Welcome to the Art Marketing Podcast. This is the podcast for art marketing strategy, tips, tactics, and focus. I've got a fun tactic today that I want to get in to.

First, apologies, I'm a little but stuffed up and nasally so my voice is a bit off but I'm confident we'll persevere.

So, wanted to get back into Facebook and wanted to do so with some email marketing on the side to balance out the [inaudible 00:00:30] and I listened to the last two episodes that we did on Facebook and we're kind of just plowing through a series on Facebook and just circuitously navigating around the subject and trying to get you guys as prepared as possible to not just run Facebook ads but to succeed, and I though about where I wanted to go next with it and I teased this technique at the tail end of the last podcast on Facebook and felt it was just a good time to pick it up and run with it. So lets talk about this particular tactic technique and then we can get into why I love it and some of the finer points.

So, the technique is, you have an upcoming email you were going to send to your list asking for a sale of some kind, and I'll go over some examples of what that might look like in a bit. You send an email to your list and then at the same time you run some Facebook ads talking about the sale in that email, basically saying the same thing in the email in different, more creative way to your email recipients. So they get an email that they might open, they might not open, then they get a reminder on Facebook, potentially Instagram, the idea being that it is going make the open rate on your email go way up. People are going to be more inclined to open your email because people are busy and nobody wants to read your email, right?

I just got done reading this book from Steven Pressfield and he's probably ... super famous author, but he's probably most known for this book he wrote called, "The Legend of Bagger Vance" it got made into a move with Will Smith and Matt Damon. But he's got a whole bunch of other ones, "The War of Art" and "Gates of Fire" also. Really great author. And he just wrote this book titled, "No one wants to read your ... " S-H- you can figure out the rest. And that's truly what it is. I love that concept, like nobody wants to open your email. Nobody want to see it, and nobody is going to see it, so you've got to do everything in your power to poke and prod and get them reminded, like, "Oh, hey, I have that email. Let me go see it." So that's what this technique is as its basic, so we're going to get into it a little deeper.

I like this particular technique tactic for a number of reasons, one, it's laser targeted towards warm traffic, right? We're going to show ads to your email list, on Facebook, so they know who you are. It's also a short term campaign. This is not like six month commitment, hundreds of dollars a month, thousands of dollars a year you are going to be spending. It is laser focused and very short, a couple of days. So it's a great way to kind of dip the toe into the water on Facebook and get started. It's a great way to get your feet wet.

I also love it because it assumes that you're doing some other correct marketing things. Namely, sending emails [inaudible 00:02:50] that you have an email list. So it's a great place to start. That fact that its a little bit more advanced and not so straight forward actually will prevent you from wasting your money because what does everybody do? They go right onto Facebook with their 15% discount, "come buy my art" and they spend $120 and then they complain why its not working, because, yeah, we've been over that.

So, the other great bit that I love about this technique is you can actually run it without even paying for the ads if you want to. So you can get started, get the measure of it, feel like you're getting good at it, and then you can go ahead and start paying for ads. So I think it's a good place to start and I want to just get right into it.

So lets set the table and talk about the nuts and bolts of it first, as advanced as we can anyway, being that this is a podcast. But first I've got to go into one of my disclaimers and, you know, is this technique, in order for it to be valuable, assumes that you have been providing value to your email list. You know, if we're talking about Gary Vaynerchuk it's, you've been doing the jab jab jab and you haven't just been swinging right hooks. If you've just been doing nothing but emailing your list, asking for discounts, it's probably not going to be as effective as it could be, and we have some blog posts on this, we kind of call is romance marketing. Gary V. calls it "Jab jab jab right hook" Seth Godin calls it "Permission Marketing," doesn't matter what you call it, I hope you're providing value to your list. So if you do that, you stand a way better chance of success of it working. So, short disclaimer, I'll include some links in the show notes that go over some of that stuff if you want to follow up.

The nuts and bolts, let's talk about the nut and bolts of it. Here are the basics that you need to get this done. You have your Facebook ads account set up, right? You have take your email list, you have uploaded it to Facebook, so no you can show ads to your email list as an audience. You have an email that's ready to send out, that is asking for a sale of some type. I'm going to go over som concrete examples of this in a bit. And then you have al of that in place, you're in business, you're ready to do this. So let's talk about what a deal might look like.

So, how would I approach this? And I figured I might as well just grab three examples and run you through to make it more concrete and give it some teeth. So, I just randomly picked three examples. Let's say you're a photographer and you have a side hustle, so in addition to selling photographs you actually have a side hustle, which is teaching classes. Let's say you're a mixed media artist and you have a show coming up. Or let's say you're a painter and you're releasing a new series, let's just say, right? So let's go through those three different examples and how I would go about doing this.

Start with the photographer. I'm going to us a friend of mine, Mike Taylor, he hosts on the platform with us at our store front, and he does long exposure night photography ... I hope that's the right term. And he also teaches classes at national parks around the U.S. teaching people how to take these types of photographs, right? So, he sells these classes and one of which is at Acadia National Park, which I believe is in Maine, and he's got an April workshop coming up. And let's just say he's got eight spots for this upcoming Acadia National Park workshop, register today. And that's pretty much the email, right? So if that's email is going to get sent, it's going to get sent to his entire list. On his list are people he knows that like taking classes, so that's all targeted and ready to go. Then the Facebook post has, let's just say and insane photo of Acadia National Park with some language like, "This is the photo you will be taking in one month in Acadia National Park. Join us for the class." You know, there's all kinds of opportunities to be creative here, but as long as the subject material is very closely aligned with the email that you're sending, you're going to do absolutely great with it.

Most emails get opened within a 24 to 48 hour period. It really decays after that, and so realistically if you wanted to, you could even just run this ad for 24 hours, up to even three days, up to even a week, right? And the budget can be tiny here. I mean you can do $5 a day, $10 a day, total $30, total $60. It would depend on your email list and you kind of just have to massage it to taste. But, it's insanely effective. It's amazingly effective, and I almost never see artists do it, I almost never see most people in the marketing world do it.

So anyone in the economist world, this is just a really, really effective way to increase people that are going to see your offer, and hopefully increase people that are going to take action. So that's a great way for him to do it to drive some more eyeballs to the class, and obviously you get the added bonus of more eyeballs, more traffic to your website, and good things will come from that as well.
But let's say you're a mixed media artist and you have a show coming up. So you upcoming and you not only want to email your list, especially the geographical ones that might actually come to your geographical show, right? But you also want your list to know about your show, any new pieces, and that they can potentially purchase these pieces after that fact.

Again, you compose your email, you mention the show, you also let folks on the email know that you will be offering a discount after the show. Always include some urgency. So, "Hey! For those who can't make the show, I'll have a special deal for you afterwards. Look to your email." So, there's my email, it's ready to go. So I'm going to go ahead and put together the Facebook ad that mentions those aspects. Talks about the show, talks about the venue, talks about RSVP or whatever your situation might be, and run those ads. Run those ads that concur and again, you can do the day you send the email, you can do $10 a day for 24 hours or you can do $5 a day for three day. You kind of just have to play with it, there's no right recipe. It's just conceptually how you approach us and go about it.

So you know, in the mixed media artist scenario, as a bonus, you can actually geographically target your email list. But that's potentially a subject for a future podcast, meaning if you lived in Memphis, Tennessee and you were pretty sure that only people on your list that live in the greater Tennessee area would come to your show, you can draw a geographic circle around those people.

So maybe we'll deal with that in a future episode. But if you are contemplating this or you're in this scenario or you're thinking about this scenario, it's coming up. Listen to the second podcast because Kim Vergle goes into detail about how she did this discount coupon codes, the emails, the whole shebang, and Kim did fantastic with hers and think about how much better it could have potentially been if she would have had the Facebook ads running concurrently.

So let's shift gears to the third example. Let's say you're a painter and you just released a new series. So, drive up some hype. Time to email the entire list, so we get that email together introducing the brand new series, in the email you use one or two or three or four example, you show this beautiful series, "check out the rest of it on the website," right? Again, we get a Facebook ad, maybe we introduce the series. List the series name but then we show a couple of different images. So now I've seen two or three different images in the email and one or two or however you want to do it in the Facebook ad. Both of those are going to be driving me like, "Oh, that one was really cool. Oh, I've got to go check out the series, I'm going to go to the website."

So, I think there's so many different scenarios in which you can do this. The great part about it is you want to save them. You want to this type of activity initially unless you're really just bought it, which is hard for first timers. But you want to save this for the times when you actually have something strong to offer. You have a sale or you have a new series or you have a big announcement or you have a geographical show. Anything along those lines, and I think one of the fun things about running marketing for art store fronts is I really like this technique.

We are advocating that all of our customers use this technique, and I've got our in house copyrighting expert, her name is Kimberly, we'll have her on an upcoming podcast episode. She's amazing, and we're actually going to put a blog post together with the images and all the copy of exactly how we do this and the three scenarios. I actually have a call with her later today about it. It should be live and in the show notes with all the images, all the copywriting, how you'd do it, how you'd stitch together the Facebook update with the email update, and some ideas for some subject lines to give you even more ammo to approach it.

But it really is powerful, it really is cheap, and it's just effective. It's a powerful, unconventional way to get started with Facebook ads. Cheap, easy to execute on, and really can improve your results. And I think the best part of it is it's really easy to systematize. You only have so many big events per year, shows, sales, this, that, whatever. So once you get the measure of this technique, you can just always go back to the well and hit it again and again and again and as a [inaudible 00:11:15] aside I should say, you definitely also want to include Instagram in your targeting when you do this because the whole entire world is on Instagram and its another great way to remind them.

And the other thing I perhaps haven't mentioned is, your goals are a couple [inaudible 00:11:30] so with your ads you're going to have links in those ads that are attempting to drive these people to wherever you want them to go, your website or maybe it's the RSVP page for your event or wherever the case may be, and you're going to set your ads up so that they're link clicks and you're going to pay for those link clicks. But the best part about these ads are, they're just as effective without anybody even clicking the link in your ads, as they are when they do. Because really what I want to do is, you just have to think through your end views or your customer, that person on your email list.

And let's just say it's Bob in Tallahassee. So I email Bob in Tallahassee and he's busy. He's got a lot of stuff on his plate that day. He's got to go pick his kid up, he's got to take the dog in, whatever. He ignores the email, he's too busy. He might even have wanted to see it but he ignores it. Then he's at lunch and he's flipping through Instagram or Facebook and he sees this image and he sees the fact that, "Oh my gosh there's that show. Oh, that's right I got that email!" He doesn't even click the link, he goes back to his email, he checks it out and he opens it. Now Bob would not have opened that email if you didn't have a second opportunity, a second bite at the apple to try to get his attention. So it also can be amazingly effective when you're not even paying for the link click.

So, really like this technique, really recommend you check it out. I'll put all the ammo that we have combined, blog post on how to get your email list into Facebook, the types of ads you should run, anything else that was pertinent to it in the show notes. So if you want to do some brush ups and read about that stuff you can. If you're mobile and you'd rather us just text you the link to this stuff, we've got a fancy texting number, you can text the word, "AMPZZZ" Z as in zebra, so, "AMPZZZ" you just use that word and you text it to the number 44222, again 44222 and we'll send you a link to get the show notes.

Otherwise you can get all the resources at the Artmarketingpodcast.com and I hope you enjoyed the episode and see you guys soon.