How Many New Customers Did you Acquire Last Year?

In this episode of the Art Marketing Podcast, Patrick delves into the crucial importance of acquiring new customers for building a successful art or photography business. Drawing on nearly a decade of experience and data from over 8,000 customers, the podcast reveals patterns and strategies employed by the most successful individuals. The episode emphasizes the necessity of consistently acquiring new customers, likening it to a life-saving exercise for business health. It provides actionable advice on setting ambitious customer acquisition goals, the significance of product diversity, and the benefits of consistent marketing. Listeners are encouraged to rethink their business strategies to focus on customer acquisition as the key metric for long-term growth and revenue potential.

Podcast Transcribe

Patrick Shanahan: [Music] Coming up on today's edition of the Art Marketing Podcast, we're talking about how to get buyers to act fast: tips for setting up your art for impulse purchases. [Music] Specifically, we're going to be talking about why you want to do this, awesome context and current events, how to think about your product lineup, and some tactical ways to go about it.

If you listened to the last episode, you know the following: your goal this year is to 10x the number of new customers you acquire. A new customer is defined as somebody that purchases something from you. The value does not matter; it can be for five dollars or five hundred dollars. What they purchase does not matter as long as you retain the information on said customers so that you can market to them in the future. That's the definition of a new customer, at least as I define it. You also know the more customers you acquire, the more you're going to have to market to, and the more you're going to sell. Why? Because you know the easiest customer to get is the one that you already have, and some percentage of these new customers that you acquire are going to come back and purchase again and again, and some will turn into collectors. Collectors are the Holy Grail of any art business, and acquiring new customers is an art form in and of itself, and most of you guys are terrible at it. We're going to be discussing this quite a bit in the episodes to follow.

I want to talk about how we can alter your product lineup as an artist or a photographer, and we're going to get into that. But first, I want to start with a story. Over the years at Art Storefronts, there have always been times where I've run case studies—marketing case studies—myself, members of my team, with various different customers. There's one customer recently, a long-time friend, I've mentioned him, he's been on the podcast, I'm not going to go into his name, who came around with a new limited edition. The celebrity is the subject matter material, endorsed by the celebrity, not a huge celebrity, most would say, but whatever, hand-signed limited editions, the whole thing. He did his initial rollout to his own personal audience, and his own personal audience is pretty big. He did a great job. I think he sold a little bit over forty-five thousand, forty-six thousand, something like that, and really, really did well. That was primarily just him marketing to his own list, okay? So not—he didn't really get any help from the celebrity, he was just like basically him marketing to his list and asking the Swanson family to share in the whole thing.

So he came to us and he's like, "Hey, you know, we helped him out with the initial rollout campaign," and he's like, "Hey, I really think I got to try Facebook and Instagram ads with this." And I should mention, limited edition, I think it's an acrylic, you know, hand-signed, the whole thing. So they're expensive, they're like close to 2,000 bucks. He's like, "You know, I really think I should, I should, you know, advertise this thing. I got to sell a few more of them." I think there was like 150 in this limited edition, so he's got some left. And he's like, "Can you help me get the campaign set up?" And I'm like, "Yeah, I can. And if I was in your shoes, I would also probably spend some money on Facebook and Instagram ads, but I'm not bullish on this whole idea." He's like, "What do you mean? What are you talking about? I mean, the piece is selling great, everyone loves it." I was like, "Yeah, I know, but you're asking Facebook and Instagram to go and find people that you've never met, that don't know you, that are not attached to you, that are not bonded to you, do not know, like, and trust you, have not been following you as an artist. First-time people, and saying, 'Hey, check me out, I'm an artist, I got a hand-signed thing of this guy, give me two thousand dollars short.'" Right? And you know, that's just, it never works. And that's what I told him ahead of time. I was like, "This never works." He's like, "Let's just do it, let's take a shot." And I sort of agree with him, right? Because, you know, he wants to sell through the entire range of limited editions, and he needs to try everything that he can to get the word out there. So it's worth taking a shot, and you know, he was not going to spend a ton of money on it, he's not investing thousands and thousands. So I was like, "Okay, let me set it up, let me see." And the idea was to go onto Facebook and Instagram, use Facebook and Instagram's interest targeting, which isn't very good anymore, and target people on both platforms that have expressed an interest in said celebrity, right? And the long and the short is, I probably chewed through half of his budget, he got one person contacted at him, he had one add-to-cart, and that was it. Nobody purchased. And he's like, "Well, we didn't even spend all the budget I had allocated." And I was like, "We're not going to spend the budget. It's not worth it. This is lighting the money on fire, because that's just not how art sells. That is not how wall art sells specifically."

I think back to a situation I was in recently, and we'll take it out of art. For the first time ever, there's an electric car in the family, and we've never had an electric car. And the electric car comes with an outlet, an outlet that can be on at any point in time. I mean, the batteries in this car are huge; it could power the house for three days. So you can power things with the outlet, which is really, really cool. So I was like, "Oh man, I can finally get one of those plug-in coolers." You know, it's like basically, it's like a little cooler-sized thing, they make them up to big, and you can plug it in and it's like a little refrigerator, right? And you don't ever have to use ice ever again. And because you have an always-on outlet in your car, then you have an always-with-you refrigerator, which is an amazing thing. So what did I do? I started Googling. I found the one that I liked. Then I Googled the one that I liked versus and found all the other ones that were competitors. Then I went onto the website, checked out the prices, checked out the prices of the other one. Then I went to YouTube and I Googled the cooler, and I got about like four or five people that do the overlanding thing, that's off-roading, where these things are really prominent, and found some people doing individual reviews. Here's what I love about these things, here's what I don't like about these things, here's what you think, you know, five or six different YouTube videos. I found out like the very top model is awesome, the top brand is awesome, but you know, you can go one step below and there's literally no difference aside from hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dollars. And it's like, no. So I finally arrived at the one I want, and you know, it wasn't a huge purchase, I think it was like 480 bucks or something like that, but not small, right? And there was like a good 20 points of research in there that I did that finally got me over the line to make that purchase, right? And that's how it goes with art. People want to follow the artist, and then they want to have some exposure to the artist, and they want to check out some of his other work, and then they want to see what you post regularly on Instagram, and making like any type of spur-of-the-moment purchase. Why the Facebook ads failed. No one's going to do that. That is not how wall art is sold. I'm not going to randomly find out about you for the first time ever and be like, "Oh, I'm going to buy this $2,000 limited edition." No, it doesn't matter how good you are at marketing, that's just not going to happen. There's not a high percentage of success of that particular advertising campaign working.

And it got me thinking about, you know, the reason for this podcast episode, because I don't think these types of things are mentioned enough, okay? The smart artist these days is a contrarian thinker, or needs to be. Now, regardless of how you feel about social media personally, you know, you don't like posting what you had for breakfast, I get that. You know that as artists and photographers wanting to sell our work, we have to go where the attention is. And for most of those, two venues are Instagram and Facebook, Instagram being the more prominent of the two if you're trying to sell wall art. Now, when you regularly browse these apps on your mobile phone, what are we greeted with as consumers, right? We're greeted with a myriad of product ads trying to sell us just about everything under the sun. And depending on your personal tastes, you podcast listener, and preferences, these items can tend to vary. They can be clothes, or gadgets, or makeup, or sporting equipment, or gardening stuff, right? It all skews based on your browsing habits and then what you historically like, comment, and share, also what websites you visit. That, in turn, gives that data to Facebook—Meta now, Facebook and Instagram—to show you those types of ads.

So while we're a diverse audience that listens to this podcast, there are some recurring themes in the

 type of products that we end up seeing on Instagram, do you notice that? That we end up seeing on Facebook. And there is a ton that we can learn from those products. Namely, the majority of the items are cheaper in price, oftentimes under a hundred dollars, you know, up to a few hundred dollars. Very rarely multi-thousand-dollar tickets, depending on what you're browsing. I mean, sometimes you're browsing like luxury cars or something, and you might get some different ads, but by and large, the majority of the product makeup that we see as ads on Facebook and Instagram are items that can be purchased on a whim without having to ask permission, without having to research for six months, in a guiltless transaction. You don't have to ask your significant other, you don't have to ask the accountant, you don't have to throw stones. Throwing stones, what does that even? But they are easy to purchase, okay? It's very easy to just hit buy now. Boom, the thing's integrated, you get a little dopamine hit from the order confirmed, and then you know you're going to get a shipping invoice, and something's going to show up on your doorstep, and you're already thinking about that. We all love that dopamine hit, right? And all of these items, for the most part, are what I would loosely describe as impulse buy type of items. You ever notice what's not in those ads? Wall art, inexpensively priced wall art. And there's a reason for that.

So it's very important to keep in mind as well—and again, this is inside baseball, but it's an important fact—I think starting late 2020 and maybe into 2021, 2022, Apple decided to have a knockdown, drag-out fight with Facebook and Instagram. And Apple's big lever was saying, "Facebook and Instagram, you can no longer track what my device's users are doing." So if you used to visit an Instagram or Facebook ad with your Apple iPhone, click on an ad, the ad would send you to the website, there would be this myriad of tracking data that flowed through to the merchant on the other end. That's all stopped since then. Why do I bring that up? I bring that up because it's made it extremely difficult for a whole slew of e-commerce merchants to try and really try and figure out and prove their ROI on Facebook and Instagram. And so the reason that's important is that the items that keep showing up in your feeds, okay, as ads, keep showing up for a reason. Those folks are advertising those things. Those folks are spending a couple of dollars on an ad, or a dollar on an ad, and they're getting a couple of dollars back. It's working. So as the smart artist or smart photographer out there, we can learn from this particular situation. If we are going to be regularly marketing on these platforms, it stands to reason that we need to have some emphasis on some items in our lineup that are ideally non-wall art related and apply to this impulse buy, you know, criteria. Right? Under a hundred dollars, can be made, can be purchased, quick decision, etc., etc. And as soon as we start taking some shots at acquiring customers via these impulse buys, everything starts to change, okay? Everything starts to change. You realize that this is all just a game of maths. There's all these little formulas that are running around, and one of which is what the advertisers are continuing to do on Facebook and Instagram. If they keep showing up and showing up and showing up, it's working. Okay, well, there are simple maths to what their product lineup looks like, and there's something that we can learn and take away from them.

So let's talk about your product lineup, and then we can get into some tactical ways to set yourself up for impulse purchases. You need to pay attention, keep an eye on, you know, start to remember when you're going through Instagram and you're seeing all these things. The purchases need to satisfy this threshold of being low commitment, low ask, don't need permission to buy it, special. And like I said, a lot of that depends, you know, obviously on the price. You know, items that are under a hundred dollars or not much over are great. And lastly, although wall art can work, it's not ideal, okay? And it's certainly not enough. Even if you want to make wall art a part of your impulse buys, you need non-wall art to feature in there because not everyone is ready to buy wall art right now. And this is where the merch comes in, okay? What it is does not matter. You have to do whatever works for you in your business, right? I get all kinds of tons of pushback on merch all the time. "I'm not doing this, or I'm not offering that, or I'm a fine artist, I would never do anything like that." I usually retort in my normal snarky fashion with, "Okay, go ahead and let me know the last time you went to a museum that didn't have a gift shop. I'll wait. Can you name one?" No, you can't, okay? If Van Gogh can hang on the wall and there can be a damn gift shop with Van Gogh hanging on the wall, your art can be hanging on the damn wall and you can be selling gift shop-type items, okay? You don't want to have a hobby, you want to have a business. This is very important.

So merch, okay, has become a particularly easy way for you creative types to get your creative thing onto a product that you can offer via POD (print on demand), which means you do not have to have any minimums, you don't have to keep any inventory, you can take one order, you can take ten thousand, it doesn't matter. So it's very important to understand that you need to get, or one of the easiest ways to get some of these impulse buy items into your lineup is to contemplate merch. Now, I've got some customers, I say this all the time, that hand paint wooden spoons, kitchen spoons. So they're buying the wooden kitchen spoons, hand painting them, selling them that way. That totally qualifies. It really doesn't matter what it is as long as it can be an impulse purchase, okay?

Now, a pro tip on all of this is it is so much more effective when you actually have whatever it is to be able to hold in your hand. So wall mock-ups here, or product-type photos, doesn't do it. Whatever you're going to end up doing, order the doggone things so you can hold it in your hand. It will change everything.

Let's start combining things. What do I love more than anything? I love artists running sales because I know how determinant it is of their revenue potential, the number of sales run per year. But I especially love flash sales, and I always have. And what does every properly executed sale have? Very simple, back to this math concept. It is more psychological math, if you like. It has a discount, it has scarcity, it has some percentage off, and it has the deal is going to end very soon. You have those two things, you combine them, turns out human beings are more likely to take action. You're going to increase your conversion rate. And so that's all very, very important, psychological math, if you like.

Now, what do all artists and photographers for the most part hate? That's right, running sales. I know that 40% off store-wide makes you feel like a used car salesman. You need to get over that, but I totally understand where that comes from. Yet, when we realize that not all sales are created equal, they're not all the same, there is a kind of nuance in this notion of a sale and running them, you realize just how awesome flash sales can be. And you obviously can use the impulse buys in just about any post, but I just love the flash sales. They are light, they're easy to run and fun, and can make you look like a creative, fun person rather than a used car salesman. Bonus: they are extremely easy to run with merchandise, which qualifies as your impulse type of buy.

So instead of doing this "take 40% off store-wide, my biggest sale of the year," all the hype and everything else, you can just have a flash sale Friday. Why? For no other reason than you had a good weekend. Like, Friday is Friday. Instead of taking 40% off store-wide, you're instead just going to do a flash sale on tote bags. "Hey guys, it's Patrick. Do you ever go shopping? Of course you do. Instead of those busted, bad-for-the-environment plastic bags, you feel guilty throwing them away, what if instead you had one of my super sweet tote bags?" This is where it helps to hide the thing and you show it off. "These things are awesome for carrying groceries, they're awesome at farmers' markets, you can leave them in the car, you can buy a bunch of them, you can give them as gifts. I really like them, I think you'd really like them, and they're a great way for you to support me as an artist, and I'm very, very appreciative of that."

So back to the flash sale. "You want to be shopping in style, right? So for the next 14 hours, scarcity, until midnight tonight, all tote bags on my site are 20% off, or if you like, buy one, get one free. Sale ends at midnight tonight. Thank you again for supporting me as an artist, and have a great weekend." That was me holding my Instagram, holding my phone up to Instagram, recording a quick video, me holding the bag, pressing publish, and I'm done. That is my sale, it's finished. That's an amazing thing. That is just an amazing, amazing thing.

Bonus: when you start adding these impulse types of buys into your lineup, it improves

 what you were doing pretty much everywhere in your business stack. Are you going to be rocking an in-person event? Bring your impulse buy merch items. You will end up acquiring more customers because not everybody is ready to buy wall art all the time. What about a website? Why having a website is so important. You know, you can use one-click upsells. We call them revenue boosters. All the others call them one-click upsells, but this is the thing where I come to your site, I purchase the wall art, and then right before I leave, you're like, "Hey, do you want to add a pack of three tote bags to your order for $75?" I'm going to click yes. When you have that happening automatically on your website, you will get a significant bump in your AOV, average order value, just by having them. These things literally work absolutely everywhere in the stack at all times. I would probably be driving my car around with them just so I have them all the time.

So the challenge then is to get some items that qualify as impulse buys into your product lineup. If you end up joining Art Storefronts, we make this very easy for you. If you do not want to join Art Storefronts, that's okay, it's not going to hurt my feelings. Figure out a POD place where you can get this stuff made and then start pushing them all the time. You will acquire more new customers as a result. You market to those customers. Some percentage of those customers, as a result of getting your art—albeit not on the wall, on a product—into their hands, are going to come back and buy wall art from you when they are ready. Why? Because they have been shopping for the last two years with one of your super sweet tote bags on end with your art on it, and they're like, "Now I'm ready to buy wall art." Boom. Who are they thinking of? They're thinking of you. Some portion of those newly acquired customers are also going to buy again and again, and now you have a collector. Get enough of those, and your art business now pays that base salary quite literally. Collectors are the Holy Grail. It all ties back to acquiring new customers. How many new customers can you acquire per year? Having impulse buys in your lineup is a great way to do it. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.