The Starks would say winter is coming, actually, in terms of real weather that is true.

In the art world we might say the (biggest buying season) of the year is coming… also true.

Are you preparing yourself to take advantage?

We certainly hope you are.

Can’t deposit hope in a bank account though can you?

You can deposit dollars though, and this post is going to do its measure best to help you make more of them this season.

Todays case study produced a 455% increase in conversion rate of new visitors turning into buyers.

Whaaaaa?

Yep.

Best thing is you can use this exact same technique. A technique we strongly recommend you get into place before winter / biggest buying season of the year comes.

So lets dive into the recipe and its ingredients.

It involves a pop-up, a discount, two emails, scarcity, and automation.

Yep… just as we were picking up some speed I just lost half of you didn’t I?

So let me deal with #1 and #2 above in order.

Both of which usually freak artists out.

What do I mean?

#1

What if you do decide to show a pop up on your site, and you get a comment like this…

Oh man, not only that comment, its on Facebook, which is public, and it even has 11 likes!!!!!

Run for the hills, shut down the business, pack your things, its all over, your finished.

My favorite quote to think about in this situation is from a football coach named Buddy Ryan

If you listen to the fans, you’ll be sitting up there with them.

For me that completely sums things up.

I can’t tell you how many artists as well as other digital marketers I have talked to that are freaked out about pop-ups.

The reality is I don’t care about that comment or the ten likes it has gotten on Facebook.

Those people were never going to buy anyway.

You cannot worry about keeping all of the people happy, all of the time.

Its a recipe for failure. If you believe in what you do use an email pop up and ask for the email.

Its going to annoy some people sure, but others will opt in, get to know your work, and eventually buy from you.

So use the pop-up. Give it a shot at least. If it does not work you can turn it off.

#2.

Artist: Discounts, I don’t do discounts, it cheapens my work. My work is too prestigious to discount… I simply won’t do it.

Me: Ok… name one other brand that does not do discounts…. Don’t worry I will wait… Oh thats right Louis Vuitton. So there is LV and whats the name of your art again?

You can discount and you should discount. If you have a problem with the practice then you can offer free shipping or a signed copy or send them a photo or something.

Whats important is that there is an incentive.

Bottom line you wont know if this is good move for you till you try it. Its not gonna kill you to try it. So let everybody else complain about discounts, it will keep them busy, while you test something that might just work.

Ok… so hopefully that sorts those first two and we can get into the case study. Let’s set the table and talk about all the ingredients here.

Case Study Elements.

1. The pop up and discount

Important elements to note here are the discount — 20% off in this case —, the fact its asking for and email address, and the valid on new customers only part.

2. The Emails

1 Email sent immediately when the subscriber opts in, the second email sent on day 3 to let them know the coupon is about to expire.

3. Scarcity

In this case the coupon expires in three days time, this isn’t a live long coupon here, you need to buy within the three day window and we are going to remind them about it

4. Automation

By far my favorite part. This happens day and night, when you are home, and when you are away, its auto-magic. Once its setup up you don’t have to do a thing.

The Data

For this study here is how we looked at the data.

We used the period of 4/1/16 – 6/30/16: ( 3 months ) to establish a baseline conversion rate of .82%

We then implemented the study and after 1 months worth of data we found the following.

The conversion rate improved to 1.39%. That’s a 70% improvement.

Lets use some real numbers to give the maths some teeth.

1000 visitors a month x .89% conversion rate = 8.9 sales a month x $150 (average order value) = $1335.00 a month

1000 visitors a month x 1.39% conversion rate = 13.9 orders a month x $150 (average order value) =$2085.00 a month

So with this technique in place the artist in question (assuming he gets about 1k visitors a month) is going to be dropping an additional $750.00 the bottom line each month. That’s a nice little win right?

Returning Visitors

So lets drill into returning visitors in GA. If you’re a Romantic Art Seller, you already know that “new visitors” rarely buy on their first visit. Instead, they typically buy on a returning visit after they get to know you and when its their time to buy.

So let’s look at this data again, but this time, focusing only on returning visitors.

4/1/16 – 6/30/16:

At this point, returning visitors were converting at a rate of 0.99%.

7/1/16 – 8/31/16:

One month after implementing our time sensitive offer, the conversion rate ballooned to 5.49%!

That’s a whopping 455% improvement in our returning visitor conversion rate!!

Conclusions

Given this success, we are now advocating that all of our customers implement a 3-day expiration.

It should be noted that we also tried 1-day, 2-day, and 4-day expirations, but it was the 3-day seemed to work the best. We plan on doing further testing on this, but for the time being, we felt it was more important to release these findings.

Best Practices: What to Email

The email that we used for the 3-day expiration is the same one we featured in section #3 (“Study Your Competition”) of this blog post.

You can download that template — if you use mailchimp — for your own use by clicking here.

Just change the text in the first email (sent immediately after the site visitor signs up) to “Expires in 3 Days,” and the final email to “Expires Today”.

Subject Lines

On the initial email, we recommend making your subject line something like “20% Off Welcome Offer”.

Then, on the final day, the reminder email subject should read, “Last Chance to Save 20% On My Art”.

The Lead Capture Tool

This case study blew us away.

So naturally we are working on automating this whole process for you.

What does that mean?

We are in final testing stages of baking this feature in natively.

Currently it works like this

• You create the pop up
• You create the coupon code
• You integrate the pop up with your ESP like mailchimp
• You create the two emails in mailchimp and set them to fire at the appropriate time
• You monitor the situation to ensure everything is above board and not getting abused

Easy enough right… yep not too bad.

Yet its just another thing we can make even easier.

So in our next release the lead capture tool is gonna take care of all of this for you.

• Set the discount
• Lead capture will pre populate the emails, you can make edits, which takes two seconds, and then it will send the emails for you
• The tool will automatically check to ensure the email is a new customer, and only send coupons to new customers

This whole technique will take minutes to setup, edit, and get rolling.

Automation | ftw – for the win

The Art buying season is coming.

What steps are you gonna take to capitalize this season?