a great way to do that. So it gives you the opportunity to have a much lower price point item and you know, for photographers and for the ones that are selling prints, you have a pretty good shot at you know, just offering a print rolled up in a tube and being able to get some of those lower price points in there. But especially for those that are selling originals.

Like, if you're selling an original, your lowest price point might be a thousand bucks and that's a hard sale to make. Excuse me, and it's a big purchase, so you're not gonna see the kind of frequency there. And, yeah so I think that's great and we'll follow up with exactly how the gift cards or certificates work. Okay, next question is, so should romance emails not include discounts, and offer discounts only during the holidays? Here's where we get into the sticky territory, right? 'Cause we gotta bunch of customers that are offering discounts to a certain extent in the romance emails, right? And they're having a level of success with that and I think it's a fine line that you walk in that regard.

So I think here's how I would approach it conceptually. If your email feels like a discount email, via the subject line, via the language and the body copy, via the very beginning of the email. If that's my immediate impression of it, then that's not good. Then it's a discount email and our brains are wired, and this, the year of our lord, 2017, to ignore those things, right? It's like advertisements in the sidebar on websites. Like, does anyone look at those things? No, you don't. So we automatically turn our eyes off to those, but, but, and here's the but, if you include just some great imagery in the front of the email, you talk about some stuff that's not sales-y and then you get down to the bottom and you do a little oh hey by the way, if you do wanna buy these things, these things are on sale.

You could totally do that, you could totally do that, but I think, personally from a psychological standpoint, you know, and I think I love an analogy on this one and here's the analogy I give and it's mildly graphic, but I think we're all adults here. We can deal with it. I hope this goes over okay, but the discount email and especially, especially, especially for people that are just getting to know you perhaps they just came onto your list, you know, you just got their email, you've emailed them for the first time. You don't wanna be that guy in the bar that goes and walks up to a woman and says have sex with me, let's go home. That's what a heavy discount email is to a first time user.

Like, oh hey, I don't even know you and you just pulled this giant canvas off your back, rammed it in my face and said, I'll give you 50% off if you buy it right now. And I think that's a great way to think about it conceptually. So you have to romance and that's where the romance email concept comes from. You know, you gotta go on a couple of dates and go meet her parents and take her out to dinner and do some incredible things and have some great conversations and at the very end of all that, after this person knows and likes and trust you, and is benefited from some of your content, then they're ready to get hit with the discount.

Now, don't worry about timing. You still have to send the discount stuff, so if I joined your email yesterday and I'm gonna get hit with the discount email, it's okay, but just doing it all the time is just really, it's pushing it too hard. It's just pushing it too hard. So, that's kind of the strategy that we advocate. I got a question from Michelle Silverman about email frequency. “How many emails are too many?” And, you know, this is an age old classic of the tale. There's no right answer. It's different for everybody. I mean, I'm on email lists that email every day and do so with a great level of success, and I open a tremendous amount of them and I know some people that email once a month and that's it.

So, I can't tell you how many is too many. I mean I can tell you with Art Storefronts the amount of email that we send is just bananas. I mean, it's ridiculous, we're emailing all the time, but we like to think we provide a lot of value in that and as a result our unsubscribe rates are pretty good. So, let me give you and then Kimberly I'm happy to hear your thoughts on this, too or I'd love to hear your thoughts about this, but here's what I would say. Get discount when the big holidays are in, or you know, maybe an additional one or two times a year. The rest of the time, you send romance emails, right? In a perfect world I'd love you guys to send a romance email once a week or once every two weeks. Much easier to do if you're a photographer, much harder to do if you're a painter or someone that's just selling originals.

That being said, we're gonna come up with some creative ways for you guys to do it, but I think that would be the perfect pace is discounting on all the holidays, maybe an additional one or two times a year, and sending a romance email all the rest of the time once a week. But if you can only do once a month, that's a great place to start. If you can only do once every two weeks, also awesome. Even if you could get to like two a week, also amazing, right?

So, there's really no guaranteed right playbook, but almost in every instance, you know, if you have a decent sized list and you actually look at the stats, if people like you and like what you do and you've got beautiful imagery, they're not gonna be bummed to get email from you. They're just not. As long as you don't shove discounts on them all the time, you're gonna be okay. So, you know, my immediate answer would be that you almost can't email too many. You almost can't, but what are your thoughts on that one Kimberly?

Kimberly: Well I just, yeah, I think a lot depends on your audience and they will let you know, because some people will email you to tell you you're email too much and not unsubscribe. And if you set your expectations, this is why it's important when people are signing up, you know, you give them some inkling like, I, you know, sign up for my newsletter, I send out updates twice a month, or weekly-ish or whatever. That's what I do and that's what I tell my clients to do because then they know, they know how often they're gonna receive an email and if they enjoy hearing from you and you're providing value, you, you know, emailing once a week is fine.

Twice a month is fine, certainly once a month is fine and as long as you're doing the romance emails enough and providing value enough so that when you hit them with a sale, it's not the only thing they're getting. You'll be fine because, you know, like you were talking about earlier on in the presentation if the first email they get from you is a sale and then the next one and the next one. That will upset people, but if you're sending the value added email, the romance email, and then you're hitting them up with a sale, Valentine's, Christmas, special sales, other things, it'll be fine.

So, you sort of need to gauge, and also it depends on how much time you have. I mean, can you sit down and write a romance email once a week, or can you only do it every other week? But, I think as long as you're mixing it up, then you'll be fine in sending an email a few times a month and it's a good way to do things. And if you go on the internet and research this, you'll learn every different thing on earth from email every day, to email once every other month. So do what, the other thing's do what you can do, but be consistent. So if you decide you're gonna email every two weeks, email every two weeks. I think that's really important as well.

Patrick: Yeah, I think that sounded nice and I always like going through the analogies and this question pieced out this analogy perfectly. Let's say we're all shopping for a mattress and we all go into the giant mattress shop and everybody starts trying out the ones this one, that one, the other one. Everybody's gonna end up liking a different one, right? Because it's just such a personal preference and that's really what the email frequency is, too, right? There's no exact right answer how that goes. I got a couple other questions that have come in that I wanna get going here. I see here, what about a January clearance sale? Is that a turn off? No, I don't think that's a turn off. I think that's actually a great idea. I think that just make sure that, you know, you're not just constantly discounting and I think we went over that.

Like you just can't keep constantly, when I say constantly discounting, it's not just constantly discounting, right? It's always going for the sale and asking for the sale. It's that jab jab jab right hook, thing. You can't just be swinging right hooks all the time. That's not gonna work, you're gonna piss people off. So you gotta do some jabbing which is the romance email. So as long as you have some of those mixed in there, yeah, January clearance sale is a great idea. Are there samples of Valentine emails? What we'll do is in the blog post, we'll include a bunch of the different copy tips. In terms of actual samples of Valentine emails, we'll see what we can do to boost that post up, but yeah, we'll do the best we can to get you guys some samples, too, and again, we'll have this mid-week next week, at the very latest. What else here are there?

So how many days in between emails. We'll address that as well. I mean I think, you know, the key is the shipping time and once we have that solved, we'll talk about how ahead of time to get and, you know, again, it's the mattress analogy, right? You gotta just kinda do what works for you. So we're gonna set out some rough guidelines, give you the rough timelines. By all means do what you're comfortable with. You can copy the timing verbatim. You can adjust up a little bit to taste. The critical portion being just do it.

Got one comment and one more question. “I've noticed that I have to make my cut off around five to seven days if I do it one to two days I get a lot of customers saying they just opened it and it already expired.” Right, so you're talking about the window, the period of time in which you keep the discount open, how long that is, and you know, really the key is just having the discount and having it expire. I think that's the far more important part than how long until it expires. I would be happy and consider it a huge win if everybody used it, everybody used scarcity and they used it in the subject lines, I think.

We've got another one here that says, “can the subjects be vast like about social issues, poetry, painting?” And I'm assuming that means in the romance emails. Looks like yep, you said the romance emails. Yes, absolutely, absolutely they can. You know, it's really just providing valuable content for free. I mean if you look at what we do as Art Storefronts, how we grow our business, we're constantly just emailing out content. Constantly, constantly, constantly emailing out content and there's no buy it button in it and there's no, you know, well we certainly have the demo request in some of them, 'cause those are important to us. But it's a tremendous amount of value is the big takeaway, right? And it's value for free and that's really the critical psychology on it.

So, if you're into painting and you're into poetry and you're into social issues, and the social issues inform your decisions as an artist, then yeah, absolutely figure out a way to craft some romance emails around them and send them out and you'll see which ones do well and which ones don't do well. The social issues you could probably clearly get into some sticky situations there with religions or politics, might wanna steer clear of those, but yeah, those are absolutely fantastic romance email subjects. And on that note, I think good time to shut it down. I do wanna try and keep these things at an hour. Any parting thoughts Kimberly?

Kimberly: Um, just one really really quick aside little story. I just wanted to say that the best Valentine's Day gift I ever ever got was an original piece of art, a piece of pottery that the boyfriend I was dating at the time gave to me and I can see it across the room from me right now and I've gotten a lot of other wonderful gifts over the years, and some not so great.

But that is the one that sticks out in my mind and it was given to me, I don't know, something like 15 or 20 years ago and I still have it. So, the mindset is that, you know, art is the gift that lasts forever and, you know, if the person gets that, they're gonna be a hero. So just keep in mind that people want to hear from you and they want to give an amazing gift that's unforgettable and art is that gift. So that would be my closing thoughts.

Patrick Yeah, I love that, and you definitely need to put more of that type of language down because you're selling me on the webinar here. I'm now thinking about whether or not I need to buy a piece of art for my wife. So thanks everybody for showing up. Valentine's Day is coming, let's get those emails out.