Hey guys, welcome to Office Hours #5, Patrick here. In today's webinar, we're going to cover auto-responders, and to a lesser extent marketing automation. What they are, why you need one, and why they really are magic, this creepy GIF aside. So let's dive into the webinar outline. So we're going to do some announcements first. We're going to introduce marketing automation slash magic, we're going to talk about auto-responders and in particular the welcome mat, which I think is the first one that you're going to want to get going, and then we'll get into the Q&A as always.

So again, it bears repeating: anytime you have a question throughout the whole thing, marketing-related, fire it in, the questions are the most important thing while we're running these webinars that we want to get as many of them, try to answer as many of your questions as we can to the best of our limited abilities. I kid, I kid, we're pretty capable. Alright so let's get to the announcements, what's going up and what's going down.

First on the podcast, podcast is rocking out of the gates already. We are incredibly thrilled with that, so thank you for those that have been listening. If you have not subscribed, I really encourage you to subscribe, it's the artmarketingpodcast.com. We've got in on a different URL for a couple of different reasons. And got the next episode, is a precursor to Facebook advertising, which is something that we've needed to do, so I put down a pretty heavy one on some of the things you need to get in place in order for you to be confident in Facebook ads right out of the gate. It's a good foundational episode again. So there's, you know, a next episode preview on that one, and it also dovetails really well with what we're going to talk about today, because the auto-responder, and in particular, you know, the welcome sequence, the e-mail welcome sequence that we're going to cover later is critical to advertising.

And just so you can see it, I've got these fancy plates in here. We've got in on here, you can watch it via this player. If you subscribe, and this is the ArtMarketingPodcast.com or podcast.artstorefronts.com. You can subscribe via iTunes, via email, we'll email you every time there's an episode, or you can do it via RSS, or you can just search in whatever podcaster you use. And then just some notes, what you see, you see the episode. All of the links that we mention in these podcast episodes we're going to show in the show notes, which is a pretty standard thing to do. But in addition to that, we also include the transcribe.

You know, sometimes it really helps. I listen to a tremendous amount of podcasts, and I just love them. Sometimes I hear something and I really want to like, dig into what it is, right, so this is a pretty cool trick, I might as well actually show you this. And this works for most of our videos, too, but you can click to show the transcribe, press Control + F on your computer or Command + F on a Mac, and you can search, let's say it's podcasts, right? Well let's say you were mentioning, I can't remember what was in this episode, you know if you just wanted to search your name, or if there was anything. But we put these transcribes on every single solitary one, specifically for that, it's there to show you. And then also too, if you want to download a PDF of the show notes, we're doing that too. So if you want to print it out and read it that way then it's transcribed. So all of the podcast episodes will continue to have that. You can subscribe, and if you love it, you're enjoying it, click here leave a review.

We would totally appreciate you for that. Okay, moving on, webinar replays. So this is, what, I think our fifth one since we started doing the Office Hours ones, and you'll see the customer service team is starting to do some internally, and we're still learning, we're still figuring it out and kind of meandering our way and learning our way with it. But we do have a site that's dedicated for replays, and our plan is to try and get the replay up as soon as possible, as quickly as possible, as we can. We run them on Fridays, so it's usually Monday or Tuesday that we get it up. And it is basically officehours.artstorefronts.com. Now, we'll always send you a reminder that hey, you know, here's the link the webinar that you missed, you can go there. And this is not password protected yet, because we're still figuring it out, we're moving pretty quickly here.

So we are going to password protect this, but if you're logged into your Art Storefronts site, you'll be able to log right in here, because these are really just for customers, they're meant specifically for you, despite the fact that the outside world is probably seeing them occasionally right now, that's not gonna be the case forever. So, anytime that you're in here, the Ask A Question bar is everywhere. It doesn't matter, you know, what webinar is coming up, throw your questions in here, your name, your email, and submit the question. The earlier you guys get your questions in, the more time the marketing staff will have to chase them down and figure out the best answers that we can for you. So I encourage you to use those boxes.

One other housekeeping note in regards to this. In terms of the webinars and the replays, you know, who has the time to watch an hour webinar replay after you've already been on an hour webinar, that's two hours, and that's a lot of time, right. As good old Sweet Brown here says, “ain't nobody got time for that.” So one thing I did want to introduce is, we've got these video table of contents, and I'm not sure if anybody knew that or didn't know that, and we probably haven't done a good job of explaining it, so let me just show you what I mean. So here I am, I've clicked on number four, so this was the webinar that we had last, whatever it was, two weeks ago. And you can see, if you caught the webinar and you don't want to watch the whole thing and go fast-forwarding around, we've got these video highlights, which is the table of contents.

So all you've gotta do is click, and this thing will just launch. I don't know if you're hearing double audio there, but it'll launch to wherever, we don't need this, it'll launch to wherever that was, that exact part, whether it's your question, whether it's how to setup the Facebook pixels, and it takes our guys a long time to make these things. It's kinda arduous and a pain the butt, as Taylor will tell you. So I really encourage you to use them, I'm not sure it was immediately aware. But on just about any video that we embed anywhere you can jump right in and do this, boom.

Click to it, and so the webinar replay doesn't need to be an arduous thing. You can jump right in, go grab the piece that you want, and bounce out, and it'll always be there, so you can always come back, and you don't have go monkeying around with moving through the video here, here, is that it, is that it, which is not quite as good. So there's that, I encourage you guys to use those. Hope you think they're cool. Questions, I mentioned the questions, but again, look. Ask more questions, ask more questions, guys! So if you have a question, click the box, boom, we'll send it, and we'll prep, we'll get into it, and we'll give your question way more love, preferential treatment.

So okay, that's it for announcements, let's get into marketing automation. And it's a big fancy word, so I think it bears explaining, right? So let's give you the kind of formal definition, and I grabbed this off the web, this is what you would see if you got on Google, but let's just read it anyway. So marketing automation refers to software that exists with the goal of automating marketing actions. Many marketing departments have to automate repetitive tasks such as emails, social media, and other website actions. So the technology of marketing automation makes these tasks easier. That was complicated, let's simplify that in a word or a few words.

Things happen automatically without any extra work from you. Literally, set it and forget it. And sorta means, you need to measure how it's doing, but you set it and forget it. So let's talk about the automation that most of you already have. You've got it right now, you just don't know it. Most of you don't know it, in fact 95 percent of you are not even running this, and I blame us, our storefronts, utterly totally completely and squarely, given the fact that we've just done not a good enough job of explaining it. So let me detail it here quickly. Most of you are running the lead capture, most of you have a lead capture welcome pop-up here, 20 percent offer for first-time customers, right? So, where's the automation come in?

In the Art Storefronts system, we have it set up so that they'll automatically get the email with their coupon code, but then you can also automatically set up an email that will send on the third day, and we've got, how can I articulate this, we've got a case study blog post that we've already done on this, and we tested on a few of the different customers on our website, how much time, how much delay to put into the offer here, right? And we found in our testing, I believe if memory serves, that a three day expiration on this first 20 percent off your first order coupon code was yielding the best results.

So we built some of this automation into the lead capture tool. So what happens is if somebody opts in on the website, they get the coupon code, and it only lasts for three days. Well what do you want to do? You want to send them an email on the last day and let's just say Jim opted in. You say, "Hey Jim, thanks for opting in, friendly reminder, you only have 24 hours left until the coupon code expires." So let's get some automation going on that, let's make that happen automagically, automatically. So we've got baked into the lead capture tool already, it's sitting there waiting for you guys to set up, we've got a blog post on it. And you see it's just a simple drop down, like send, you write the reminder, you set the amount of dings that you want it to send, and boom, it's going to send it for you. You set it, you forget it, it's running.

So this blog post is going to go in the show notes. Also, I'm sure there's a Knowledge Base article, we'll track that down, put that in the show notes. But all of you guys have this already, so you should incorporate it into your lead capture, and most aren't, and it's mega effective. You'll be surprised at what happens once they don't just get the coupon code, they get the reminder, right? And how often do we talk about scarcity and reminders, like, "Hey, your discount is going to expire today! So if you were even thinking about it." Just that subtle nudge, it's a little win that works quite a bit of the time. So really encourage you guys to get that set up. Set it and forget it, you can not worry about it for awhile and move on to your next marketing effort. And depending how well it works, perhaps come back later and do some tweaking.

So good, let's get into auto responders, what they are and why you need one. So first let's take a quick poll, Taylor will you fire the poll off? And I wanted to make a quick poll and find out where you guys are in terms of your email software. And what are you using? Are you using the baked in Art Storefront stuff? Are you on the MailChimp free version? I know we've encouraged quite a few of you to get on that MailChimp free version. Or are you on the MailChimp paid version? Have you stepped up to something else? I don't know, a third party. And that poll should be full screen right now, if Taylor's on it. So if that's the case, let me know. I'd be curious to see where you guys are in your journey, because a lot of this pertains to which software you use. And there's no wrong answers here, it's just part of the trade craft.

Alright so, what are we talking about here? We're talking about a series of emails that go automatically based on an action, that's what this automation is. It's a series of emails that go automatically based on an action. And it could be anything. So in the case of the lead capture example that we just went over, right, this series of emails goes after they've filled out your lead capture box. And so there it is, there's the series of emails that you set and forget, they go automatically. Or the action could be when they sign up for your list. Or let's say, if they abandon your shopping cart. You can trigger these automation sequences off just about anything. And today we're going to talk about the one that I want all of you to start with, the lead capture one aside, the lead capture one's a no-brainer, you've gotta get that one going on immediately if you don't have it.

That's take away number one from this webinar if there is one. But number two is the welcome sequence. So let's talk about how Art Storefronts does it, you know, and I reference my all-too-often-mentioned know, like, and trust us. It's the same for you, that's how Art Storefronts does it. So if you come to Art Storefronts, and if you, and some of you might be new customers, you probably didn't do this too long ago. You opt in for a piece of content or to sign up for the newsletter, and the next thing you know, you get seven or eight or nine emails over the next few days explaining what we do, educating you on what our software looks like, what our content marketing looks like, articles that we think you need to read, why art sells online, and all of that is to build trust, to get the customer to know, like and trust us, right? That's how Art Storefronts does it, and that auto-responder is running at all times.

Now this know, like, and trust concept is absolutely critical. It's critical for Art Storefronts, it's critical for every single solitary one of you on this webinar. It does not matter if you're selling originals, arts, you're a print studio and art gallery. Know, like, trust, understand the power of this concept. The better your buyer knows you and likes you, the more likely they are to do business with you. That's how it works, end of sentence. So the question becomes, “how do we speed that process up?” The know, like, and trust process. And that's where the welcome sequence comes in. Now I want to do a quick disclaimer before I get onto the next step. Depending on where you are in your business, is how you should roll this out and how you should launch this. I don't want anybody to get discouraged, but it is a really important conceptual building block, so it is something I need everybody thinking about. But if you're just getting started, don't worry I'll circle back on how you can make this happen.

You know, if you've got the free MailChimp account, we'll talk about that. If you have a paid MailChimp account, we'll talk about that, or if you have a different provider. But first, you know, you've got options on how to do it all. So let's talk about what a good welcome sequence might look like, then we can jump to how you might put it into place, depending on where you are in your journey, right? So let's break down a good welcome sequence. And here's the big take away, it is literally no different than a normal relationship. That's it, that's how to think of it conceptually. You're trying to get this person to know, like, and trust you. So a great place to start is three to five emails tailored to whatever your situation is, whether you're selling prints or originals or printing or an art gallery.

Loose example: in email number one, it happens the minute they sign up for your email list. And on the next slide I'll have something a little bit more visual, we'll go through that. But email number one, you introduce yourself and you ask a question. Email number two that comes on day two, you talk about some of your best sellers, put those in the email. Email number three, you let people know that you share all your best stuff on Facebook, and here's a link to Facebook. Now, I've got the blog post coming in parentheses because as we were setting this webinar up we realized that, you know, there's enough of you guys doing different things that we're going to have to give you a couple of different versions of what a good sequence looks like. And we're encouraged to do that.

But let me give you the visual, right? So what is the action? The action is they opt into your list. And it really doesn't matter how they get onto your list, whether it's you add them via the fishbowl. Like let's say you're doing a gallery show and you're collecting business cards, and they're putting the business cards into the fishbowl, and you go home and you subscribe them. Or if they joined on your site, automatically. Or if they logged in to get the 20 percent off coupon. However they're getting onto your site, a great thing to do is fire an email right away that says, "Hey, how you doing, my name's Patrick. Thank you so much for joining my list, I really appreciate it. I'm gonna send you a few emails to introduce myself, it's kind of an intro sequence, but I've just got one question to ask you."

And we'll get into other reasons why I love asking a question on the first email, but it's great to do, and it's great if you just ask one question. And a good one to always do is, "So how did you hear about me?", right? Because you're curious to know how your marketing efforts are working. Did they come from the Facebook app? Did they come from an email? You know, this wouldn't work as well if you got the business card put in the fishbowl, but it doesn't matter, you ask anyway. Or you could say, "So can I ask you just one question, what drew you to my work?" Or if you're someone that had a bunch of local art show and you wanted to know whether or not somebody lived near you, you could say, "So where do you live, out of curiosity?" That one sounds a little creepy in hindsight, but just stick with the conceptual and we'll get into the details.

So then, the next day, you know, let's just say Steve opted into the list. "Hey Steve, I just wanted to show you a few of my best sellers over the years. These are the works that are most popular with everybody, that everybody always wants to see. Because you're new and just joined my list, I figure I'll send you these and see what you think." And "Oh, by the way, just to let you know, in addition to selling photos, I also offer photography workshops." Right, so there's another example. But you're giving them a few more layers of the onion, you're peeling back the onion a little bit.

Day three, and one can be just as simple as this, on day three, "And by the way, Steve, I really post some of my best stuff on Facebook all the time. If you could just check me out on Facebook, that would be the best way to stay in touch. Here's a link to my Facebook page." So even right there, and despite the fact that those examples were a little screwy, again, more defined blog post to come, you sent three emails automatically to people that have joined your list, without you having to do any work whatsoever, that's kind of introduced you a little bit, right? It's kind of introduced you a little bit. Let me give you an example potentially of what a four and five sequence would be. And so, when I say five, five days, five emails, it doesn't necessarily have to be five sequential days, it could be spread out a little bit more if you like. But it's best to do pretty quickly, in my experience.

Day four, "Hey, by the way, in addition to my," these are again an example, "in addition to my online store, I also run local gallery shows four times a year. I'll let you know ahead of time when those might be. Feel free to email me with questions you have any time." And on day five, right, day five would be the final email in the sequence, here's something I would do. "Here's what to expect from me going forward, Steve. I'm going to email you occasionally my latest and greatest stuff," I.e. romance emails, "and as a last reminder, you still have the eligibility of a first time discount, if you'd like to use that you can email me."

So there's an example of one two three four five emails that once you automate and set in place are going to be firing every time you get a subscriber. And the key is is that you set this in place, you stop worrying about it, and you know it's going to happen automatically. And what's going to take place is people are going to get to know and like and trust you a little bit quicker, right? Why is this awesome? The best way to think of any marketing automation you can build in is it's like a full time employee that never takes a coffee break, a bathroom break, no time off, and it's working around the clock on your behalf. How many employees do you have in your business currently, out of curiosity? With marketing automation, now you can have one more. And I think that's a profound concept. And it's amazing how well it works once you get it set up, it really just is.

So, the other thing is, everybody thinks like, well I think this is a common misconception, this is another great reason that the auto-responder works so well. Everybody thinks that somebody comes to your website, looks at every single solitary page on your website, completely gets to know you, then throws their email into your sign-up box, already knows who you are and knows everything, and is ready to buy. No they don't, that does not happen! That happens like one out of a million times, or one out of a hundred times. Most people barely know who you are, they saw some cool thing that caught their attention, they're throwing their email in there.

So now is the chance to introduce yourself. This is a chance for you to introduce yourself to your audience and do it automatically. I mean, each one of those emails in a sequence can literally be thought of as a date, and it's a great way to think about it, right? You know, we talk about this romance concept, you need to romance your prospective buyers and get to know them, so you know, you send the email, and that was dinner. And then you send another email, and that was drinks. And then you send another email, and you guys went and caught a ball game. And then you send another email, you get the point, right? It closes the gap, it pours an accelerant on the know, like, trust, and closing that loop.

So okay, here's the next point. But before that, I just got a question that I want to answer, and it's from Ryan, let me read it out really quickly. "One thing that always makes me hesitate to send so many emails is that I fear people will become alienated from receiving too many emails and unsubscribe all together. I often do this for something I'm interested in because I get annoyed by too many emails." What's too much? There's no such thing as too much. I have pushed the envelope on this so many times, it is absolutely mind-boggling, and let me tell you, it never matters. Can you push it too far, yes you can. Are you guys going to push it too far with five emails? Absolutely not, you're absolutely not.

Ryan, everybody says exactly that question if they've never done anything like this before, because naturally you're scared. What you will find, with no equivocation in my opinion, is if somebody is interested in you and what you do, they're interested. They're going to stay in, they're going to get those emails, they're going to potentially buy. If they're not, yeah, they might unsubscribe, they might even complain on the way out, but guess what, they were never going to buy, they were never going to be a customer for you.

So don't worry about 'em, don't worry about 'em, you cannot, what is the best line? God, I think it's a Bill Belichick line and it's, he's talking about coaching and how the fans were really getting on him and yelling at him, and he goes, "The quickest way to join the fans is to listen to them as coach." So you can't listen to these few people who are yelling and screaming over here, unsubscribed, you sent too much email. You gotta focus on doing your job, which is focusing on the people that do want your message, and are inclined to buy. Don't worry about it, you're not going to send too many emails. So great question, I love that question.

So let me get back to, and keep them coming, keep them coming, I love answering these. Any auto-responder is better than no auto-responder. I'm going to say this again. Any auto-responder is better than no auto-responder. I don't want any of you guys to overthink this. It's just an opportunity for your buyers to get to know you. Even a three email one, if you can get that going on, is way better than nothing, and it's going to put you in a way better place. All you have to do conceptually is introduce yourself and what you do, set some expectations going forward, "Hey, I'm going to send you three or four emails to introduce myself, then I'm going to be sending you romance emails, and by the way, I usually have sales on the holidays."

Right, remind them of the discount that they got for opting in or first time customer discount, and that's it. Be yourself, set this thing, and you let it work for you full time, it'll make a huge impact. So let's go back to this, and depending on where you are, I'm going to have Taylor ping me the results. So most of you guys said you were on a free account, a few of you are on a paid account, a few of you are on another provider, and no account anywhere yet 25 percent, right?

So how you put this into play, it matters where you're at in your journey, right, because the bummer is that yes we advocate all of you on MailChimp, all of you use MailChimp because MailChimp’s great, right? So MailChimp only allows auto-responders if you're on a paid account. Those are the rules, that's how they get people to convert to paid accounts, so that's how it works. So everybody that's paid and MailChimp, you have no excuse, you need to get this going on immediately, and we'll have a blog post to follow, it's really really simple. I mean you literally write the five emails and you turn them on, you're rocking and rolling. So you guys are good.

For all those that are on another service provider that's not MailChimp, whoever that might be, I'm sure it has automation built in, almost all of them do, almost all of them do. For everybody else, for those of you guys that are on the free account and also the ones that are not on an account at all, we believe Art Storefronts, we believe so firmly in this concept of marketing automation that we're currently rolling our own system, internally, and it's going to be just like the marketing automation that we showed you with the lead capture, so if you want to wait the two months until you get there, you could totally do that, you could totally do that, Art Storefronts will have it, you won't need to pay for MailChimp or pay for anything else, it'll just be built into Art Storefronts. And I'm guessing about two months, but you know, worst case scenario if it goes two months and a week or two, you never know with the dev guys. But it's coming soon, the point being. But for the rest of you guys, there's no reason that says you can't do this manually.

While it is absolutely fantastic how well this works and how great it is, this is something you could do manually. And like when a new email comes into your list, send them an email and just say, "Hey," you know, let's say Andrew joined your list, "Andrew, thank you so much for joining my list," or if you don't know their name, "Hey, thank you so much for joining my list, I really appreciate you taking the time to do that. Can I ask one quick question? How'd you find me?" Okay, start a conversation from there. If you're only getting two or three people a week signing up for your email address, and by the way, don't be discouraged by that either. You know how you build an email list, one email at a time. That's how it starts for everybody, you gotta start somewhere, and you just get going. But if you email these people back, you'll get a conversation started, and you can do this naturally. And trust me, you have the time to do it. You potentially have buyers that are going to make big purchases, so you know, you can do it manually, you can do it by hand without spending another dime.

So again, blog post to follow. The way that these sequences would work for someone selling originals is a little bit different from someone selling photography. What about if you sell photography and you teach workshops? You know, if you've got some sort of side hustle built into your business. You know, if you're a print studio it'd be a little bit different. If you're an art gallery it'd be a little bit different. So we're going to do our best to attempt to tackle this in one blog post, and we'll put it out there. But in the meantime, you know, you could be thinking about how you want to do your sequence, and coming up with some creative ideas, and even you know start replying manually to these people who are joining the list, because it's really really easy to do. So okay, that's what we've got in terms of that.

Next I want to jump into the Q&A. If you guys have anymore questions on any of that, fire them in, if you've got any other questions on anything, fire them in of course. So we've got Neil Corder here, okay, lifestyle images, let's pull his site up so we can see it. What is the best way to identify one's market? And I think it's part of a longer question, but this is the weekly, age-old weekly question where what is my niche, how do I figure out what my niche is, right? So if we go on his site, let's check it out. Yeah, so we've got flamingos, we've got nature stuff, we've got Mozambique, we've got someone's watercolors, other watercolors, landscapes, just art, urban, and I totally get it, right?

So lifestyle images art, you come here, and find our works for sale printed on canvas and photograph paper. So it really is a mixed bag, so I get it, you're trying to figure out what your niche is, what your main raison d'etre is, and again there's no easy answer to this one, it's something everybody struggles with. A few different subject matters or if you don't have a defined niche, it's really common for the photographers, and I would say, it's not something that you have to figure out overnight, right? Like you can totally take your time, take your time, get there in the journey, and listen to the customers' signals along the way, right? Like, if you're going and you find that the Mozambique prints are generating the most interest, well I hope you live in Africa, you can take photos there all the time, because that might work, that might be your niche, there might not be anyone else selling images of Mozambique.

So the key is, you want to go where the audience is when you're trying to find your niche. But I think your site's clean, I think your logo is very clean, I think you're on the right path. What you're struggling with is something that literally everybody struggles with, it's really hard. One piece of advice I would say to everybody that struggles with this, is sometimes it's easier to work backwards. Sometimes it's easier to work backwards, and let me describe that. So instead of, you know, instead of let's just say you're a photographer, because that's the easiest way, and you know you've got to make living, so you're doing some event photography, and maybe you've done a couple of weddings, and so you have pictures of some weddings. But then you also really like nature photography, but the problem is your nature photography is all over the place.

A great way to think about it, is sometimes it's easier to work backwards, which means go find a niche that nobody's really exploiting that you could potentially exploit, and start doing some tests with that, and see how it goes. Like, you know, there's a rising community in whatever it is, go get in there, find out where these people hang out, and see if you can't build it that way. And let me give you an example. I just got a new puppy, it is literally half poodle and half Old English sheepdog, it's like a new breed of dog, right?

Let's say you're a photographer and because there's this breed of dog that's so new, like you google it there's not that much stuff on there. There's a Facebook group my wife showed me that has like 100,000 people in it, these are raving mad fans. If someone got in there and just put up a site and started taking a whole bunch of photos of these Old English sheepadoodles, I'm willing to bet that that would be a really impressive niche. So I just reverse-engineered that. I went and found a community, they're stark raving mad about these dogs. What if you did something along the lines of those dogs and started building into that? Now, that's just one example, but sometimes it's at least a worthwhile thought exercise.

So Christina Culverhouse, Christina Culverhouse Fine Art. I'm mainly an abstract artist, so a good majority of my work is non-representational or semi-representational. That's a big word. I would love guidance towards how to best romantically describe individual pieces of abstract art. That's a good question, and it doesn't necessarily have to be about your art. Make it about your process. What do you do from start to finish to create something like that? What inspires you? Do you go out for a nature walk and come back, and you take a bunch of Polaroids, and you put those on the wall, and after you've looked at the Polaroids on the wall you put on the Dave Matthews Band and go paint on the canvas?

You know, if you talk about your process, your process is just as important, how representational or semi-representational is. I get that it's abstract art, I think you're overthinking it, Christina, and I don't think you need to. There's romance throughout the process of creating art. I mean, there's blood, sweat, and tears, there's everything imaginable in there. All you gotta do is grab some of it and throw it into an email or two and see how it goes. People will respond, and just let you know, like wow that was really profound, that was really deep.

Or you'll hear crickets. If you hear crickets, move on to the next one and keep rolling. So that would be my advice on that. Okay, Rebecca McMann. "I have an idea of how to enter product SEO for say, California beach art, but my work is non-representational." There's that word again, what are the odds, twice, two questions? "What in the world might I use as meta-titles, keywords, et cetera for abstract art?" And Rebecca, I think the rule of thumb here, and again, the wrong way the right way the way I do things, my rule of thumb here. If it's not something that people are going to search for, use your brain, if it's not something that people are going to search for don't get too bogged down in the weeds on SEO, don't do it. It's not worth it. If your art is some sort of white geodesic discs floating on the water, nobody's going to search in google for white geodesic discs floating on the water, that's just not going to happen.

I have a geodesic lamp in my office here. But anyway, no one is going to be searching for art of that, so you know, I would use common sense, I would do some google searches on what some terms are. If there's a bunch of stuff there, then maybe that can inform it. But don't get too bogged down in it. What you can do is you can constantly use your name and you can talk about the fact that it's abstract art, use that in a couple of different ways. But you know, SEO is not going to be the biggest organic traffic. So SEO, search engine optimization increases your organic traffic. Organic traffic is not going to be the biggest source of traffic for most people, not for all people, anyway.

For some, it's better than others, so that's just kind of the way things shake out. So I hope that sorta answers it. Alright, Arturo Samaniego. My niche is seascape paintings with a twist of placing women in water in many of them. And let's take a look at his site here, it says, "I have been running a very successful Facebook video ad campaign. I learned a lot about targeting audience, and it has been driving good traffic to my site. More people are opting in and more people are navigating to the product pages and spending time there." We love that, that's good. "However, I've had zero add to cart conversions, can you believe that? It's driving me crazy." It would be driving me crazy too, so let's just take a look at his Facebook ad quickly and diagnose this.

Alright, so new art prints, it's playing some audio here, I don't know if you guys are hearing that. Okay, so work's definitely beautiful. 27 shares, 142 reactions, mostly positive, a couple of comments, amazing, these are oils on canvas, watercolors. So he's having people click his link and go to his website, let's see what he's got going on here. Alright, he's got an art print store, he's got everything in here, contemporary figures, he's got a seascapes, abstracts, drawings. He's definitely got some killer work here, beautiful detail, beautiful composition.

The prices are a little bit weird, that jumps out at me right away, why do they all start at two dollars and 33 cents? I'm willing to bet that's probably got a lot to do with it. I would need to look at your analytics, I mean the bottom line is if you're running ads, and you're driving traffic, and you have a bunch of people opting into your email list but not buying, something is clearly not right, there's a disconnect. So I'd have to look at your analytics, Arturo, and I'll commit to doing that next week, and see what's going on. But my gut tells me, you know, I don't know why the prices are so low like that. Like I get that that's the intro print, something's wrong, right? I mean, oil on canvas, 30 by 24 inches, two dollars and 33 cents?

Yeah, that probably is enough to throw people off right away. Somebody get in there and buy these things right away. I have to think that has something to do with it, but I'll look at your analytics and get back to you. Okay, other questions? Okay, hi Victoria, if you recommend the welcome discount expires in three days, are you recommending five emails before day three? Right so, good question, very good question. Yeah no, not before, I think you'd just run the welcome sequence, and if you do run the welcome sequence with the three day expiration, you would just remind them on day three by the way that thing's expiring, and you would keep the welcome sequence going. You know, the reality is, the reality is is that someone is never going to be more engaged, a first time visitor is never going to be more engaged than the minute that they come and join your site.It's literally like turning an hourglass, no it's like a balloon slowly deflating itself, and the full balloon is interest, right?

So these people are really interested in you, and this is just a general law of averages. The minute they opt in and leave, that balloon is starting to deflate with interest. It's deflating, it's deflating, it's deflating, they're forgetting you, I don't know who Victoria is, oh yeah I kind of remember her. Victoria who, Victoria who, boom gone. And that's the way that it works, so you always want to strike while the iron is hot, there's always better conversion rates in doing so. But don't worry, we're going to offer up a blog post, and we'll bring that eventuality into the equation. Alright Lori, "The customers use Safari utilize our ASF site?" I think you're asking about whether or not the dashboard works on Safari, I don't think it does, so they've gotta put Chrome on their computers. But I'd have to ask, that's a question best for tech support, I don't know.

Doug, alright. "I keep reading about SEO and what fields matter most. So confusing. Are you going to do a webcast on best practices so we can completely understand?" Yeah, I think we could probably cook one of those up. I think even the customer service internal team is thinking about it. And you know, you're getting way too bogged down in the weeds, Doug, I can tell you that right away. You're not going to crack the code with some extra hours' worth of work putting in the best keywords. The best thing to do is just set some keywords and figure out some ways to drive traffic to your site. SEO is a complicated beast, there's phase one, it's following best practices, our storefront already empowers your to do that, it's got all the right fields.

Once those are all entered, and you have the information there, you're better off than most people already. The next phase of SEO is getting links to your website, the best way to do that is to get eyeballs to your website, the best way to do that is to go out and start working on generating traffic, so I think you're probably overthinking it. So yeah we can do a webinar, I'll definitely take that under advisement, for sure. And then, okay, so Todd asks, "I have questioned the low price teaser on my site. I am conflicted between offering mass choices and sizes versus," because that lowers the price, okay I get what you're saying, "versus limiting choices versus doing away with teaser prices. You know, all three you recommend, so how do you decide?"

Yeah, I love this question. If you've been on previous webinars, you've heard me dive into this detail. But it doesn't matter what you're selling, just in terms of commerce, it's really important to attempt to have a price for each type of buyer. And let me tell you, it's important to get a sale, and it's also important to increase AOV, which is your average order value. So let me tackle each one of those individually.

One, certain people are going to follow you, they're going to love what you do, and they're going to love your art, problem is, they're not ready to buy art right now, they're down on their luck, they don't have wall space, but they love you and they love what you do. So if you offer something cheap, 25 35 45 50 bucks, somewhere around there, they're willing to do some business with you. That's great, like yeah, I'd do that, I'd give it as a gift, it's going to go somewhere else. So you've gotta set things up so that you have something a little bit inexpensive to the best of your ability. You know, everybody's got a different situation, originals are hard to do this with, I get it. But you can bring in other items. But anyway, you get creative.

So have something for Buyer A. Then have something for Buyer B, somebody that's going to be willing to spend 100 150 250 350 450, and that's where most people are already, right? I mean pretty much everyone's got something for Buyer B. But then you want to have something for Buyer C too, right? And I don't even think we've blogged about this in depth, but let me explain. Buyer C is a big dog. He's got a big credit card, he makes a lot of money, he loves it and he wants to pull that thing out and buy something really expensive.

So throw an outlandish price every now and again on an item. Make it outlandish, make it purposely outlandish, like if everything in your store is in the 500 to 1500 dollar range, throw something in there for 3,000 bucks, just do it, just do it. You probably are never going to sell it, but you never know, somebody might buy it. But have something for A, B, and C, that's the best way to think about it. However you want to adjust what prices and sizing and what it is, teasers or if you're doing a calendar or whatever the case may be, a t-shirt, doesn't matter. Try to have something for everybody, because the biggest thing is, and I don't know if you guys listened to podcast number two, the biggest take away was, Kim Virgil on that podcast sold whatever it was, I don't remember the numbers, six or seven thousand dollars worth of art for a lady that was on her email list for 10 years, 10 years!

So I think that's an incredible concept, and the big concept is like, you're constantly building your email list, you're constantly building your email list, you never know when people are going to buy, so have all those items on there. But also, the easiest sale you can make is for somebody who's already pulled out their credit card. And so when you have those low priced items, somebody pulls out their credit card, they do business with you, they're just liable, statistics across the board say they're more liable to do it again. The easiest customer you can get is a customer you already have.

That's part of it. I said there were two parts. The AOV, the average order value. What you'll find, and you know, the greatest example of this is, you know when you look at a software or some sort of a service, and they've got that little pricing table with prices on the left, prices in the middle, and prices on the right? The way the psychology works, and let's just say there's four of them: free, 10 dollars a month, 50 dollars a month, and 250 dollars a month, right? And those are the tiers. And the one in the middle always has some sort of special highlighted box around it so it stands out, right, like the three boxes.

You have that high priced item in there so that people become psychologically comfortable with buying B. You don't even want anybody to buy that expensive plan, almost no one's going to buy that expensive plan, but when they do, they will, so that 3,000 dollar example I gave you earlier is psychology, to make people more comfortable with buying option B, and to kind of push them towards it. Because it's like whoa whoa whoa, look at that big expensive item over there, I couldn't afford that, I'm not buying that, what a rip off, but this is kind of a reasonable deal over here, this is kind of a reasonable deal. So it's a psychological tactic as well, so that's kind of my two cents on it, that's how I would approach all of it.

David says, "Is it possible to have the word from in front of the teaser prices?" Yeah, I don't know, that's the first time I've seen the teaser prices, I didn't know that they would be that low. My sense is that there's something weird going on with that, that's my gut sense in that case, but by all means don't take anything as gospel, because I might find out from the team internally that it's all working incredibly well. But yeah, I think the fact that they're so low. Is everybody's teaser prices that low, like two dollars and three dollars and four dollars, that low? I didn't realize that was the case. I don't even understand how you can ship something at two and three dollars. So that was what I was picking out about the teaser prices. But I'll get an answer on that, and we'll include it in what we publish at the very end.

Doug asked, “I've got one more question, I normally shoot landscapes but now I'm starting to move more towards drop collisions," that's collages I think, or something, I dunno. "I have created a gallery specific to that, but is there a better way, how do I promote the new project best on my site?" No, I think the gallery's a great way to do it, you know. You do it, you give it a shot, and you see how it goes.

Alright, Victoria answers, "After the basics are tackled, what are your thoughts on getting stuff like affiliate marketing? After Facebook advertising, what do I really need to get a handle on?" Yeah so, and I think I've said this before, who am I kidding, I'm a broken record, I only have like, like I'm a one-trick pony. I keep saying the same stuff over and over again. But in terms of launching a new website, which most of you guys have done, right, a new business, everybody you need to do the basics, which is what we do a great job of teaching you at Art Storefronts, and then you need to start generating traffic. And it's the same for every single solitary business out there.

In this, the year of our lord 2017, the prevailing wisdom says, you know, what about organic traffic, or email marketing or Facebook ads or Pinterest or direct mailers or this that? The idea is you have limited, finite resources and focus, okay. I can't begin to tell you how many times I've learned this lesson. So what you want to do, is you want to prepare some tests. Some quick and easy tests, and run them as quickly as you can in these various different channels. For instance, you know Victoria said, affiliate, let's just say affiliate advertising, Pinterest advertising, cold emailing, you want to run a small test in each one of them as quickly as you can, Facebook ads. And then you want to look and see what the results are, and whatever one gave you the best results is probably going to be your best channel.

You want to ignore all the rest of them and focus 100 percent of your energy on that one channel that's working, right? That's the prevailing wisdom, and you just ride that channel until you can't afford to ride that channel anymore. So that's absolutely what I found in my personal life, besides being the prevailing wisdom, and that's how I advocate that you guys go after it too. Knowing what I know about the digital landscape and marketing out there, you know, are there some anomalies to this? Yeah, there's always some people on the outskirts, you hear about them, and you're like should I go that direction? Facebook represents the easiest source of traffic, so that's what we're building into heavy right now.

What I mentioned earlier, so the next podcast, I set a bunch of the foundational stuff in place about Facebook and about driving traffic with Facebook, and this webinar today is a big part of it, and I'll just say briefly and then I'll close the webinar on this is in order to be successful advertising on Facebook, it takes two things essentially. One, you need to understand how art sells online, and that's a big one, been over that to a certain extent, and it has to do with, you can't just be right hooking, you've gotta jab, you've gotta fill the piggy bank up with goodwill.

I mean, you can't just put these ads on there that says, "Buy my art, 24 hours, 50 percent off, do it right now!" It doesn't work, that's not the way that it works. People look at your art online, they love it, they follow you Facebook, they join your email list, they get the auto-responder sequence, they see more of it on Facebook, Christmas comes around they're like oh my gosh I'm buying four of these things for my office. That's the way that it works in the real world, that is a sustainable business model. Again, my opinion. The other one is, and this is again what I detail in the podcast in greater depth. But the other one is, none of you guys are in a great position to go and win on Facebook until you get this other foundational stuff in place.

You can't just have a website, you have to have website with lead capture. You have to be gathering email addresses, you have to be sending auto-responders, you have to be romance email marketing, you have to be discounting on the holidays. You do all of that stuff in conjunction, you get this foundational stuff in place, and instead of just being fishing on Facebook with one line in the water, you've got 10 lines in the water, and that's how you win. You start building your email list, you start building your email list, you're emailing your email list, you're doing all the steps of the stuff that we advocate, and the next thing you know you're starting to see an ROI from your Facebook ads.

So that's where it's at, highly recommend that podcast that'll get into in depth, and then we plan on just keep motoring through. I want all of you guys to advertise on Facebook, assuming it fits where you're at. I think you can make a huge impact on five, 10, 15 dollars a day. And it's just, never before in the history of mankind have you ever been able to do something so amazing as the targeting that's on Facebook right now. One final analogy, and I've used it before, I'm always with the analogies. But you know when you drive down the freeway in your town, and there's a big billboard on the side of the freeway? That's how advertising used to be right?

Spray and pray. Like you're sticking that thing on the side of freeway, and you're paying to stick it on the side of the freeway, and you're going to show it to hundreds of thousands of people but you really only are going to have a thousand targeted people that are going to see it. With Facebook, if you know what you're doing, it's like grabbing that street sign and ramming it in somebody's front yard. That's how granular you can get if you're good at it. So I'm really encouraged to teach you guys that.

I'm going to end things on that note. If there's any questions that we didn't get to, we'll pull them into the next webinar. But thank you guys again, hope you're enjoying these, and we'll try to get the replay out just as soon as we can. And everybody have an absolutely fantastic weekend, thank you.